The Unbidden (2016) User Reviews

How do you feel about an exorcism?

[nogodnomasters · 4/10 · 22 September 2017]

Lauren (Tamlyn Tomita) is a writer who is annoyed by spirits who pull off her covers...big deal in Canada, not so big in Southern California. Her three best friends opt to have a seance on the night of the anniversary of a death, we presume her mother. As the night goes on, they get an unexpected guest, a son (Hayden Szeto) who wants to locate his biological mother. At this point we get an all too lengthy tale including Lauren's "daddy-bad" story which didn't add much to the film.

The film has a great twist. The lines were, for the most part well written. It displayed a certain amount of humor and nonchalant attitude toward actual proof of a spirit, while Kat (Julia Nickson) remained skeptical and cynical..."The house is always settling" as things fly off the table. The script was better written than directed. It grew boring. Scenes should have been cut. The deliveries (except for Amy Hill) were bad. Asians make up half the planet and about 1 % of the successful comedians. They needed a more diverse cast, like an uppity black woman play Anna who didn't like ghosts. And was it just me, but did the young Kat looked about 6 inches taller than the older Kat? Narhee Ahn had the script for a horror classic. Quentin Lee dropped the ball.

Guide: No swearing. No nudity. Brief clothed sex scene.

hm - not impressed much

[sjarja · 2/10 · 28 January 2017]

very bad acting in conversations made this movie a pain to watch. Many, many scenes feel as if the actors read their lines from a tele-prompter for the first time - rather than having learned them. Acting and vocalization feels utterly unnatural and the lines are delivered so badly that i had to cringe more often than not.

In addition to the poor dialogue - the actors rarely seemed to actually talk to each other - and rather seemed to talk to the camera, which - naturally - destroyed any possible chemistry between them.

Meanwhile - some of the acting that was not about talking - was not too bad and felt much more natural.

The story ..... well... it felt like a rip off from some tele-novela - and because the protagonists had no chemistry ... had little to no impact at all. There are no surprises, no twists, no turns, no character development, nothing.

So i am sorry to say that this movie was pretty bad - and a good example how not to do conversations in movies.

Bad is not good

[crackerjackusher · 2/10 · 18 September 2018]

The appeal of Tamlyn Tomita, still lovely in her 50s, lured me in to this bad piece of amateurish filmmaking. I stayed until the end waiting to see if it could actually get worse. It did not disappoint.

The potential was there, but it was a mere mediocre movie...

[paul_haakonsen · 5/10 · 19 April 2020]

The 2016 movie "The Unbidden" is listed as a horror, thriller and mystery movie here on IMDb, and that is why I ended up sitting down to watch it. I hadn't heard about it prior to stumbling upon it and taking a look at the movie's cover - which was quite interesting - and the movie being labeled as horror, of course I had to watch it.

Right, well the movie was pretty weak in terms of being a horror movie, a mystery movie well that was more passable, but a thriller not so much. So on that account, I must admit that writer Narhee Ahn and director Quentin Lee failed to impress me with this movie.

While I did make it through the entire movie, I can't say that this was an overwhelmingly impressive movie experience. I must say, however, that the movie does have some nice enough twists to the plot along the way. But just a shame that it was so hard to take the movie's storyline serious.

I will say that the acting performances in the movie were good, and I was especially impressed with Tamlyn Tomita's performance, as she really carried the movie phenomenally. The movie also does have some nice performances from Julia Nickson, Amy Hill and Elizabeth Sung - all whom were nicely cast for the roles.

I think that "The Unbidden" might have been set up to be a bit more than it turned out to be at the hands of director Quentin Lee. For me, the movie was pseudo-entertaining, albeit very generic and mediocre. As such, I am rating "The Unbidden" five out of ten stars. I sat through the entire movie, but this is hardly a movie that I will be returning to a second time.

If you sit down to watch "The Unbidden" with the intention of being in for a horror movie, you will be sorely disappointed - much like I was - especially given the movie's very interesting cover.

Not a slow burner so much as a no-burner

[Woodyanders · 3/10 · 9 December 2020]

Mystery writer Lauren Lee (a decent performance by Tamlyn Tomita) enlists the assistance of three close friends to perform a seance in order to get rid of an evil spirit that's been haunting her. However, said seance doesn't work and the spirit continues to torment Lauren.

Sound interesting and exciting? Well, it just ain't. Director Quentin Lee not only relates the familiar and predictable story at a painfully plodding pace, but also crucially fails to generate any essential tension or spooky atmosphere. Moreover, Narhee Ahn's talky script gets bogged down in a numbing surplus of sappy soap opera sentiment and excruciatingly tedious exposition. Worse yet, the ghost is downright lame: He's just some dude who's either hiding under a bedroom sheet or making gurgling noises off camera. The game cast tries hard with the insipid material: Julia Nickson as the haughty and glamorous Kat, Amy Hill as sweet medium Rachel, Elizabeth Sung as the concerned Anna, and Hayden Szeto as Lauren's long lost son Derek. A real fizzler.