The Uninvited is the latest in a long line of Hollywood remakes of Asian horror films, in this case the highest-grossing Korean horror film to date, A Tale of Two Sisters.  Like the previous remakes—with the exception, maybe, of The Ring—The Uninvited has the creepy plot of the original, but lacks the extremely important atmosphere that made the Korean original so chilling.

The plot picks up with the release of a girl named Anna from a mental ward, where she’s been since she slit her wrists following her mother’s death in a horrible fire.  She returns home with her successful, aloof writer father to find that his new girlfriend has moved into the house.  The girlfriend is Rachael, who previously acted as the nurse to Anna’s sick mother… and Anna has always felt a dislike and suspicion toward her, as most young girls would of their father’s new love interest.

Also waiting at home is Alex, Anna’s older sister and best friend.  Together, they begin to suspect that maybe the fire that killed their mother wasn’t an accident, but rather a way for Rachael to get her out of the way so she could have their father all to herself.  This suspicion grows when a boy who has been sweet on Anna admits that he saw what happened that night.  However, before he can share that information, he is mysteriously silenced.

As has become the standard in these movies, there is also a trio of creepy kids who appear to Anna in her dreams.  Or is she dreaming?

Whereas the original Korean film had a unique, creepy atmosphere bringing the audience into the frightened, off-kilter mindset of its heroine, The Uninvited looks like just about every other horror film released this decade, and never is any kind of tense fear or suspense generated.  Although the movie has its fair share of creature effects and mangled dead bodies jumping out at us, these things always happen right about when you would expect it would.  Due to this predictability, the film lacks any real kind of suspense or chills in its first eighty minutes.  Fortunately, the film does make up for its predictability a bit in the end.

Unlike the recent, similarly-stylized horror film The Unborn, The Uninvited manages to avoid coming across as a joke.  The actors, including Elizabeth Banks as Rachael, David Strathairn as the father, and Emily Browning as Anna, never try to carry the material further than it is intended to go and look like they actually belong in a horror movie rather than a parody of a horror movie.  It helps that the script keeps the cheesy lines of dialogue to a minimum.

Still, right down to those creepy kids, there is no shaking the fact that The Uninvited is not much different than the majority of the lower-budget horror films Hollywood has been producing lately and there is not really any argument I can make for it over any other.

The Uninvited is rated PG-13 for “violent and disturbing images, thematic material, sexual content, language and teen drinking.”  Most of the violence is off screen, but there are some rather disturbing images that might frighten the young or the faint of heart. 

Courtesy of a local publicist, Jeff attended a promotional screening of The Uninvited.