Acting overcomes horror cliches

Nightmares, creaky doors and little ghost children. Though chock-full of such cliches, this horror film steers through enough twists and turns to prevent it from being overly predictable.

“The Uninvited” (directed by the Guard Brothers) is the story of a girl named Anna (Emily Browning) and her struggles coping with her mother’s accidental death.

She comes home and discovers her father has moved on and is seeing Rachael (Elizabeth Banks), her mother’s nurse prior to the accident. The paranoid Anna and her sister Alex (Arielle Kebbel) instantly suspect Rachael was responsible for their mother’s death – and fear they could be next.

The film starts off slow, but eventually builds intensity, providing clues that would seem to help solve the mystery.

One problem, though, is that the film incessantly and abruptly jumps from scene to scene, going from a seemingly normal setting to a darkened room with eerie music.
It also relies too much on the common jump/scare flashes that only desensitize viewers to the real scare scenes present in the latter stages of the movie.

In many ways, this is the classic story of a main character experiencing a supernatural phenomenon nobody believes. But in other ways, it’s not like that at all.

What saves this movie is good acting, especially from Banks, who plays a solid gold digger/psycho bitch-type character. Browning also turns in a good performance as a girl with a troubled past. Throw in an unexpected twist at the end, and “The Uninvited” ends up being way less predictable than it seemed in the first 45 minutes.