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When I initially saw the trailer for The Uninvited, my first thoughts were: Oh, please, stop the Asian film Hollywood remake madness! Haven’t we had enough of these genre retellings to know that they just don’t work? Of course, I’m talking about such disasters as One Missed Call, Shutter, and the Jessica Alba non-starter, The Eye. Now we have The Uninvited, the remake of the Korean cult classic, A Tale of Two Sisters. Maybe it was because I was expecting another mess of a narrative and cliché-driven ghost story that I was pleasantly surprised to find a story that was both tension-filled and ultimately satisfying.
Anna Rydell, played with great intelligence and vulnerability by Emily Browning, arrives home after spending some time in a mental facility, where she was recovering from the tragic and violent death of her sick mother. Anna’s father, Steven (played with wonderful gravitas by the always reliable David Strathairn), an author who has just published a new book, lives in a beautiful and isolated house beside a lake. It’s the perfect place for Anna and her sister, Alex (Arielle Kebbel), to wile away their teenage days and help each other come to terms with their new, soon-to-be stepmother, who also just happens to have been their dead mother’s nurse.
When we first meet Rachel Summers, her menace is only hinted at, as she steps out from the shadows of a room to greet the returning Anna. But Elizabeth Banks’s portrayal of the new potential step-mother switches wonderfully from innocent charm to creepy malevolence in the blink of an eye.
Soon, the two sisters start to realize that their father’s new partner is not who she claims to be, and Anna has recurring visions of the dismembered corpses of children, as they grab at her from under the oven and jump out of garbage bags.
The supernatural elements of The Uninvited sometimes get in the way of the thriller aspects of the plot—by far the most intriguing. However, once the plot twist kicks in at the end, the spectral components make perfect sense, and they cogently tie this psychological chiller together. The chemistry of the cast works extremely well, as does the relatively short runtime of 82 minutes (without credits); the story is economically and deftly told by English directing team the Guard brothers, Charles and Thomas.
The Uninvited is by far the best of the Asian remakes to come along since The Ring. And while it’s not without some stock genre set pieces and scares, it’s well worth an hour and a half of your time. For all those horror fans who’ve been burned by the remakes of the last couple of years, The Uninvited is an intelligent and welcome addition to the genre.
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