This is delightful in a small way but you have to make a shift. It gives out that it's going to be horror about poltergeists, we get to that effect malicious forces around the house, objects that move, a possessed girl and a seance, in other words we have largely the same events and scenes of a poltergeist film but without the murky oppression of American films of that sort, without the angst or the aural violence.
We get instead a whole other narrative ground beneath our feet, foreboding of another kind - the house as a house of grief, a girl whose father abandoned them "possessed" by a monstrous father, smashing things and hurling abuse. A bereaved father who comes to investigate and finds a surrogate daughter much like the one he lost one day - and named the same no less. All this is made obvious in the course of things.
What I like is that from this ground up we have what the British do so well, an embracing of people and relationships between them that comes with a natural affinity. The Brits are not particularly interesting in a visual way - they're either bland or tend to control too much - but the trade-off in fact is that they delight in faces and spoken words, in the peoplesness of people; the same energy that in the more rowdy Italians tends to waft around the environment, in the case of Brits it's kept firmly inside persons. They are good souls in my mind.
If you look here - all its real charm comes from the adventurousness of human friction, from how characters rub and glide off each other. Lovely actors. The two girls, Janet in particular, one of the most endearing I've seen, an absolute firecracker of sassy spirit.
We get instead a whole other narrative ground beneath our feet, foreboding of another kind - the house as a house of grief, a girl whose father abandoned them "possessed" by a monstrous father, smashing things and hurling abuse. A bereaved father who comes to investigate and finds a surrogate daughter much like the one he lost one day - and named the same no less. All this is made obvious in the course of things.
What I like is that from this ground up we have what the British do so well, an embracing of people and relationships between them that comes with a natural affinity. The Brits are not particularly interesting in a visual way - they're either bland or tend to control too much - but the trade-off in fact is that they delight in faces and spoken words, in the peoplesness of people; the same energy that in the more rowdy Italians tends to waft around the environment, in the case of Brits it's kept firmly inside persons. They are good souls in my mind.
If you look here - all its real charm comes from the adventurousness of human friction, from how characters rub and glide off each other. Lovely actors. The two girls, Janet in particular, one of the most endearing I've seen, an absolute firecracker of sassy spirit.