An Unquiet Grave

At their beloved's graveside, a grieving husband proposes a pact to his sister-in-law in the hope of restoring life to their dearly departed.

Dialogue-heavy two-hander that mostly feels like an old-fashioned morality tale, along the lines of be-careful-what-you-wish-for, but looking to deliver something more.

The opening scene is two actors expositioning - or maybe they're speaking in riddles that can only be worked out later. By the end, we circle round to a parallel scene, with a hint that this pattern will repeat - so the film-makers are taking a look at some aspect of death, which is intriguing and enough to forgive the drawbacks of low-budget and inexperience in the production.

But the opening is followed by another static scene, where the dialogue raises unspoken questions that might be down to the discrepancy between what appears to be going on and a hidden reality. The suspicion is that it's just a bit cack-handed, given the unexplained jump forward in time.

Eventually, we get to the ritual scene, which is effective and the first time the movie earns its spooky music. The possibilities open up, and the director lays on a couple of moments of weird, when the husband finds himself addressing a void, but I couldn't figure out what they signified. There's also a bleeding knife, which has to symbolize guilt, linking in a later scene to a heart, but I was still struggling to put everything together.

Good horror creates a weird world that actually maps back on to ordinary fears and struggles in a human way. So surely with twins there's a psychoanalytic truth about identity and doubling, some psychic path to a repressed horror? An exploration of what a woman goes through in subjecting herself to a husband, when her liberated self dies?

I'm not insisting on puzzle-solving, but there has to be a consistency and a purpose to those moments where the film-maker shifts out of the ordinary - the trick is to present it as an entertaining narrative, using all the skills of cinema, and to allow the audience to reach its own conclusion. Instead, we get splashes of gruesome symbolism and macabre oddities.

The performances and editing are fine, the cinematography and the lighting not very attractive, and the music for me was too deliberately spooky.

Overall: Digs its way out of the morality tale, only to stumble around the graveyard, bumping into headstones.

It's not badly made. It's not badly acted. And the story itself isn't bad either. The problem is that it's just... kind of... lame?

Well, no, let me take that back. Maybe a better way to explain it is as a dramatic horror story that leans much harder into the drama than the horror. So, if you prefer your dramas to have a little bit of eeriness to them, this film is right up your alley. But if your definition of horror is strictly jump-scare after jump-scare, this one definitely is not for you.

Either way, with a run time of just 75 minutes, it's really not all that much to commit to.

Well an unquiet grave doesn't necessarily make for grand horror entertainment. And such was the case for the 2020 horror movie from writers Christine Nyland and Terence Krey.

Sure, I hadn't even heard about this 2020 movie before now in 2021, when I had the opportunity to sit down and watch it. And with it being labeled as a horror, of course I had an interest in watching it. And I must also admit that the movie's title was sort of alluring as well.

But director Terence Krey managed to present an abysmal display of a movie here with "An Unquiet Grave". And I was honestly not even remotely entertained by the storyline in the movie. In fact, it was an amazingly boring and uneventful movie, which made for a dull movie experience and a prolonged movie experience at that. Woe to you if you manage to sit through the entire ordeal.

And with this being labeled as a horror movie, well... That might be stretching it somewhat. Sure, if you are fresh off of the boat and unfamiliar with the horror genre in general, then sure this movie might be scary or fall into the horror category. But if you, like me have had a decades of exposure to the horror genre, then this movie was a stroll in the park and quite far from being a horror movie.

The acting in the movie was nothing noteworthy, especially since the actors and actresses had wooden and emotionless characters to work with, given the inadequate storyline and some dubious writing.

My rating of "An Unquiet Grave" lands on a two out of ten stars. This movie simply isn't worth the time, money or effort. Some of us suffered through this, so you don't have to.

This was like that one campfire story someone tells, when everyone is pretty sure the teller misremembered most of the details, but they don't want to be rude so they say "um.... ok. Thanks. Who's next?"

I think someone had an idea about twins and tried to write a screenplay about it without ever really noticing that there wasn't much to the idea to begin with. They started throwing in some random obligatory scenes, and then added a lot of fluff in a sad attempt to fill all the empty space, but in the end it was pretty much empty space.

This movie is spooky, I'll give the writers and film makers kudos for that. However I was not convinced of the husband's need to do what he did. Still, the movie made for entertaining viewing.