An Unquiet Grave

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.

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.

This was a beautifully shot, well acted movie with a decent premise that just took too damn long to tell. Even at only just over 70 minutes. I loved parts of this and saw moments of brilliance, but wow did it feel long. And I gotta say, there were key moments in the story where I just couldn't believe the characters would act the way they did because it was too far-fetched, so that's not good. Still, I would love to see this edited down and put into an anthology or something.

This movie was so boring that I actually forgot I was watching it. I cleaned up the kitchen and went out to water the lawn before I finally remembered that I was watching a movie. I came back in to rewind it and discovered that I hadn't actually missed anything because not a single eventful moment happens in the entire film. Seriously. Not one. I wasn't even this bored when I helped my husband sort his tools in the garage.

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.