Uninvited, The (2009)

I first saw Kim Jee-Woon’s A Tale Of Two Sisters (2003) several years ago at the Melbourne Film Festival. Kim’s previous films had been witty and acerbic comedies, but now he'd decided to imitate the J-Horror that was so popular at the time, producing a film that was filled with lots of creepy images lifted from The Ring and The Grudge, along with a story that I couldn't really follow. I remember falling asleep at one point, so maybe I’m being unfair about its narrative competence. But when I heard about an American remake, the first thought that came to mind was that it might not be such a bad idea. At least this time maybe the film would make sense. And I'm glad to say it does hold together for me, but unfortunately it's a fairly frustrating journey to reach that blessed state of clarity.

Anna and Alex are fairly typical teenage sisters, plotting against and challenging authority, which in this case means their new evil stepmother. The plot hinges on what happened the night of their mother's death. She was, for reasons that aren't entirely logical, living in the boathouse by the lake with a bell strapped to her wrist to call for help. How a terminally ill person can be left alone in a boathouse isn't something the film addresses, but when a kerosene leak combined with a broken lamp blows up the boathouse and kills her, Anna becomes suicidal, Alex becomes an alcoholic, their father Steven finds solace in the arms of Rachael, and the whole messy thing goes from bad to worse once Anna’s visions play on her fears and Alex starts to believe them too. There’s good fodder for a ripping yarn here, but just because you have a dead parent telling you they were murdered, it doesn’t make you Hamlet.

The trouble with The Uninvited is that it’s incredibly obvious, so much so that watching people get gulled by Rachael is an exercise in aggravation. It's hard to imagine a more obviously evil stepmother than Rachael; she's scheming, spiteful and falsely-loving in almost every scene. Steven is even worse, a man lost in his writing, uninterested in listening to his daughters, and especially oblivious to Alex's complaints. He's the worst kind of passive-aggressive parent and you want to slap him to make him see what is plain as day throughout - that Rachael is evil. It does put you in the position of empathising with the heroines, but seriously, how stupid can people be? Of course Anna and Alex know better than their father and, thanks to the internet, discover the dirt on Rachael. So with no one else to believe them, they take matters into their own hands. There are some tense scenes as they try to steal evidence of Rachel’s previous crimes from her bedroom and the visions are horrifying in a standard J-Horror way.

But then, after all the annoyance comes the payoff. A reveal that turns a lot of things on their head, re-casts events and suddenly justifies a lot of the film's more turgid passages. So the question is this, is a surprise twist enough to justify sitting in a cinema for an hour and a half watching dire stereotypes? I'm not entirely sure I'd watch The Uninvited again, but I was surprised to discover that a film I'd spent most of the runtime disliking suddenly had me leaving the cinema thinking it wasn't as bad as all that after all. In fact, it was kinda clever. It's a neat trick to subject the audience to a bunch of distorted stereotypes and then, suddenly, have them accept it just before leaving the cinema. At its best, a twist can take a good film and make it a great. At its worst, as can be seen with Fernando Meirelles’ currently screening Blindness, it can take a great film and turn it into a woeful one. Here, it transformed an annoying film it into one which I found myself liking more and more once I understood what was actually going on. I'm not entirely sure this excuses it, but I still found I had to admit I enjoyed it.

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