The Uninvited Review
PG-13 horror. These two things don’t have to be incompatible, despite Hollywood’s best attempts to make you think they are.
The Uninvited is a fairly good example of the subgenre I call bullshit-PG-13-not-actually-scary-studio-horror. Seems kinda specific right? Trust me, there are many examples of this, ones I’ve seen include remakes of When a Stranger Calls, Prom Night and The Messengers.
Here’s what happens. The studio knows 8th graders need a movie to see on date night so they can get excited holding Jenny from Math class when she jumps in fear. But 8th graders can’t make it into something like a Halloween remake. So what’s produced instead are movies like these.
Pretty much nothing happens. I’m basically 100% certain there’s a shot in When a Stranger Calls where a cat jumps out of a corner scored to sound like a sledgehammer hitting a locomotive. In The Uninvited lead innocent-eyed Anna (Emily Browning) walks into a room and is SHOCKED to find her sister Alex (Arielle Kebbel) there. Shocked. It’s her sister. They live in the same house. Is this really so horrifying.
Basically editing and the score do half the work of “scaring” you, which essentially means it’s like having some dude run up and yell “Boo!” at you. Is that guy a real artist? No he’s not.
Anna and her sister both are convinced their stepmom (Elizabeth Banks, trying to break into new acting ground as a meanie) killed their real mom. Dad (David Strathairn, good actor slumming) doesn’t buy it.
I won’t give away much more without giving a spoiler alert, but the point is this:
This is a ghostly Korean remake Hollywood goofy movie. Creepy little kids appear. Zombie-looking ghosts appear. A lot of the “scares” are pulled back when the character turns out to be “dreaming”. And then there’s a last act twist that makes absolutely zero logical sense, following by another twist that invalidates the prior twist, while also making zero logical sense.
HUGE SPOILER
What are the twists you say? Well, first it turns out Anna’s sister Alex is actually a figment of her imagination. So if this is true that means Alex apparently never interacted with anyone else for the entire movie except Anna. Sweet, so that makes no sense. But that wasn’t enough for these filmmakers.
There’s another twist. It turns out Anna actually had planned all along to return home and kill Rachel, because she was angry Dad was bopping her while Mom was sick with disease. It was actually Anna’s fault Mom died, she left a gas tank leaking. So she actually came back after being in a mental hospital to kill Rachel, intentionally.
This of course begs the question why did she need an imaginary friend, and why was she surprised she had an imaginary friend (who commits the killing, which means she actually did) if she had planned to kill Rachel all along?
NON SPOILER BEST PART OF THE WHOLE MOVIE
Rachel confides to Anna about her old job working as a nurse, saying, “I used to wipe old people’s asses for a lving, and let me tell you, they were not beautiful…like your mom’s.” Banks somehow says this with a straight face. Is she referring to asses or people? See that? Isn’t that a lack of command of the English language? Yes it is.
-Dan Benamor