Darkness Details

Spanish director Jaume Balagueró's follow-up to his far superior The Nameless (1999) is a messy and muddled supernatural tale about an American family moving into a Barcelona country house haunted by the spirits of children ritually sacrificed by a creepy cult. A workmanlike cast — Anna Paquin, Lena Olin, Iain Glen — tries its best to invoke shuddery suspense as the relentlessly silly and repetitive plot unfolds. But the snail-pace of this low-voltage formula horror defeats them at every blandly atmospheric turn. Although beautifully shot, the parade of familiar clichés and over-reliance on Balaqueró's stock-in-trade tricks — vibrating images, soundtrack noise to invoke sudden scares — add up to an empty exercise in banal technique that can't lumber soon enough towards its murky and ludicrous climax. Far-fetched, fatally flawed and just plain boring.

Jaume Balaguerós impressive debut horror movie, Los Sin Nombre (The Nameless), hinted at great things... read more on Time Out