The Mistress

I've watched a lot of bad indie horror. Terrible indie horror even. I can tolerate a lot - bad effects, lousy acting, bad dialogue...all forgiveable. Boring, however, is another matter altogether. That brings us to The Mistress, a movie that makes the lamest Lifetime movie seem thrilling and fresh. It would be impossible to include any spoilers in this review as there is virtually nothing to spoil. Even the "big twist" that I'm certain the screenwriter was very proud of is telegraphed for most of the excruciatingly long runtime. I could imagine what sort of horrible torture I would have to be threatened with that could get me to sit through this again.

Obviously some money spent on this but shame about the story, script, acting and a million cliches. Almost a film school graduation project.

Cliches abound with old house, cellar with boiler, rocking chair in attic, old letters etc discovered, attractive neighbour, newly weds, the classic coming down the stairs in the middle of the night to discover the old phonograph playing etc the list is unending!

This may have worked as a 20 min short but dragging it out as a,feature was never going to work.

The camera work again is cliched trying to be clever but missing every time. Sorry but dreadful.

No pun intended - this really goes deep diving into quite a few cliches. One of them being the coming and staying in a house that had quite a lot of problems and issues. There is some horror history or rather past to it ... I do wonder if the people going into this should not reconsider. Same goes for anyone who might have it in for me - that's what I am kind of thinking when reviews go awol ... but here we are.

But they act like every other horror family heading to their doom ... or are they? Well you have to watch the movie to find out of course. I thought the movie did a few clever things. You may know where it is heading and maybe can even guess a major twist - but even if you do I feel the movie is strong enough to work on its merits. It is not superb or awesome or whatever ... but it is more than decent ... especially if you are into horror movies. Acting is also quite nice to say the least.

I almost didn't watch this because of the laughably low rating and bad reviews. But I thought I'd try it out, and if it was horrible I'd just turn it off.

I must have watched a different film than others. I found it to be really interesting, engaging, and creepy (even though I suspected the "twist" long before it was revealed). The mood and music were very Hitchockian. The sets and cinematography were very well done. I even appreciated how the title sequence had a kind of 70s/early 80s/vintage vibe to it that matched the warm SoCal setting.

There were a couple of scenes here and there that were a little too dark (like, I couldn't make out what I was looking at), but not enough to make me feel frustrated with the movie overall.

And again, even though I was pretty sure there was going to be a twist of some sort, I was interested in everything that was unfolding.

I found the acting to be quite good, too. I mean, not Oscar-level or anything, but certainly good enough that I wasn't rolling my eyes at any time. Even the characters that seemed a little cheesy reminded me of ACTUAL people I know who are a little cheesy, so they still felt believable. (It was NOT "Lifetime movie" style acting in my opinion!)

I'm not sure I would actually rate it a 9/10 -- maybe more like a 7. A good movie but one that I probably won't go around telling everyone to watch. Still, I'm giving it a 9 in the hopes of boosting its overall rating so people don't just skip over it like I almost did, because I DID think it was worth my time to watch.

Honestly, with all the tripe on streaming these days, this one is a LOT better than most! The VERY final scene, in fact, hinted that there might have been yet another layer I missed on the first watching, so I might give this one another go around and who knows... I may start telling everyone to watch it, lol.

I was hoping the writer & director was also the lead actor, since that would explain a lot about 'The Mistress'. This movie has levels of bad to it, starting with the premise, which is backwards.

Normally with a haunted house movie, you find out the house is haunted, and then the climax revolves around the history of the ghost, which is usually the key to the protagonist's victory. This movie STARTS with the explanation about the ghost and then elaborates on the life of the ghost while ghost haunting stuff unfolds.

It's anticlimactic, then combine it with a slow pace, sleep-inducing music, poor lighting, monotone line delivery of passionate admissions of love, boring relationships and 2-D characters, you've got yourself 'The Mistress'. I'm guessing the budget was low, so hopefully this film did what it needed to do in terms of providing streaming catalog content and getting some people experience that leads to better opportunities.