An Unquiet Grave

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 film just has two characters and their conversations are like pulling teeth waiting for answers.

The writing is obtuse and often silly.

This is a resurrection movie without much momentum or energy. I cared nothing for the two characters. It seemed like a short story made for a 30 minute TV episode.

Im not sure what the goal was here because the writing and the actors don't sell it. I saw the film on "Shudder", and I expected more. I wanted to like this movie based on the description, but it never develops into a compelling story.

This film is terribly slow. Im sure it started out as a good idea but the execution just wasn't there.

The only horror here is the fact that this rubbish was made.

Two character boring, tedious and obscure movie that drags and drags and . . .drags.

Awful acting and daft plot and storyline.

I could hardly sit through this all the way. It's 99% dialog between 2 characters over ambient music the whole movie. Doesn't classify as a horror film.

But if you're looking for something on shudder too chuck on so you fall asleep faster I'd recommend this "An unquiet grave"

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.