This is an interesting idea handled in a poor and predictable way. My favourite thing about it has to be the main villain's accent. For some reason he sounds like a 1950s gangster, "now listen here see". Imagine him in a zoot suit with a tommy gun and it becomes very entertaining.
The rest of the cast are fine. The creepy little boy could easily have been swapped out with a ham sandwich and it wouldn't have made much difference as all he does is stare and vanish, but that's par for the course with this sort of film. The original spooky child of the early 00s, Jodelle Ferland tries her best, but she never really has much to do. She also decided to play her role like a demure Victorian nanny, which is completely at odds with the rest of the film. It's impossible for me to see Lochlyn Munroe as anyone other than Greg from Scary Movie so he's a lost cause. There are other people but they're all bland and uninteresting.
This film also suffers from jumpscare abuse. I'm very jumpy, jumpscares get me, but after the first dozen or so I'd become desensitised to them. Every few minutes there's another piercing screech and a thud, but it's just a cat, or a shadow, or sometimes it's an actual over the top ghost, or sometimes it's just for fun. There's no tension, no build-up, just increasingly ineffective loud noises.
All in all, if you're bored and need something on in the background, this is a perfectly adequate horror film. If you want to be scared or immersed in an interesting story, look elsewhere.
