The Spiritualist

Please read this review before committing your valuable time to this failure of a movie. The only conclusion I can draw is the positive reviews (some of which are absolutely *glowinug*) are "canned" reviews by people in the movie. My wife and I sat down to watch this, with fairly high hopes, and as time passed......and we watched our lives cut shorter and shorter with each passing second wasted on this dog of a movie, we became very frustrated. There isn't even a cogent story line to follow. What's it about? Shouldn't you have a general idea within the first 20 minutes of the movie? But you don't. The scenery is interesting. It was shot in an old house. If you need to see pics of an old house, go to Pinterest and search for Old House. 5 minutes and you are done. But as for the movie, it's a turd.

So, somewhat a telling of a ghost story, but the presentation is a bit confusing at first given the jumps in time that aren't well delineated. Then the movie shifts to a "spiritualist" coming to the home of the couple that the wife is plagued by visions of her deceased mother. It builds some sense of tension up to this point, then the plot shifts to keep itself hidden so there can be some twist at the end. It was still unclear at the end what was actually happening even though a point or two were clarified. The film was able to capture enough of an atmosphere that I could almost overlook the rather amateurish acting (Can Jake stop calling his wife "Babe" in every line he speaks to her?"). I wasn't completely bored while watching, but I was left without much feeling for this film.

This movie is the reason why ALL movies' full synopsis should be posted on the internet! I watched this -even some scenes more than once - and I STILL didn't work out the ending! I've heard it called another "Sixth Sense", but I swear, I just don't see it! This is driving me crazy! Would I watch it again? Yeh, probably will - but only to figure out what was going on!

The difficulty, I think, was all the back and forth from past to present. The actors often wore the same clothing in both time settings, so it was very confusing.

The Spiritualist was good in some scenes , then others acted as if she didn't know what she was there to do. But one of her high moments was when she was discussing the man's dead twin brother. The man's reactions to her description were so touching, heartbreaking, yet encouraging.

Perhaps, if I figure out the "mysteries" in this film, I'll find more scenes like that. I hope I can. The worst thing a filmmaker can do is to drop the story, leaving it unfinished and untold.

With friends like that, who needs enemies. I'm talking of Laura's so called friends that appear during a seance. She doesn't know any of them but that's why the film fails. None of the characters are likeable. The story makes no sense and it jumps a lot. The best thing about it was the beautiful castle it was filmed in. The only reason I watched it was to see a ghost, but instead it was full of sounds of people gulping. All I can say is in one word: yawn.

This is the British Blair Witch Project with steadier cameras. Endless, plotless bleh that makes no sense.