Un jeu d'enfants

Remember The Possessed? In 1961, Jack Clayton filmed that oppressive story about a young unexperienced lady nursing two innocent kids and facing some supernatural appearances. Or was it her that filled all the atmosphere with her own fears and neurastenic obsessions? Tuel, french director, do the same excellent thing with his movie: two little kids trapped in a huge maze-like parisian flat, between a father who is on the edge of madness and a mother who lost a son a few yew years ago and never succeeded to overgo the drama. Are the two intruders at the beginning of the thriller real persons, ghosts from a past tragedy, or just a projection of the mother (excellent Karin Viard)? Despite an end which sounds just too much of a final explanation, Laurent Tuel's movie is a little masterpiece of building anguish without easy effects, and suggesting horror that can hide istelf behind each of the dorrs of the flat. Wonderful. NAturalist fantasy at its best.

Even french critics have regarded this movie as an insignificant movie, I think they were wrong.

The atmosphere was terrific, characters very well interpreted by two excellent actors : Charles Berling & Karin Viard. Without heavy special effects, scenario succeeds to really frighten us.

I was shocked for a while after the last image plays.

I really loved this movie.

Don't look to this if you're expecting a child or if you want to have one :)

Dull French horror movie about a frazzled mom who believes that her two small children plan to harm her and her increasingly short-fused husband. Early scenes with children playing a secret game that the mother is to be excluded from, for now, are promising and remind of the chilling Ray Bradbury story Zero Hour. Unfortunately, the movie never goes anywhere interesting from there and the filmmakers leave the audience with many more questions than answers: What exactly are the spirits of the old brother and sister trying to accomplish and why? If they died as children why do they appear as old people? How exactly did they manage to make one of the characters commit suicide? This movie is a complete dud. If you like evil children movies you would be much better off watching The Innocents (which this also recalls in its early scenes) or the Spanish flick Who Could Kill A Child.

In Paris, Marianne (Karin Viard) and Jacques (Charles Berling), and their son Julian (Alexandre Bongibault) and daughter Aude (Camille Vatel) compose a happy upper class French family, living in a huge apartment (for European standards). The children have a baby-sitter, Daphnée (Ludivine Sagnier) and Jacques has just been promoted in his job. The family's life changes when Marianne receives two weird old visitors, the Worms (Pierre Julien and Manuela Gourary). They ask Marianne for permission to visit the apartment, where they live when they were children. Marianne receives a phone call from her husband, and when she returns to the living room, the strange couple was leaving the children's room. From this moment on, the most mysterious and bizarre things happen with Marianne and Jacques, affecting their lives. I liked this very scary French horror movie a lot. It has the same atmosphere of `Stanley Kubrick´s The Shining', the characters are well developed, and the tension increases in an intelligent way. The viewer is never 100% sure whether the mother or the father is getting deranged or the children became evil, until the end of the plot. Unfortunately, there is a great flaw in the script regarding the visit of the Worms: why have they waited so long to come back to the apartment? My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): `Jogos Sinistros' (`Sinister Games')

This is not a great movie but it's quite a good one with an eerie atmosphere - ideal viewing for the early hours of the morning. I missed the beginning so had to catch up on what it was all about - but I could tell right away that those kids were up to no good. As another reviewer noted, if you're thinking of starting a family then avoid this film - you may be persuaded otherwise! Maybe the denouement doesn't explain much but hey, this is a horror movie. The characters that played Mr & Mme Worms were (I thought) hideous in the extreme & enough to give you nightmares. A quietly creepy and menacing film.