This was one of the movies premiering on a busy Wednesday in some of Indonesian cinemas. I saw the trailer to the film 2 or 3 times before and I noticed that despite being a horror movie, it did not seem too scary. So I decided to give this a try last night. As usual, I saw this one by myself due to my wife's preference to avoid watching horror movies. Ok, let's get on with the movie now.
Brief Story Line
A troubled high school student named Katherine (AnnaSophia Robb - Race to Witch Mountain, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory etc) was enrolled by her parents to a boarding school called Blackwood led by its headmistress Madame Duret (Uma Thurman - Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill etc). Apparently the school only accepted very few students which include the rebellious Veronica (Victoria Moroles - Teen Wolf TV series etc) and other troubled girls Ashley (Taylor Russel), Izzy (Isabel Fuhrman) and Sierra (Rosie Day).
The school seemed to be focusing on teaching specific lessons by its limited teachers. One of those teacher was Duret's son Jules (Noah Silver - Tyrant TV series etc) who was still young and attracted the girls. Things would start to get mysterious though as the girls seemed to be gaining excellent abilities in lessons they used to fail. Not to mention Kit (shorten for Katherine) sometimes had the sense of unexplainable existence around the school.
When Kit started to get really suspicious, it turned out that there was something dark in the school that endangered everyone in it. So could Kit and her new friends survive? Find them all in this horror movie.
End of Brief Story Line
OK, just as I expected, this movie was not too scary. The first half hour was focusing more on the adaptation by the girls into this new dark & mysterious school. But when the mystery start to take more focus, there were few scenes that briefly gave me the creeps (that scene involving Kit in the middle of the night was the highlight of it). However, aside from very few jump scares here and there, the movie did not become scarier. Instead it was more like a mystery solving kind and even though it involved something supernatural, it was not the kind that would give you really scary moments like those Conjuring series or Japanese horror movies. One thing that I thought reduced the scariness was probably there were scenes that were too dark that we could not really see the supposedly scary presence.
The story itself was not too complicated. The idea though was something quite unique and interesting. And up till the two third of the movie, it was quite intriguing and made me want to know the real reasons behind the mystery. From what I saw in the end credit scene, this was based on a novel by Lois Duncan which surprisingly was written back in 1974. So I guessed there were quite a lot of changes would have been done in this movie to accommodate the modern things that did not exist during the time of her writing. Anyway, I thought the novel's idea was unique enough but unfortunately the adaptation might not do justice to the book.
Oh since I mentioned about credit scene earlier, I waited till the very last minute and there was a scene which I was not sure it had any significance. Btw, I was also surprised to see that the copyright was 2016, which meant the movie was already completed 2 years ago, but only released this year. Perhaps the distributor not really sure about the success and just wait till the right moment.
Overall, this movie was a decent enough attempt to create something unique they probably saw in the novel. However the adaptation was not really satisfying. The creepiness was there but not consistently done, while the scary part was too brief. The ending though was quite nice but it personally made me feel the movie was more like a drama with some horrific images, rather than a full horror movie. The actresses and actors in here were just so so and sadly Uma Thurman did not get too much screen time to leave a great impression (though she did show glimpses of truly cold appearances). Which was quite surprising considering the movie was directed by Rodrigo Cortés who previously directed Buried starring Ryan Reynolds which was one of the best psychological thriller to my opinion.
Anyway, if you are looking for a drama horror mystery movie with high school girls as the lead cast, then you could give this one a try. Surprisingly I was not too disappointed by this movie as perhaps it was not below my already low expectations. But if you expect a truly scary horror supernatural movie, then this may not satisfy you. The choice is yours.
Mike's movie moments rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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