A young woman kills her father and flees with her brother. They end up at an orphanage where the nuns are hiding a dark secret and something lurks in the dark. Meanwhile the cops try to sort out the murder.
Great moments, and a killer final 20 minutes are lost in a too slowly paced film. Sequences should move at a step or two quicker. I kept thinking I should have jumped here. The film never takes any time to make us feel that this is a normal place, we know it's evil from the first frame.
Everything in the film looks perfect and constructed. The film wants to look cool, and it does but often at the expense of the suspense. The rooms are big, the hallways wide and empty. It feels like a construct not a real place.
This is kind of like a throw back satanic horror film from the 1970's or early 1980's minus the grit those films had. The paintings on the walls and in the opening montage remind me of those 70's b films that used Bosch paintings of hell under the opening credits.
What kills me about the film is that I kept thinking this should have been better. Yea, this has moments, but for 90 minutes thats all that has. When we get into the final 20 or 30 minutes this film suddenly clicks. There are a couple of WTF turns where the film becomes it's own thing and begins to soar. There are turns that make you set up and the film finds a focus both visually and emotionally. I adore the end of this film, my problem is that the slog to get there is tough, more so when you realize that the first 3/4 of the film could have been like this but wasn't.
Is it worth seeing? Maybe. Somewhere down the road away from a big admission price at a festival.
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