Dream House Review: Not Scary, Simply Mysterious

Let’s start off by recognizing that whoever decided to market this film as a scary/horror story made a mistake. Even the poster screams creepy, but what appears to be doesn’t materialize. As someone who doesn’t enjoy horror films (for the most part) I wouldn’t have chosen to see this film based on the previews and taglines. A person who does enjoy scary movies is going to be wildly disappointed by this one, which is more of a murder mystery with a psychological bent.

This review is going to be hard to complete without spoilers, but I’ll give it a try. The film begins when Will Atenton (Daniel Craig, YUM) quits his job as an editor to move to the country with his family and try his hand at writing a novel. His wife Libby (Rachel Weisz) is busy fixing the place up while his adorable daughters (played beautifully by Taylor and Claire Geare) explore.

The problems begin right away, when the younger girl sees a man outside watching the house, the neighbor Anne’s (Naomi Watts) ex-husband is openly hostile, and teenagers gather for a séance in the basement. It doesn’t take long for the Atenton’s to figure out a brutal murder – in which a man allegedly killed his wife and two young daughters – took place in their house five years before. What’s even worse is that the husband has recently been released from a psychiatric facility and returned to town…perhaps to recreate his past on the family now living in his home.

Anne and her daughter Chloe (Rachel G Fox) know more than they’re telling, as does everyone else in town, but when Will tries to get answers everyone clams up. It’s not until he visits the psychiatric facility that the truth begins to come out, and the journey of the main character changes.

To be honest, I’m not sure whether or not I heard about the main twist ahead of time or if it was really that simple to figure out, but either way I knew what was coming when he visited the mental institution. What I will tell you is that, even if you think you know what happened, there’s another twist toward the end that hasn’t been spoiled by pre-film hype, one that stops the movie from becoming a full-fledged “yeah we’ve seen this before” cliché.

The performances by Craig, Weisz, and Watts are all superb – the chemistry between the husband and wife crackles, and Watts had my attention from the moment she appeared on screen.

The main issue, for me, came from the lack of subtlety regarding a certain sub-plot. It was obvious from the second scene of the film that a certain someone had a secret, or was someone to be feared, which kind of ruined the big reveal at the end. In addition, the big reveal was unnecessarily complicated by the addition of a character we’d never met until that moment, a fact that confused me because my mind went “wait, who the hell is THAT?” instead of going “I KNEW it was him.” I also didn’t understand the last scene, or why it was supposed to make me feel as though we’ve bookended our story with some kind of closure, but whatever.

Nothing in that paragraph makes sense unless you’ve seen the movie. Put simply, the final twenty minutes of the movie could have been done better.

Dream House is not a poor movie, and the style and cinematography are engaging, creepy, and keep you on the edge of your seat. In the end it suffers from a desire to be more clever than it actually is, which bogs down the enjoyment with confusion and disbelief and for me, lots of eye rolling.

I wanted to pat it on its head and say “it’s okay to be your own film. You don’t have to be Inception or even Shutter Island. We like you just the way you are.”

An enjoyable film for a Friday night at home with your significant other, or even older children, since there’s nothing offensive, crude, or all that frightening about the movie, but there are plenty of other projects out or forthcoming that I’d recommend shelling out the box office bucks for instead.

Photos Courtesy of George Kraychyk and Universal Picture