I'm Spoiling This Movie

Film: The Uninvited (2009)
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.

I’m going to spoil The Uninvited in this review. I’m going to be nice enough to put that spoiler information below the fold—you'll have to click on “more” to get to it. I do that not out of respect for the movie, but out of respect for you, the reader. This is a movie that deserves to be spoiled because it is not merely a shoddy remake of a vastly superior film, but because the shock ending it utilizes has been used better in every other film I’ve seen that has used it.

In fact, I am not merely going to spoil this movie. In doing so, I will be spoiling a few other movies as well. I’m sorry about that. However, I’m going to be extremely careful in this respect. In the next paragraph, I’m going to mention the main film that this one is aping, mainly because this is technically a remake of that film. This means that if you haven’t seen that film (and you should—it's brilliant), you can avoid having it spoiled by not reading past paragraph #3. The other movies that essentially do the same thing as this one will be much further in the review, and most of those are old enough that they won’t be spoiled, and the one that is more recent is disappointing enough that you’re not losing much.

So, right off the top, I’m going to tell you that The Uninvited is a remake of A Tale of Two Sisters, which not only came first, but is far superior in every way. If you’ve seen that movie (or know the twist), feel free to continue reading. If you haven’t seen that movie, you should really stop here—that's not a movie that should be spoiled for you. To be fair, that 2003 film is the sixth Korean version of the story, but it’s a Korean folk tale, so that makes a certain amount of sense. Seriously, though, if you haven’t seen it, stop now and move on to something else.

We start with Anna (Emily Browning), who is being released from an institution where she has been for some time. We will eventually piece together that Anna witnessed her very ill mother dying in a fire, something that naturally traumatized her. What we also learn is that in the nearly full year she has been under a doctor’s constant care, her father (Davit Straithairn) has become involved with the full-time nurse (Elizabeth Banks) hired to care for her mother.

Now that she is back, the only good thing that appears to be going on in Anna’s life is that she has reconnected with her sister Alex (Arielle Kebbel). Not really feeling at home in her family now, Anna begins to investigate, and specifically, she starts to investigate the nurse, Rachel. She begins piecing things together, finding that Rachel’s background is a suspicious one, and that she may be someone guilty of killing a former patient along with that patient’s young children, and she may well have caused the fire that killed Anna’s and Alex’s mother. Of course all of this is going to build into a climax that will give us some shocks at the end, or shocks if you haven’t seen the original film.

So here’s where I’m going to spoil the film—I'm going to reveal the big shock moment that happens about 6 minutes before the credits. Ready? All of this is in Anna’s head. We find out that on the fateful night, Anna returned from a party to discover her father and the nurse in the act. Wanting revenge, she tried to set the house on fire, but instead, managed to ignite the boathouse where her mother was, and where Alex happened to be as well. So, this whole time, Alex has been a figment of her imagination. Watch it knowing this, and it’s easy to see that no one but Anna actually talks to Alex.

This is a relatively well-known twist. It worked in Fight Club and it worked in The Sixth Sense. It came across as a shock in A Tale of Two Sisters, assuming (as was the case with me) that you hadn’t seen one of the previous five incarnations of the story in Korean cinema. It even works better in Goodnight Mommy (or Ich seh, Ich seh, if you prefer), which tells a very similar story, but with much younger children. Hell, even Harvey has some common elements here, as does Blithe Spirit, even though in both of those movies, the character is visible only to one person, but is also actually there.

Bluntly, every other time I have seen this trope used, I have liked it better than I did in The Uninvited. It’s equally true that in movies I have seen called The Uninvited--I've seen two of them—this one comes in second. I tell you these things to save you the 87 minutes I lost watching this.

Why to watch The Uninvited: If you don’t know the story, it’s got a decent ending.
Why not to watch: Every other movie that uses this conceit is better.