2008 - Directed by Eric Red
Starring Famke Janssen, Bobby Cannavale, Ed Westwick and Michael Paré

I’d been curious to see how this film turned out since I first ran across the trailer, as the concept was very intriguing and I kinda have a thing for Famke Janssen , from way back to stuff like Lord Of Illusions.

Marnie (Janssen) is a housewife who has been released on a house-arrest type scenario to serve out the last year of her sentence after the self-defense murder of her abusive husband.  We open with her being transported to her home and an officer affixing her with a monitoring device that gives her reasonable mobility in the house, but doesn’t extend even to her front door.  The major plot-point here is that her husband was a cop, and his partner Lou (Cannavale) has taken a very personal interest in her because she killed his best buddy.  Now you know as well as I do that the deceased’s ex-partner would never be allowed anywhere near the case or allowed to look after her at her release, because that’s just a huge lawsuit-worthy conflict of interest, but for the purposes of this film, let’s just ignore that and settle back into Marnie’s deserted brownstone, shall we?

Once she gets Lou’s snarky, grousing ass out of her home, Marnie sets about clearing Mike’s (Paré) stuff out of the closet, tossing it in a suitcase into the basement.  Her lo-jack device conveniently starts going off as she enters the basement stairs, so she is forced to pitch the suitcase into the recesses of the room; suffice to say, this becomes important later.  Being that the house has been vacant for some time (I don’t think I ever heard a specific amount of time that she’d been incarcerated), she’s unable to get her electricity turned back on, leaving her with candles everywhere for the weekend.  Marnie relaxes in a bath, speaks to a girl she met in prison who’s happy for her release, then settles into bed, ignoring the creaking floors of the empty house.  Oh, and candles provide an extraordinary amount of lighting to this house.  I’m just saying.

Marnie tries to acclimate back into her life, painting over the blood stain left on the wall by Mike’s death.  She sits on her windowsill, tries to speak to her neighbors, all of whom give her the cold shoulder and bear an obvious grudge against her because her husband’s violent behavior was always covered up by his cop buddies.  For all intents and purposes to them, she’s just the crazy woman who snapped and killed her cop husband for no apparent reason. 

Marnie follows noises, finds a really random cat hanging out in her house, which she doesn’t question, but instead starts to feed and keep as a pet?  Personally, I’d be more alarmed if I found a mystery cat hiding in my home, but I’ve got allergies.  More noises are revealed to be a bum who has snuck into the house from a window in the basement (which I don’t think is ever dealt with, as she can’t enter the far corners of the basement, but let’s concentrate on the spookiness upstairs instead of the presumably open window down there), so she runs him out and thinks that’s the end of it.

The local grocery delivery boy Joey (Westwick) is a welcome distraction, she flirts slightly and is happy to see a friendly face, but late that night a shrieking apparition appears in front of her in the bedroom, she falls down the stairs trying to get away and is knocked out by an unseen force.  When she comes to she finds cops and an ambulance questioning her about the shiner she has and why the bloodstain is still on the wall in the dining room, for which she has no answer.  She manages to give herself the willies for a few days looking for strange noises, but Mike finally shows himself in the kitchen, attacking her with all the china flying across the room and shattering on and around her.

Lou has now taken to staking out her house because he’s the kind of cop to let all other crime in the city slide in an effort to make one housewife’s life miserable but he doesn’t seem to hear the commotions happening inside the brownstone.  Marnie reaches out to Joey, who is the only sympathetic ear she has, explaining the history of violence that she and Mike had, he gives her his digits to cal if she ever needs anything, because they’re good friends and all, but what young guy in his right mind is going to pass up that kinda MILF action living right around the corner? 

Marnie asks him one favor, to bring her some books from the library on ghosts; the rituals described therein leading her to more spookiness in the basement as she tries to rid the house completely of any of Mike’s belongings.

Mike is represented as a smoky apparition that menaces her in various ways, and I thought the design was interesting and pretty well-used throughout.  The one scene I was really surprised/amused by was when Marnie has her priest at the door to the house and he flat-out refused to come in and bless her home.  Can a priest do that?  Isn’t that like failing to stop and render aid; can’t you be sued or something?

The film is surprisingly engaging considering that it’s just one character for the most part, bumping around one location, but the ending does lose some steam in that it becomes the predictable showdown you’d expect.  There’s one death that’s pretty damned gruesome, made slightly more shocking after the relatively tame first hour or so that mainly involves moving objects or the occasional smoky apparition. 

The film is an interesting take on a ghost story, the acting is decent, and while I was frustrated with a few plot conveniences, the overall experience was fun.

Give it a rental.

5/10