Anna's parents are getting a divorce, and send her to stay with an aunt and uncle for two weeks while certain things get sorted out. I assume it's which parent gets stuck with Anna, who suffers from narcolepsy and possibly hallucinations. But she's on new medication to help with that, though!
It's not working very well, because Anna starts seeing dead people. A dead kid floating in the surf at the beach. A man standing underneath the tree outside her window. Or she hears voices of lots of kids crying in pain from the middle of a field. These are not things that make one popular at their new school, to say nothing of the opportunities it provides the aunt for passive-aggressive comments, or for the uncle to peer disapprovingly over his glasses at her (while reading the paper in a room with only a blue light. Strange lighting choices people make in this town.)
Anna eventually becomes friends with a guy named Josh, who clues her in on a bit of gristly local history, as well as some bad history of his own, with his father vanishing suddenly several years ago.
The suspense and uncertainty is about what the locals are hiding, not what the ghosts Anna's seeing are up to, and definitely not whether she's crazy. I might have been open to that sort of film, but the movie gives that hand away early when Anna reviews footage from the camera she left at the foot of her bed (presumably to make sure she didn't get up and sleepwalk), and she misses a brief shot of the kid she'd later see in the ocean. So even if the kid she found in the surf is suddenly not in cradled in her arms, we know she's not nuts.
The movie's pacing feels uneven, as it seems to take a long time to get into the notion of what's going on with the town. It starts out seeming like this is just something about Anna, and its over halfway done before anyone's getting into why there are all these ghosts. It never explains how the ghosts know Anna can see them, or really explains why what's happening is happening. Though I appreciate there's no scene at the end where someone sits there and lays the whole thing out for us. Josh and Anna learn the "what", but the "why" isn't so immediately important to them.
And the time it takes showing Anna trying to fit in with the other kids, and how awkward things are with her relatives, at least helps make her feel like more of a character. She seems to drift a lot, quiet and always giving off this air like she's got one arm wrapped around herself to feel secure. It also helps build the relationship between her and Josh so that the various clues the movie drops don't feel too ham-handed. Anna doesn't know the town, so Josh tells her things about it as a way to make conversation.
2 comments:
I was thinking that this didn't seem like the same film that I'd seen at all, and then I realised that's it because it isn't.
I was thinking of Anna and the Apocalypse, which does, to be fair, feature "the dead", just a different flavour.
I'm positive I've never seen that, but the poster I found on IMDb looks very familiar. Maybe it was listed on Netflix or Pluto and I scrolled past it at some point.
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