Neighborly Concern: THE HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET

The House at the End of the Street starts out by introducing materials so standard that I found myself wondering if the movie could possibly be heading to such conventional territory. Oh, just you wait. The opening scenes introduce us to a single mother (Elisabeth Shue) and her teenage daughter (Jennifer Lawrence) as they move into a new house in a new town. They get the new place for cheap on account of the neighbors, who, four years ago, were murdered by their young daughter. The girl went missing that same night and now the only one living in the big empty house is their justifiably morose son (Max Thieriot). The poor kid’s avoided by the townspeople who monger rumors about his long gone sister and generally behave rather badly when the topic of the boy comes up at, say, a welcome-to-the-neighborhood picnic.

The eerie house with a mysterious history causing mild discomfort for new neighbors isn’t exactly new territory. It’s to the filmmakers’ credit, I suppose, that the whole thing ends up operating at a reasonably workable level. The script from David Loucka (based on a story concept by Jonathan Mostow) has some fun playing around with audience sympathies. Thieriot’s troubled guy is understandable for a while; it’s the townspeople who are generally awful. For once, all the foreboding and ominous red flags seems to point away from the guy who’d be the suspicious creep in many a horror flick.

The first half of the movie may be mostly unpolished exposition spoken half-naturally, but the actors are likable and talented enough to make it all seem more or less convincing and soon enough the situation grows enough mild interest that it doesn’t seem so bad. What’s too bad is that the movie doesn’t seem too good, either. There’s a lot of talent here, but the film never finds a good reason to make much use of it. Lawrence is called on mostly to wear a tight white T-shirt. (Hey, there are worse reasons to see a movie.) Shue gets to act intensely concerned about her daughter and the boy next door, but not concerned enough to stop the plot in its tracks. Everyone is suspicious, but there’s really not all that much to be leery about for a while.

Because of the movie’s sometimes agonizing scarcity of imagination, the whole thing starts to feel like a watchable bore. There’s not a whole lot of suspense happening for a very long time as the film sets off a long fuse of characterization and build up that’d work better if the flimsy material could rise higher than the actors can take it alone. The bulk of the film is only a notch or two scarier than what you’d find on the Disney Channel during October as we patiently wait for Big Secrets to be revealed. Director Mark Tonderai turns in the one of most stylistically generic horror movies in recent memory, bland PG-13 Hollywood slickness that leans on the crutch of sudden orchestration anytime something vaguely suspenseful is occurring. By the time it goes through a couple of genuinely surprising (well, it got me, at least) twists, it’s all too self-serious to go off the rails properly.

And these twists to which I refer are certainly a little nutty. I won’t spoil them here, because you just might have the TV on in the background one day a few years from now and this movie will come on and you won’t have enough willpower to change the channel so you’ll just let it play out while you, I don’t know, fold laundry or something. Anyways, the twists are silly and they undo a lot of what little I found of interest in the first half of the picture, but the actors are on board to sell them. Tonderai treats it all so reverently, so tactfully, and with such restraint that the effect is more or less negated. By the time the material grows dark and weird and a little predictable, but still functionally dangerous and tense simply through the sheer will of talented performers, it’s basically a moot point. The movie completely trades in what little I was enjoying for a badly executed climactic sequence derived from a jumble of influences from (mostly) better movies without even the slightest intention of enjoying itself.

Quick Look: MY SOUL TO TAKE

With My Soul to Take, the story of a dead schizophrenic serial killer who may or may not have returned from the dead after sixteen years just to kill a group of high schoolers, Wes Craven’s offering up leftovers from his greatest accomplishments. It’s a little Nightmare on Elm Street here, a little Scream there. I had a good time. It’s a fairly shaggy slasher picture, but it’s sort of charming in its steady, almost anachronistic style. And its straight-faced use of red herrings and obvious twisty horror plotting makes it a bit of an earnest, unselfconscious throwback. The killer’s prey is a carefully diverse group of teenagers (all in their twenties, of course). There’s a jock (Nick Lashaway), popular girls (Emily Meade and Paulina Olszynski), an Evangelical Christian (Zena Grey), a geek (John Magaro), and a blind kid (Denzel Whitaker). Our main point of entry into the story, which is partly a bleary coming-of-age story, is a troubled teen played by Max Thieriot, who handles quite well a part that calls for a blend of high emotion and low pop-psychological semi-supernatural oddness. He’s given several moments that could very well have become accidental camp in lesser hands. The cast has some nice banter mixed in with some real clunkers, like a failed bon mot from the Christian girl suggesting relief from the heat of their crisis with some “prayer conditioning.” But above all, Craven’s film works in its erratic, loopy way as a look at a community that is literally haunted by memories of sudden and scarring violence. Its high point comes not from a particularly frightening scare or a squeamishly gross gash of gore, but instead from a scene that finds a brother and a sister, both marked by the town’s killings of sixteen years prior, smashing apart the last relics of their tainted memories.

Quick Look: CHLOE

In Chloe, Julianne Moore feels emotionally cut-off from her teenage son (Max Thieriot) and suspects that her husband (Liam Neeson) is cheating on her. Rather than rest on her suspicions, and yearning for a way out of the loneliness and distance she feels growing in her familial relationships, she hires a prostitute (Amanda Seyfried) to flirt with her husband, befriend him, and see if he’ll have an affair. From that bare-bones plot description, it sounds like the film’s interests lie only in its more prurient scenes. While, yes, the film is interested to a certain extent in what goes on between sheets, it is a film that is much more interested in what goes on behind closed doors. And that is an important distinction. The film is not about sex; it’s about secrets. It’s not about affairs; it’s about what we assume. It’s not about what we see; it’s about what we think we see. Director Atom Egoyan is keenly interested in the darker side of human nature, the self-destructive, impulsive desires lurking in the corners of our minds. Chloe is no Exotica or The Sweet Hereafter, to name two better Egoyan efforts, but it’s still a dark, gut-twisting thriller about these characters and the way they interact (or don’t). It’s an exceedingly well-crafted exercise, well-acted and handsomely shot, but one that’s at its best the further it strays from standard thriller tropes. Funnily enough, the film only gains tension the more it gets away from questions like “who knows what?” and “what’s around the corner?” Egoyan’s film falls apart in the last act, with Erin Cressida Wilson's script giving in to its latent thriller tendencies in some fairly goofy ways. But isn’t it funny that the film shares the same downfall as its characters? They, too, find it hard to resist the allure of that which could leave them worse off than before.