It's not often you get a modern horror film with its origins in Greek myth, but SIREN is such a movie. Sadly, it wastes the potential of that premise with a storyline that turns out to stick to its low budget origins in a film that features plenty of tease and very little in the way of action or incident.
I don't mind mood pieces that focus on brooding atmosphere but there's none of that either. Where SIREN does succeed is in creating a sufficiently exotic locale for the action - this British movie was shot in Tunisia and it looks great. The twentysomething cast don't have much opportunity to shine given the vagueness of their characters, and when the supernatural aspects of the storyline finally show up they're dealt with in the most ordinary way imaginable.
Where I do have to praise the film is in the performance of lead actress Anna Skellern. She starts off being treated in purely physical terms as a Kelly Brook-style voluptuous figure, but by the end she's shown previously unimagined depths of fragility and determination. Skellern is very good, the single stand out in what is a generally lacklustre movie.
I don't mind mood pieces that focus on brooding atmosphere but there's none of that either. Where SIREN does succeed is in creating a sufficiently exotic locale for the action - this British movie was shot in Tunisia and it looks great. The twentysomething cast don't have much opportunity to shine given the vagueness of their characters, and when the supernatural aspects of the storyline finally show up they're dealt with in the most ordinary way imaginable.
Where I do have to praise the film is in the performance of lead actress Anna Skellern. She starts off being treated in purely physical terms as a Kelly Brook-style voluptuous figure, but by the end she's shown previously unimagined depths of fragility and determination. Skellern is very good, the single stand out in what is a generally lacklustre movie.