"Un jeu d'enfants", translated as "A Child's Game", is a French horror flick which is clearly inspired by Henry James' classic work "The Turn of the Screw", or perhaps more particularly by "The Innocents", the 1961 classic adaptation of that story.
You know the drill: it's a woman pitted against two kids who may or may not be evil. Or is she just crazy? Well, here the psychological aspects of the story are pretty much gone and we know for a fact there's something supernatural going on here.
Perhaps it's the lack of the psychological angle that kind of neutered the story? You see, I saw this movie on TV ages ago back in the 2000s when it was fairly new, and I never forgot some of the images from it, but I couldn't remember much else. Having just rewatched it I have realised that this was because there was nothing much else to remember about the flick, except to file it away in my brain as another adaptation of James's novella.
The movie has occasionally striking imagery that grab the attention, true, but it doesn't have much of an atmosphere and nor does it say a whole lot about these images. Something that I hadn't seen handled in horror a whole lot, interestingly, is dealt with here: the way the mother, suffering from visions that are making her act crazy, instigates sex with a couple of strange men who immediately take her up on her offer, no questions asked.
The fact that so many people will have sex with a married person with a family without a second thought is disturbing and this movie calls that to mind, but doesn't do anything with it, or any of the other lights it shines on human psychology.
The lights go on, get our attention, and then they go off again. The movie is content to get our attention sporadically and let us lose interest the rest of the time.
And the climax, when the real bad guys finally turn up, is striking only for how ridiculous it is, an anti-climax in the only throughline the movie had: shocking imagery.
You know the drill: it's a woman pitted against two kids who may or may not be evil. Or is she just crazy? Well, here the psychological aspects of the story are pretty much gone and we know for a fact there's something supernatural going on here.
Perhaps it's the lack of the psychological angle that kind of neutered the story? You see, I saw this movie on TV ages ago back in the 2000s when it was fairly new, and I never forgot some of the images from it, but I couldn't remember much else. Having just rewatched it I have realised that this was because there was nothing much else to remember about the flick, except to file it away in my brain as another adaptation of James's novella.
The movie has occasionally striking imagery that grab the attention, true, but it doesn't have much of an atmosphere and nor does it say a whole lot about these images. Something that I hadn't seen handled in horror a whole lot, interestingly, is dealt with here: the way the mother, suffering from visions that are making her act crazy, instigates sex with a couple of strange men who immediately take her up on her offer, no questions asked.
The fact that so many people will have sex with a married person with a family without a second thought is disturbing and this movie calls that to mind, but doesn't do anything with it, or any of the other lights it shines on human psychology.
The lights go on, get our attention, and then they go off again. The movie is content to get our attention sporadically and let us lose interest the rest of the time.
And the climax, when the real bad guys finally turn up, is striking only for how ridiculous it is, an anti-climax in the only throughline the movie had: shocking imagery.