User Reviews

A young man named Ethan (Thomas Mann) drops out of college to take care of his younger siblings after the death of his parents. He gives most of his spare attention to an invention he hopes will produce wireless electricity. His invention begins to arouse paranormal activity in the house. At first he believes it his father and mother. Or is it an unwanted malevolent entity wandering the house?? Not very scary, but your interest sure builds. The cast also features Robert B. Kennedy, Percy Hymes White, Nicola Peltz and scene stealing young Kate Moyer, as Becca.

Two loving parents, three children, the oldest of which is a very bright college student working on an invention intended to provide electricity through air.

Very early on, the parents die in an auto accident, and the oldest son quits college to work in a hardware store and care for his younger siblings. The scenes of the family adjusting to this new life with out parents are very good. I definitely felt the sadness and frustration of each of them as they attempt to be responsible and do their parts to keep their now-smaller family functioning.

The characters are written well and acted well. No over-the-top wailing, the little girl is refreshingly not portrayed as helpless. The neighbors feel for the siblings and bring sympathy, advice, friendship & meals.

The oldest son continues to work on his invention in the garage and it is at this point the supernatural shenanigans begin. Unwittingly, he keeps his machine on and it opens/weakens the door between living and dead.

At first, it's just the little girl who experiences their parents talking to her, giving her advice to give to her brothers. Helpful Mom-Ghost changes their calendar each day for them. Eventually they are all convinced their parents are really communicating with them and that they need to keep working on the invention.

It's then that the film takes a turn. The range of the invention, much like wi-fi, extends to other houses. Neighborhood dogs start barking at things only they can sense, and their widower neighbor starts seeing his dead wife. Oddly, the children's' parents are no longer around. They've been replaced by the ghost of a child murderer who lived in their house previously, and, unlike their parents' ghosts, this one can grab them, open doors, and I guess maybe kill them.

It's just downhill from here. The neighbor steals the invention so he can get his wife back, two of the kids are trapped in an underground tunnel, the oldest kid's girlfriend has to rescue them. Lots of running around, fighting, screaming. It's all just too incongruent with the rest of the film.

At what point did the parent ghosts just go away? Why is any one ghost stronger than any other? Is it even ghosts or is it all demons? And if it's all demons, why were they being helpful and nice at all? Why not just BAM! Door is open, let's wreck havoc on humans?

Lots of clichés too. The house haunted by a bad guy who lived there and comes back to kill some more. The Scary Basement (Just once, I'd love to see a horror film in which the basement is the place where the pool table and cheesy home bar is.) The ghosts or demons go from barely being able to make their presence known to full on manifesting corporeal hands in like a day. And last, but not least, the cliché of "We are now having a happy ending scene because we destroyed the invention, thus closing the spirit realm, but one naughty demon has stayed behind to move the little girl's doll around, just in case this movie is popular enough for a sequel".

This movie was first two thirds really good with lots of promise, and last third was totally same-old, same-old.

Before I really get into this movie, let me say that the acting was sufficient. However, the director allowed the movie to plod inexorably long for most of it without any true scares whatsoever, and the few that were present fizzled out predictably. It's not until about 17 minutes left in this movie that anything significant starts to happen (a disappearing/reappearing toolbox is not my idea of horror). Mind you, Netflix shows a TV-MA rating and I saw no evidence that it's other than a Brady Bunch PG-13 movie, IF THAT. I am a huge horror fan, not just the top-of-the-line flicks but also the Bs and some Cs - for example, last night I watched the Argentinian sub-titled The Cannibal Club on TubiTV that is rated R, essentially TV-MA, but which delivered some shocking horror scenes completely alien to this movie. And they spread them sparsely throughout the movie which makes it much more effective.

Now, if you still want to watch this movie, stop reading now. SPOILERS!!! NO ONE dies or is even injured in this TV-MA 'horror' movie - how is that possible??? And the few scenes they deign to show the viewer where someone is in peril leaves no doubt they'll be rescued. Not a single person in the movie was harmed to the extent that they even needed a Band-Aid. Someone mentioned there's a beautiful girl in it - yes there is but she has the brains of a squirrel. She supposedly was living with the young genius who co-designed the machine and had the same knowledge, and apparently loved him, but when he met with her to tell her the machine was bringing his parents' spirits back into the house she blew him off - this, after 3 months of waiting for him to get over grieving for his parents' sudden death. Who does that? Why wouldn't she at least go over to the house and make him prove it? And the repetitiveness of the days going by - OMG, like Groundhog Day. They get up in the morning and someone has reset this manual calendar to the current day, over and over again.

Everyone who is a horror fan KNOWS that if you awaken spirits that you think are your loved ones it almost always turns out they're evil - see Poltergeist and Pet Semetary for examples - they're just masquerading. Oh, yeah, this young genius also works as a retail cashier at some kind of electronics store yet we're supposed to believe he's working on a machine that will create wireless electricity to power your smartphone as you walk in the door and power machines without cords that will revolutionize the world? I'm surprised he wasn't slinging double mochas at a Starbucks! He couldn't get a paid internship with a major physics thinktank???

Some have mentioned a twist - please, you could see it coming 20 minutes earlier. A next-door neighbor who has seen what he thinks is his dead wife confronts the young genius and finds out that the machine is causing it, so of course later he steals it to bring her back and that's when the last 17 minutes finally awakens the movie from a coma to a semi-coma. And everything ends fine, and the family moves out only for us to see in the final scene the head of a doll in a box that the little girl had left behind for Alice, a spirit that she had befriended. Original, right? As original as a '?' at the end of a 1950s B sci-fi. No explanation given as to how that was possible because only the machine's amplified signal could give the spirits enough power to project themselves into the real world and the young genius had smashed it to pieces during the last 8 or so minutes of the movie.

Those who think this movie is really good have no experience with really good horror movies and I feel sorry for them because they must have been watching total dreck to think this was good.

HOW does this so high in rating? In my opinion, the high reviews seems bought. Because the scare level is 1,5. The ghostly stuff (added effects) is a 0. The music is a 7. The acting is a 3. I just don't understand.

The plot is very unbelievable. 10 min in to the movie, a tragic accident happens. With 0 character development, I feel sorry for no one. It felt like "Hmm, we need something to happen in the movie so we can continue it."

1 adult, 1 teen and 1 kid believes that mommy and daddy are there in presence. The twist at the end with the neighbor seems sooo rushed.