If this website operated a star system for films, Dream House would earn one star, but only because it made me (and everyone else at the media screening) laugh out loud. 

This film is lazy, ridiculous and terribly cut in a way that made me wonder if this was a film made by students on a very big casting budget (Daniel Craig, Naomi Watts and Rachel Weisz are the big names in the leading roles).

This film has a twist - I am normally a fan of films that get turned on their head right at the end, making the viewer think again about what they just watched and ask questions. In other words, films that make the viewer use their brain. However, what happens when you reveal the twist about halfway through the film (or what felt like halfway)?

What do you do with the rest of the film subsequently? In this case, it appeared that the makers had about five different options of where they could go with the film after this point, and went with all of them in no particular order.

Hence, you have one scene which leads to another seemingly unconnected scene, which then cuts to Daniel Craig leaving a building which appears to be at the end of his driveway as that is immediately then where we see him. 

The plot initially sounds promising; Will Atenton (Craig) resigns from his city job to move to a rustic house in the country with wife Libby (Weisz) and their two daughters, so that he can concentrate on his writing. However, they soon discover that a brutal murder occurred in the house several years before they moved in, and it has been lying idle since. And a shadowy figure appears to be watching them…but why?

Ah, the whys. Well, up to the point of the aforementioned twist, this film was trotting along nicely, with a nice dose of suspense due to the near absence of background music, and a few triggers to make the audience jump. It was questionable as to whether this was a thriller, or a horror in the making, but things looked promising.

Then the twist happened, and it was swiftly downhill from there on an almost vertical slope. Had the film stretched out the mystery and suspense, and not copped out with a “Screw it, we may as well tell them now what’s going on” approach, this may well have been quite a decent film. Potentially.

However - with films such as The Sixth Sense, where the twist was timed properly, the viewer first says, “What?!” and instantly wants to watch the film again to see where the hints to the twist were. When they watch the film again they say, “Ah yes! How did I not catch that?” However, once this farce concludes, one does not want to go through it again.

Mainly because, if you watch it again, the whole plot makes even less sense than it did first time round and it will annoy you even more than the first viewing managed to. Usually, a review is just that - a review of a film based on one person’s opinion. However, in this case I feel it is my civic duty to save many people the cost of their cinema ticket and say AVOID. You will thank me for it. 1 star.

Christine Brookes