There aren't too many movies that I like that start at the end. This one isn't likely to make me a convert. It starts with a man (Bill Pullman) jumping to his death from a hotel balcony. At least, I think it was a hotel. It may have been an apartment. I really couldn't tell.
And that was the second part of the problem. I was completely and utterly lost all the way through this movie. I followed the plot well enough, but I spent much of the time trying to figure out what was happening around the plot. That's no fun.
What I can tell you is that Karen (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is some sort of exchange student. At least, she is an American. Suddenly, due to the death of a nurse or housekeeper or something, an opening becomes available for her, and so she jumps at the chance. But the house where she will be working is possessed by the spirit or someone who was killed. Apparently an ancient proverb says that someone killed with great emotion will remain there, and that's what happened.
And that pretty much wraps it up. The rest of the movie is spent jumping back and forth between the present and various places in the past, but for the life of me, I can't tell you where. It seems that a girl who may or may not have been a teenager (roughly) was killed. Then she was stuffed in the attic area. Her little brother wasn't killed, I don't think, but he died in the house as well, and so he just sort of wanders around the house scaring people when his sister's spirit doesn't.
Peter (that's Bill Pullman's character) went to the house because he was being stalked by the girl who was dead, or at least he thought that he was, looks around because he sees the boy (or perhaps the spirit of the boy, I'm not sure on that). He finds the body of the girl in the attic. How do I know this? Because Karen sees it all in a vision when she goes to find her boyfriend, who went to the house looking for her. Why she doesn't see him while he is dying I don't know. That's just not very clear. I wish I had a better idea of what happened, but I just couldn't get it.
In the end, it seems that Peter killed himself because he couldn't deal with seeing the dead girl - or perhaps he killed himself because he wasn't being stalked, but he really had something going on with the woman and couldn't handle it. Again, I'm not clear. Karen, meanwhile, wants to get rid of the evil, so she tries to burn down the house. Her boyfriend doesn't seem to make it, and there is a setup for a sequel, which was recently in theaters. I hope it's clearer than this one.
Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, disturbing images/terror/violence, and some sensuality.
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