Bryan Bertino's horror conforms with deadly intensity to the old-school rules of the genre: every curtain drawn back must reveal a scary face, empty swings must move sinisterly in the breeze.
Star rating **
Dir: Bryan Bertino
With: Liv Tyler, Scott Speedman
Bryan Bertino's horror conforms with deadly intensity to the old-school rules of the genre: every curtain drawn back must reveal a scary face, empty swings must move sinisterly in the breeze. Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman are James and Kristen, a picture-perfect young couple who arrive home after a bad evening out, not knowing the night is about to get a lot worse when strangers call. Bertino makes a decent fist of building tension in the film's first third, with Tyler impressively wide-eyed with terror as things go crash, bang, wallop in the night. The suspense is there, but like the juice in Kristen's pesky mobile phone, it doesn't last long. The moral of all such stories: get a dog.
