Dream House (2011)

I'm going to come right out and say it: There are spoilers a-plenty in this review.


Now that that's out of the way, let me assure that it doesn't matter. "Dream House" is so painfully obvious and transparent that spoilers don't really matter. You know what's going on in this movie. So take my advice and read on, because to answer your question: "No, you really don't care if it's ruined for you."


I will come right out and say that I was not expecting much to this movie, and I'll tell you why: Daniel Craig. I am not a fan. It's not so much his acting, although I do find him to be generally stuffy, dull and emotionless, it's more his face. I call him "Duck Face." Just watch him and you'll see it. He's eternally doing the Duck Face! Although I may have found a better comparison more apt to his acting method...

If Bond ever went to Easter Island, he could become INVISIBLE.

I kid, I kid. I will be the first to admit that Daniel Craig actually surprised me in "Dream House." He was good! "Dream House" had him act like a human being so much that it weirded me out. I wasn't used to actually LIKING a Daniel Craig performance but I have to give credit where credit is due. I had never seen him play a role where he was a loving, caring father who actually laughed and smiled before. Normally he's a blank slate that's pretty hard to read. I usually can't tell if he's bored, angry or sad but in this film, he actually has a range of emotions and really does a great job with making you like his character.


The two little girls in were also quite good, as far as child actors go. They weren't annoying, at least. But before I go off praising the cast so much you think that I'm giving "Dream House" a pass, rest assured that it was not very good.

The basic idea is that Daniel Craig is an author who believes his wife and two young daughters are being stalked by someone. Weird stuff keeps happening and everyone in the neighborhood he just moved into is treating him really weird. He then finds out the house he lives in was the scene of a triple homicide where the husband killed his wife and two young daughters 5 years ago. The man has recently been released from the asylum back into society, so Daniel Craig begins investigating into finding this man and stopping him, but nobody will help him or believe him, and in fact, treats him like an annoying freak.


Can you see where this is going? Yeah, he's the patient recently released from the asylum and he's constructed an alternate personality to help him deal with his family's death. Not hard to figure out.

There's not too much to "Dream House." If you've seen the trailer, which I wouldn't recommend, you're basically already 70% of the way through the movie. Any kind of twist that the movie was attempting to pull is so transparent that it really is hard to tell if the movie was even trying to pull it. Are we supposed to know he was in an insane asylum before putting the disc in the player? If you were to have watched the trailer, evidently yes, because they flat out tell you that he had been at about the 45 second mark. You know what, screw that. Read the back of the case. You'll figure it out if you've got 2 brain cells firing before even watching the thing. So where is the twist? And for that matter, where is the suspense?


I had a really hard time determining what exactly the goal of the film was. If it was supposed to be a twist-filled suspense film, it fails catastrophically because of not only the fact that the trailer and description on the back of the case ruin it, but because the story by itself is just so stock that it's impossible to not call it immediately. There is no way a fully functional adult human being, even having not seen the trailer or read the box could watch more than 5 minutes of this film and not call that he was the one imprisoned in the asylum for the accused murder of his family, and that they are either ghosts or just in his head. Maybe I just watch WAY too many damn movies, but come on. It's as subtle as the Hindenburg going up.


Now, on the other hand, perhaps that's not the point of "Dream House." Perhaps the point is not to be a twisty-turny thriller of Shyamalan proportions, but an inward gazing character study. And there may be something to that. Daniel Craig's character is reasonably fleshed-out and likeable, and it did produce enough of a desire to figure out exactly what this guy's deal was. Much of the movie takes place with us seeing through his eyes, since his family isn't actually there, so we are put in his driver's seat, so to speak. In that regard it would imply that this is a movie that is suppose to transplant us into this character's head, and have us discover what it is that makes him tick.


That, unfortunately, turns out to probably be the film's ultimate downfall. While it probably could have made an OK movie had it focused more on character, its problem is that it didn't go all the way down that road. Instead it had to be infused along the way with the predictable PG-13 pseudo-thriller genre in order to get the little teenagers in the theater because the movie was marketed to look all spooky. This movie didn't need more of crap like "The Unborn" or the remake of "One Missed Call." This movie needed some "Jacob's Ladder" to make it really pop. And I tell you, even though "Jacob's Ladder" isn't a horror movie, it's FAR scarier than anything these predictable snooze-fests produce.


See, the problem with infusing it with these kinds of movies means that there has to be a clear cut villain, solution, and ending. I didn't think that it would be possible to have a villain in a movie with a story like this but they manage to produce not one but two of them! How can you justify having a villain let alone TWO when the biggest obstacle the main character faces is his own brain? How can you justify having a solution to that problem? I didn't know mental illness could be so easily fixed, but apparently the cure for a complete psychotic breakdown is simply getting vengeance on someone who wronged you in the past.

And when he does get vengeance...oh is it stupid. So very, very stupid.

You know, in most GOOD movies, there's no cure for something like that. You know why? Because it's far more terrifying. You can't fix your own derangement like that, especially if it's something so severe as seeing your dead family and talking to them without even knowing they're dead. You know how most mental derangement ends up being solved in good movies? With a drill to the forehead or a pillow to face. Watch "π." Watch "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest." Watch "A Beautiful Mind." Hell, watch "Sucker Punch." Each one of these films deals with mental illness and the horrors of it, along with the consequences of having to deal with it, and each one of them in a far, far better way than "Dream House."


There is one final thing I need to bring up, however, because it doesn't happen often with me. This movie did accomplish something. It offended me. I found myself VERY upset at a scene that involves the mother panicking over her daughters because of their gunshots wounds they received when they were killed. Now, they are all ghosts or figments of his imagination at this point, but to see those poor little girls standing there with bullet wounds staining their pajamas red, struggling to understand what was happening in their fever-like state was something that really pissed me off, and I don't even have kids. I can only imagine how mad I would be if I did.


Now I can tolerate a lot of DARK stuff, but that scene is done in such bad taste and is so exploitative of our feelings that I was offended. The movie didn't have enough foundations to fall back on that it was forced to pull out two little dead girls being paraded in front of us as their mother cries in an attempt to understand, all in an effort to draw out some emotion from this stock piece of crap movie. I found myself saying aloud "Oh, boo this movie! Boo!" and I would have proudly stood up and done so had I seen it in a theater. And loudly, too.


THE BOTTOM LINE - A stock piece of wanna-be thriller that could have had potential had it been more intelligent. Notable only for the fact that it offended me with its blatant manipulative use of the little girls. Skip it. Especially if you have daughters! >:[