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Demi Moore and Hans Matheson |
Demi's lukewarm chiller
Half Light
Directed by Craig Rosenberg
Certificate 15
DEMI Moore’s character in this supposedly spooky ghost film has writer’s block. Viewers may come to the conclusion that Moore herself seems to have a form of actor’s block.
Her hamming it up amongst the swirling mist in this supernatural tale underlines her fall from a position as one of Hollywood’s blockbuster actresses.
Moore is Rachel Carson, a mystery author facing a 100-foot high brick wall of a temporal lobe problem. She just can’t seem to get words on paper anymore, and for an award-winning blockbuster writer, that’s not good news. It doesn’t help that her five-year-old son has drowned and her marriage to Brian (Henry Cusick) is on the rocks. She decides to move from Primrose Hill to Scotland in the hope the new environment will provide a quiet feeling of contemplation.
But she finds little to settle her mind. Instead she discovers a place that is remarkably like something from one of the pages of her best-selling books. In fact, it so clichéd, the film is almost ruined by the number of unoriginal facets of the place it is set.
She becomes chummy with a dishy young man called Angus McCulloch (Hans Matheson) and embarks on a steamy fling.
But all is not what it seems with her bolt-hole, and those who live there: the lighthouse is haunted, there is an old crone who can see into the future, and messages from the ‘other side’ start telling poor Rachel her life is in danger.
Director Craig Rosenberg relies on shadowy camera work and a heavy musical accompaniment of cellos and violins that is supposedly playing homage to the gothic chillers of the past, but it is laid on so thick it is not easy to work out what is meant to be scary and what is not.
However the setting is superb. The claustrophobia of being miles and miles from anywhere gives an ample supply of spine chilling moments. |
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