This one's thick with atmosphere. Unfortunately, I could never get over the basic premise that two young boys are left alone at home in a remote country house beside a lake and forest waiting for their divorced mother to come back from the hospital after a bad accident. The overall tone might be that of a dark and disturbing fairy tale, but at least the beginning should have been grounded in a little more realism. Otherwise, there is no real incentive to figure out the underlying psychological motivation of the characters and their interdependence. It feels like the directors had assembled all the creepy movie ingredients they could think of and then run out of their own ideas. The result is a demented shopping list where almost no cliché is left out. The bandage fetishism is a nice touch (a cross of Maria Beatty and Scott McGehee/ David Siegel), so is the art direction, although a bit obvious with the pictures of blurred silhouttes on the walls. The coackroaches, the candles, the children's games, the nursery rhymes, the bow and arrow, the pagan masks, the dark spaces, the dead cat, the bondage and torture, it's all too familiar and stripped of any real emotional attachement or narrative consequence. It's a clinical study of whatever they where trying to dissect, one that gets rather tiring about the half-time mark. The third act should have been the second act leaving room for a truly innovative story twist towards the end. Alas, that twist never comes and this viewer felt slightly frustrated when the credits started to roll.

Unlike many I did not actually pick up the twist in the story, I think it is partly because I didn't really care and partly because I was fighting against sleep. Was I watching the movie in the wrong mood? Probably, will I watch it again? Probably not.Ultimately the movie fails to deliver, it's not suspenseful or scary. And the personalities do not really work. The mother goes from being very dominant to submissive by simply being tied to the bed. Sure, she is overtly dominantly ruling the house, but we get that there is no father in the gorgeous household so it's easy to think that she has taken over that role on herself. But who swifts personality like this, so easily?Isn't the creepy kid story so much of a cliché now that we really shouldn't need to see more movies about it. Certainly a person in trouble such as the mom would be smart enough to talk tons of memories to convince the kid(s) that she is indeed their mother?I recommend skipping this one.

I decided to watch this movie after finding it on a list of horror movies made in the 2010-2017 range. While it was interesting, it was predictable and I personally figured out the surprise twist ending about a third of the way through. The ending was ultimately disappointing but i dont regret having watched it. At about the 45 minute mark it basically becomes torture porn and there were a few moments that were a little unsettling. The story is not very original especially if you have ever seen the movie "The Other"

In a lonesome house in the countryside lives nine-year-old twin brothers who are waiting for their mother. When she comes home, bandaged after cosmetic surgery, nothing is like before. The children start to doubt that this woman is actually their mother. It emerges a struggle for identity and trust.........What could have been a really good psychological thriller, is ruined by camera angles and mise en scene, because as soon a mother gets home, the twist is spoiled by these two crucial elements.This alleviates any potential mystery that surrounds the mother, and the narrative arc between her and her children. If the makers had have been more careful with the script and position of the three main characters, this could have been a lot more tense for the audience, rather than them waiting for the predictable reveal.Other than that, it's pretty solid stuff, the first two acts are creepy enough, with mother acting mysterious her gait and characteristics coming straight from Les Yeux Sans Visage, and the house being shadowed like The Others.The final act goes down the torture porn route, and whilst it's not as visceral as an Eli Roth film, the fact that the act is being committed by a minor, makes the whole sequence highly unsettling.So aside from the fact that the film literally gives the twist away as soon as mother gets home, the film has a good story and some wonderful cinematography, and the final third is pretty heartbreaking.