This British dark fantasy film was based on Catherine Storr's Marianne Dreams, which it vaguely resembles. The cast includes Ben Cross (Chariots of Fire) and Gemma Jones (Sense and Sensibility, Bridget Jones' Diary), but the lead role is played by little-known Charlotte Burke, in her one and only big screen appearance.Burke stars as Anna Madden, a troubled girl whose alcoholic, emotionally distant father works overseas. Her mother (an awkward, wooden-faced Glenne Headly) with whom she shares a spiteful love/hate relationship, is a business professional of some description, and has little time for Anna's angst.Burke was actually 14 years old at the time Paperhouse was made, but her small face, short stature, and immature body allowed her to pass for the 11 year old Anna. Incredibly, we still get a bath scene in which she is briefly shown topless.Anna's mother smokes like a chimney, casually flicking ash and half- finished cigarettes out the window of her Saab while exchanging insults with her daughter and agonising over her frayed relationship with her husband. At one point she slaps Anna across the face, and Anna barely reacts. This is a family in which domestic violence is part of everyday life.In an unrelated scene, Anna chats with her slutty school friend Karen (a frisky Sarah Newbold, who eventually found her way back to cinema in 2004 as assistant supervising producer for Juliette Soubrier's La Dernière Visite) while they both try on makeup and discuss the merits of snogging (Karen boasts that she's had four different boys in one night).Having established that Anna is an irritating little bitch, the movie takes a U-turn and asks us to sympathise as her life is disrupted by supernatural shenanigans. She enters a dream world where she meets Marc (a languid Elliott Spiers, who looks like someone who's about to die in the next 6 years, which he actually did) and discovers that her actions in the real world affect events in his.Marc and Anna hit it off surprisingly well for two kids who aren't very likable (I kept hoping that Anna would push Marc out the window, and even offered to do it for her at one point) and together they try to solve the mystery of their curiously intertwined existential dilemma. Resolution is possible, but it must come at a terrible price. Who will pay: Anna, or Marc? (By this time I was hoping it would be Marc, because he's a boring little scrote whereas Anna is quite cute once you get past her bitchiness and 1980s hair).The movie works on a number of levels: psychological, philosophical, and societal. The overarching theme is of course the onset of puberty, and the trauma this inflicts on Anna's damaged psyche. A secondary motif is Marc's helplessness, counterbalanced by a disturbingly Oedipal theme in the third act, where Anna's father makes a surprise entrance in a manner not conducive to filial piety.Paperhouse is far from perfect, but the remastered 1080p print corrects the inconsistent 'dark wash' palette of the original, boosting saturation levels to decent values and rebalancing the skin tones. Director Bernard Rose was a little too fond of the so-called 'scratch cut' technique (which initially gives the impression that you're watching one of those dreadful Scott Shrosbree films) but it somehow works better than expected.I rate Paperhouse at 24.97 on the Haglee Scale, which works out as a perky 7.5 on IMDb.

Young Anna (Charlotte Burke) leads a lonely life: her mother (Glenne Headly) works all day and her father (Ben Cross) is working abroad; Anna doesn't get along at school, starting fights with classmates and teachers. To make matters worse, she starts having dizzy spells on her birthday, and in dreams she travels to a house she has control over through her drawings.This is the premise of Paperhouse, a movie by Bernard Rose, based on a novel by Catherine Storr, and which belongs to that persistent subgenre of movies about troubled children who mix their fantasy worlds with their real frustrations and problems; in recent years it has given us Where The Wild Things Are and Pan's Labyrinth and has been going on since Victor Fleming decided Dorothy didn't actually visit Oz but dreamed it up instead.Remarkably Paperhouse takes less inspiration from The Wizard of Oz and more from Roman Polanski's Repulsion, like in the feeling of loneliness, or using the father figure as a source of fear there's a tense sequence in which Anna's father comes into her dream to kill her with a hammer. The movie, however, brings nothing new to this fantasy subgenre.The movie has some storytelling problems. In one of the subplots Anna learns from her nurse the story of Marc (Elliott Spiers), a boy who can't walk and is dying. Anna, without knowing his look or anything about him, promptly imagines him and several details of his past in her dreams that turn out to be real. How she does that is never explained and the movie never decides whether it's trying to be a supernatural thriller or just the wild imagination of a sickly child. In fact this movie suffers from trying to be too many things at the same time: a horror movie, a love story, a family drama – so that it always falls short of successfully being anything at all.In spite of that there's a good emotional story somewhere in the movie, as Anna believes that through her drawings she can change Marc's fate. Everything that she draws happens in the dreams, so she draws Marc a pair of new legs, only to see them turning to dust. The moral is very simple: you can't change reality to your whim; growing up is accepting things as painfully as they are.Visually the movie is quite good – it's always fun to see how Anna's drawings change her fantasy world; at first she just sees it as a house surrounded by Stonehenge-like rocks in a deserted landscape, but then she draws the trees, the interior rooms, stairs and objects to fill the house with. Considering the movie clearly didn't have many resources to dispose of, the crew did a fine job making the house familiar but also otherworldly.Glenne Headly and the under-appreciated Ben Cross give good performances here, but the movie belongs to Elliott Spiers and Charlotte Burke, who strangely never made a movie again. People tend to despise child actors, but the two practically carry the movie with their chemistry and genuine feeling.A note must go to the music by Hans Zimmer. His career was just starting when he composed the score for Paperhouse and the style is similar to Rain Man and Black Rain, two of my favourite scores by him. People who only know Zimmer from his loud, synth-heavy modern style (which I also love) would be surprised to see the elegant and melancholy music he composed here.All in all, Paperhouse should leave anyone looking for a good time satisfied. The movie has a fast pace and ends before the viewer knows it, leaving him marvelled with occasional flashes of visual creativity, solid performance and a heartbreaking finale.

*SPOILERS** Probably everywhere!... Quirky little film but for once I was grateful for other reviews which helpfully teased out niggling questions raised. One could take it at face value as a psychologic/horror thriller or elect to pick it apart by analysing each scene - but I don't think I'll bother. Thank goodness for DVDs where you can re-run scenes to catch action or dialogue you missed - which at least managed to defer my opinion that this one had totally sunk in the mire. It did have some redeeming features. Both children carried the film, however played by much older actors than the children they were meant to portray. The characters of the 2 adults and their performances were weak as dishwater. I didn't even recognise it was Ben Cross until halfway into the film! Gemma Jones, bless 'er, redeemed it by being normal and as always was the most professional. The boy Elliot and the female lead Charlotte Burke actually did a good job, but as 'Anna' she became intensely irritating after a while. Burke's general deadpan expression did nothing to make her sympathetic and was especially grating when she was continually rude and demanding to the grown-ups who took the unexpected treatment meekly. What was this child's true angst - Daddy simply being away? Did I miss some explanation of why? Glenne Headley as the mother was completely miscast and you can see when they are having soup in her room that her voice is dubbed (although apparently it is by the same actress having to disguise a North American accent). While you could empathise somewhat with the fruition of Anna's drawings in her feverish dreams, when awake she didn't seem to think the results of her scribblings were in any way odd. She seemed too selfish to ultimately care about the boy in the dream house. What on earth was the greenish gloop being dispensed from a machine in the hallway of the paperhouse? Ice cream? The interior of the flat (representing a London council or housing association block no doubt- from the rickety old lift and the mansion finish outside) seemed far too modern and "chi chi". And what was with the weird wall mounted "radio" in the house on the hill - looked a bit too techno even for Anna to draw? The later snogging episode was totally inappropriate and unnecessary.***GOOFS*** Blink and you miss it! Once again we have X-rays in a hospital hanging on a lighted viewing box behind the nurse's head displayed the WRONG WAY ROUND. No doctor or health professional would look at them that way but it happens in film after film with monotonous regularity, almost too often for logical statistical probability. 'Though credits frequently list medical 'advisors' not one of them ever seems to catch these glaringly obvious errors! NB: Normally chest Xrays are viewed the same way as if you were facing the subject - ie: the heart shadow on the (seeming) RT hand side of the viewed piece of film. Plus, here we are in a Children's ward yet the images shown are of Adult chests which in itself is ridiculous. There is also a single view of an adult forearm hanging on another viewbox with no sign of the 2ndary image(usually a lateral view) anywhere. Both of the chest X- rays are clearly out of some X-ray department's box of embarrassing rejects. Each one is useless diagnostically as the lung bases of the left side of the chest are 'cut off' (in Radiology parlance) and the second image is 'underpenetrated'. Light boxes equally should not stay on all the time due to glare and heat.

Coming from the same director who'd done and "Immortal Beloved", I'm not surprised it's a good film. Ironically, "Papierhaus" is a movie I'd never heard of until now, yet it must be one of the best movies of the late 80s - partly because that is hands down the worst movie period in recent decades. (Not talking about Iranian or Swedish "cinema" here...) The acting is not brilliant, but merely solid - unlike what some people here claim (they must have dreamt this "wondrous acting", much like Anna). The story is an interesting fantasy that doesn't end in a clever way that ties all the loose ends together neatly. These unanswered questions are probably left there on purpose, leaving it up to the individual's interpretation, and there's nothing wrong with that with a theme such as this. "Pepperhaus" is a somewhat unusual mix of kids' film and horror, with effective use of sounds and music. I like the fact that the central character is not your typical movie-cliché ultra-shy-but-secretly-brilliant social-outcast girl, but a regular, normal kid; very refreshing. I am sick and tired of writers projecting their own misfit-like childhoods into their books and onto the screens, as if anyone cares anymore to watch or read about yet another miserly, lonely childhood, as if that's all there is or as if that kind of character background holds a monopoly on good potential. The scene with Anna and the boy "snogging" (for quite a stretch) was a bit much - evoking feelings of both vague disgust and amusement - considering that she was supposed to be only 11, but predictably it turned out that Burke was 13 or 14 when this was filmed. I have no idea why they didn't upgrade the character's age or get a younger actress. It was quite obvious that Burke isn't that young. Why directors always cast kids older than what they play, hence dilute the realism, I'll never know.