Ellie, supposedly about 25 years old, is played by a woman easily in her 50s. There is a problem at the outset. The director had some good ideas, and hired a good photographer, but overall the story is a failure--a weirdo slasher ghost story failure. Skip this one.

This is a confusing mess by design. Ellie Rose's mom (Kika Mirylees) changed when she was a child. She has a sister Chloe (Alexandra Moen) who apparently mom liked best. Ellie (Lucy Benjamin) has flashbacks to her husband Frank (Bill Ward) apparently slapping her and causing a miscarriage, although the flashbacks hide faces. Then there was the night her and Chloe go to visit mom and she finds blood everywhere, and if you missed that flashback, wait as it is repeated as it takes up half the film.As I watched the film I was confused as to what was flashback, what was real and what was the present, and what was a dream. In the end things did come together and the imagery made sense. I can even say it was smartly done for what they wanted to do. However the fact is I struggled through the film and wasn't entertained seeing the same faceless scenes repeated over and over. Nice era recreation. Did they have underground power lines to remote areas?Guide: F-bomb. No sex or nudity.

Type-casting can be unforgiving. Lucy Benjamin, well known for years in cockney soap 'EastEnders', plays the title character here, and it took me a while to get used to her with an American accent. This is short-sighted of me because, to my UK ears, she is very convincing as Rose, returning to her remote family cabin after suffering an abusive marriage.However impressive she is, I'm not quite as in love with her as Director Tristan Versluis seems to be; much time is spent with her alone living day to day, sleeping, eating, day-dreaming and running from spectral images, presumably from her past.Whilst his lingering execution conveys very well the isolated monotony of her existence amidst these beautiful but unforgiving surroundings, it slowly dawns on me that nothing at all seems to be happening. I love slow-burning stories, but apart from her remembering her abusive past, there is nothing going on.Joining Benjamin are other UK actors with American accents – fellow soap actor Bill Ward as Frank and Alexander Moen as Chloe. Moments are repeated, an occasional well-executed shock-effect occurs, but these moments are in isolation and don't appear to lead to anything. It's as if every scene has been thrown into a hat and picked out at random and made into a film.The impressive finale threatens to almost make sense of it all, and it becomes apparent that the twist simply isn't hugely emotive because apart from Rose, all the characters are so sketchily written. This is a shame because visually, everything is great. Ultimately 'The Haunting of Ellie Rose', also known as 'Not Alone' is rather like a David Lynch film, only not terribly well made. It emerges as a muddle, despite the best efforts of the cast.

As far as I can tell from my extensive research (10 minutes on IMDb), this is the first movie in which Lucy Benjamin has appeared. She is more well known in the UK for her role as Lisa Fowler in the soap opera Eastenders ('oy mate, you been shafting my sister, innit?' etc.). She has also acted in other British TV soaps, sitcoms and series. She is a reasonably good actress, so I don't think the blame can be laid on her for this stonker of a movie. Instead, I think we have to point a finger (or two) at director/writer Tristan Versluis. He has also directed a handful of other movies, but his main involvement in movies and TV series has been for make-up, including top-rating shows like Game of Thrones. Anyways, Not Alone (a.k.a. 'The Haunting of Ellie Rose') is badly written and poorly directed. It is predictable and clichéd, and, apart (possibly) from the main role, seriously lacks character development - as we all know, if you can't empathize with any of the main characters, a movie will not hold your attention or stir your emotions (for instance, horror films are supposed to be scary...). On the positive side, some of the photography and filming is very good quality, but the low budget is clearly reflected in the limited locations, poor costuming, limited soundtrack, and dodgy 'special effects'. Versluis does well in the make-up department (where his experience lies) - Ellie Rose's broken wrist is gruesomely real, as are the dead bodies sitting around the kitchen table. But somewhere around the start of the third and final stage of this movie, the viewer begins to realize that there are no surprising twists in store, and that they have just wasted 80 minutes of their life. Let's hope Lucy Benjamin gets offered work in better movies, and that Versluis' writing and directing improves - because both show promise and could have done better. So, unless, as some of us do, you have an inexplicable attraction to B-movies, I advise you to skip this movie and look for a better horror film - about one in 10 of 2015's horror films were watchable, which is a fairly good rate.