Review of House at the End of the Street (2012) by Viniciusbrito — 12 Oct 2018

After a, apparently, tough divorce mother and daughter move to another city for restart and forget problems that were present in their regular lives before. The movie into a neighborhood that have one macabre event, a girl killed her parents with a hammer and have never being seen again until that very momment, a boy that, as they said, wich is the brother of the girl, he lived away in another city with his aunt, go back to that city and start living in the same house as the parents got killed, wich make a lot of people in the town despise and avoid him. Directed by Mark Tonderai. Written by David Loucka and Jonathan Mostow.

The biggest problem with the story of this movie and the movie overall, is that it seems that it doesn't always know what it wants to be, it feels like the movie was meant to be an horror in his cern, but some times it just become a romance scholar movie, it does let you forget what you were watching before, sometimes it is a family relation thing, it simply keeps changing the style of the movie, for me this was a big flaw, it isn't a problem when the movie try to apply different subjects to have more themes approached, the problem is when it change completely the ambience and style of the movie to the point that it seems that it is another movie. Removing this points, the story is actually pretty interesting, I got engaged in what was happening and even curious about somethings that we had going on in that little town, it does have some plot twists, some you can see it coming, some you don't, it does offered you a bunch of points of view of the same story, and only by the end you got to know the true one, with a twist that I really didn't saw it coming. The movie have some events that felt so unrealistic in a way that bothered me for real, like, if there is someone that have been through a trauma, I don't see why almost everybody of a town would despise this person in such a extreme way, for me it was just ridiculous and completely out of the old and good verisimilitude. It also had some other situations that didn't felt right, like someone reaching a place running almost at the same time of someone in a car. When the movie jumps into a true horror, together with the revelations and stuff, it does got considerable better, I can't say that it didn't knew how to create an ambience of horror, it did and worked for me, I could get tense in some moments and it was pretty good, nothing original or innovative, but definely good. In some moments the charactres make a few choices that I considered really dumb or a bit to much, that also got me a little off the movie. The movie contains a bunch of jumpscares, and I gotta say that the first one may works, but all after that one, don't really. Some times the movie got to repetitive, and could be boring.

In this movie we have Jennifer Lawrence, she did a good job, could pass some emotions pretty well mainly when it was about romatic moments, I could believe that she liked the boy, in surprise and horror moments I think she was just ok, she could have work a little better in her expressions. Max Thieriot was good, I think he had a a good performance here, he first convinced me a bit of something and then again of the other thing, wich I can't talk much about it because it is a full spoiler, I think it was good to make he didn't change much in voice or behavior, because that is pretty much how that is. Elisabeth Shue was good, she could make me believe that she was really concnerned in every moments, even that her characters pissed me off some times, she did a good job.

The camera moviment in horror movies normally it is very important, it makes you not knowing what is happening around the place, or even makes you know something that not even the character does, and it helps in give you axiety during the scene, in this movie it does contain this aspect, but just a little bit, the cameras work here, they aren't excpetional, but definely functional. The cinematography overall, for me worked, even that the movie didn't explored it very much, the thing that having a forest that you can't see much beyond it, it is already a bit scared, having a camera in there watching the character also worked, sometimes it uses some positioning that for me were very sucessfull into the goal. There is one specific moment in a party, that the camera do a very strange and no sense thing, that comes back to that thing that I said about the movie not knowing what it wants to be.