The Uninvited is a US remake of a Korean horror film A Tale of Two Sisters, which I’m sure plenty of people saw back when it came out in 2009, but not so many that the film is still spoken about these days. Be warned if you’ve not seen the film before that I will discuss some plot elements that could spoil the film for you, but will give a major spoilers warning when we reach that point.
The story focuses on Anna, a teenage girl played by Emily Browning. She starts the film in care after the trauma of a fire that took her mother’s life. She’s struggling with the events and frequently having bad dreams. She returns home with her father and is displayed to learn that her father is now living with Rachel, who was a care giver working for the family whilst their mother was sick.
Also at the home is Anna’s sister Alex, and neither of the two sisters like the new woman in their father’s life. The plot then shows the many ways in which the sisters and Anna in particular don’t get along with Rachel, and after literally just the opening scene where Rachel tries to be friendly with Anna and fails, Rachel doesn’t seem to show any genuine concern for the sisters.
As the plot goes on we get more reasons to be suspicious of Rachel and there is a little bit of a mystery to be uncovered as to what really happened surrounding the fire that killed their mother.
It’s not a bad film, but it doesn’t feel like quite enough happens for this to be a truly great film. Anna keeps seeing visions of ghosts or zombies and this is a sign of her troubled mind. Refreshingly her sister believes her that she is on to something and that these visions aren’t a sign that she’s crazy. That plot idea has been done to death a million times before. The truth of what’s been going on isn’t much better however.
OK MAJOR SPOILER WRANING
So, towards the end of the film Rachel stops playing nice at all with the sisters and attempts to inject Anna with some kind of sedative. Anna escapes but sees that Alex has also been attacked. Anna manages to get away and goes to the authorities who bafflingly help hold Anna down whilst Rachel does sedate her and takes her home. You can only really conclude from this that the cop is in on whatever scheme Rachel has going on to marry Anna and Alex’s dad…but why would he do this?
There is no reason, and that’s because it’s not what is going on here. We see that Alex has recovered from being attacked by Rachel and the next thing we know is that Alex has attacked Rachel with a knife, killed her and thrown her in a dumpster. The dad turns up to learn this and Anna defends that Alex didn’t have a choice but to kill Rachel. And then….wait for it…the dad reveals that Alex had also died in the same fire that killed the mum which as it turns out was Anna’s fault.
Boom, the film then warrants a second watch to see how Alex could have been in all the scenes she was in and not actually be there if she was in Anna’s mind. Turns out they did an OK job at this, as the biggest misdirection scene is after Alex complains to Anna that Anna didn’t respond to letters she sent her whilst Anna was in hospital and they have the realisation that the dad mustn’t have sent them. I’ll be honest this was an alarm bell when I first saw it as I wondered why Alex would have always had the dad take the letters in, and never called or visited herself.
The swerve here is that Alex seemingly speaks to the dad alone, but Anna is observing through a window and you’ll notice on a second watch that the dad doesn’t respond or acknowledge Alex at all. Nicely plays, if other than that the Sixth Sense did this famously and this is the exact same swerve. Sorry, spoiler for the Sixth Sense, but I’ll avoid similar spoilers on my next point.
There’s also been loads of films where the hero turns out to be the villain but doesn’t realise due to a mental break, and whilst I won’t reveal which films do this, there are a bunch from this era of films that do it.
The performances are also decent and there is some tension, but truthfully I think this film would have been much more effective if it hadn’t had any of the ghosts and zombie vision stuff as that is all completely red herring. There is nothing at all supernatural to the plot and it’s all just in Anna’s head. Clearly they just added some ghosts and ghouls just to add more jump scares to what was more of a thriller. The funny thing about the twist is that I predicted that the sister would be the bad guy, but got wrong that the sister was only the bad guy by being a figment of Anna’s imagination.
Certainly this film is worth a watch, and you can breeze through it’s short run time for a fun evening where you watch multiple films. Is it a great film? No, but it doesn’t really do anything to offend either.
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