begob
A rich widow meets a dark stranger on the beach after she hears her name being called by her late husband, and is pulled into a con-trick. But who's being conned? This starts out as an over-dialogued ghostly melodrama, but develops okay into a mystery-thriller and delivers a solid twist. So it's worth bearing with, but the initial pace really plods along and the lighting and visual clichés are just too dull. I saw a bad youtube copy, so don't want to be too harsh. Some of the effects are interesting if not convincing, and the music is the usual constant romantic background manipulation.The acting is fine, but the story doesn't inspire, and although there are noir touches it's not a patch on Chandler.Overall, won't be watching again.
Rainey Dawn
Do not let the name of this film scare you off from watching it because the name of the film does not do this movie justice at all. This is a great film noir thriller with Gothic overtones.This is a ghost story and one cannot speak of this film without giving it away. This is a movie you will just have to see to appreciate. I can say this film does have a couple of surprising plot twists for the first time viewer that fans of mystery-thrillers can enjoy.I recommend this movie to anyone that loves a good ghost story, horror films, mysteries and thrillers. This movie is really worth watching.8.5/10
arfdawg-1
Despite the good reviews here, this movie is dismal. Slow and plodding. Rather boring and over acted. The direction is heavy handed. Not of interest in the slightest.The Plot On the beach one night, Christine Faber, two years a widow, thinks she hears her late husband Paul calling out of the surf.Then meets a tall dark man, Alexis, who seems to know all about such things. After more ghostly manifestations, Christine and younger sister Janet become enmeshed in the eerie artifices of Alexis.But he in turn finds himself manipulated into deeper deviltry than he had in mind.
chaos-rampant
Hypnosis noir (or spiritualist noir) arrives at the heart of noir; staged image, desire amplified at the hands of some illusionist, belief creating a story. The silent Dr. Mabuse, the oldest noir progenitor I have found, is about a criminal mastermind who in controlling the illusion of appearances creates the crime narrative we try to apprehend him in. Exciting as all get out.Here, two beautiful sisters, heiresses to a fortune, fall under the spell of a 'psychic consultant', a spiritualist who manipulates their yearnings for money. Mabuse-like, he controls his appearance, his house a large staging area rigged with devices for illusion. Not very interesting because the same token that brings a hypnosis noir close to the heart of things ultimately substitutes the intuitive dreaming with explanations about how sleep works.The opening scene is pretty tantalizing though. That is the first moment where illusion emerges in the noir world. What is it? The woman is in her house, a marvelous mansion on a cliff overlooking a moonlit beach, and thinking she has heard the voice of her dead (but still loved) husband she goes to the veranda, but of course there's nothing there but the tumultuous sea below. So the illusory urge was already present from the start, it creates everything else, and is as simple as this, a voice coming in from an open window. Nice. It could be the start to a ghost movie, where again it's all about haunted spaces of memory. The Uninvited strikes this balance, another quasi-noir. What makes this a noir is that moments later the woman goes for a walk and the illusionist materializes as if from the night to answer the need for magical dreaming. A crucial turning point later on is a seance that turns real; shifting us from her ethereal dreaming to constructed sleep. In great noir, we have imperceptible shifts so that we dream.
AD
