So is this sci fi or what? Is this Costner's new direction? Anyway I love Sci Fi.
Nina
just read the plot! ;-)
shareMore here...in spanish, sorry!!
http://www.cinemavip.com/news/post?post_url_id=luiso-berdejo-pega-el-s alto-a-hollywood
A father moves his children to a new town after losing their mother. The daughter goes through very stange behavior changes.
My son auditioned.
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** POSSIBLE SPOILERS (Depending on how much you like to know) **
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In the short-story that it is based on, a young father relocates to the countryside with his daughter, who is perhaps eleven or twelve, and his 3-year-old son. (The mother abandoned the family.) There's a strange mound near their house, sort of like the fairy hills you see in the UK and Ireland, and the daughter seems to have a strange fascination with it, while it simply terrifies her little brother. Her behaviour starts changing and becoming quite strange; she becomes increasingly infatuated with the fairy-hill, to the point that her young brother starts becoming afraid of her. There's also the fact that the previous owner of the house, a writer or artist or thereabouts, went a bit barmy and left strange pages with pictures of odd-looking creatures on them. The father finds a strange wicker-doll in his daugher's room one day (a doll made from twigs and leaves and such, sort of like the 'Green Man' of old pagan European mythology), and encased inside it a trapped spider. He has to go away on business one day and leaves an old woman to look after them, instructing her under all circumstances NOT to leave his children's bedroom windows open at night (there's a reason for this that I can't recall). The weather is warm however, so the old woman does, and when he returns his daughter is virtually an entirely different person. His son's favourite teddy-bear also goes missing, and on a whim the father goes to the nearby mound and begins ripping up the grass and digging, and unearths his son's teddy-bear buried deep within it, and knowing that his daugher put it there.
The short-story basically ends with his daughter appearing in his room one night and declaring that she is his "new daughter". (I'm sure the film will have a more sound ending.) It's also made pretty clear in the story that the whole thing, besides being obviously supernatural, is about a daughter transitioning into womanhood, and a father losing his sense of who she anymore because of it.
Anywho... I'm almost certain the film will add tons of rather ridiculous and grandiose twists and turns (it has Kevin Costner in it, after all), but the story is quite beautiful- I'd really recommend it. I'm concerned about the fact it's set in rural America too, since the whole fairy-hill premise wouldn't make as much sense now (although the location is never explicitly mentioned in the short story).
story set in Mercy SC not sure if that is a real place or not---
shareThere are some fairy tale-ish mounds in America. They don't have as much meaning, fairy tale wise, as in Ireland (which I think the short story is set in, as the author is from Ireland), and I don't know about Illinois, as I've never been there, but in Washington State, in southern Thurston County, there are hundreds of strange mounds, about six feet tall and six feet wide, which are quite mysterious. The legend is that they are the mounds of giant gophers or something ;), but they're probably from when the glaciers moved across this area. I live in Thurston County, and my aunt and uncle lived where these mounds where, in a town (actually more a stop on the highway) called Grand Mound, named after the mounds, of course. Anyway, it is kind of random that it's set in America, but that's probably so it will be more appealing to American audiences. I'm rather disappointed about Kevin Costner being in it, but I adore Ivana Baquero. I just read The New Daughter, it was great. I had read The Book of Lost Things (by the same author, John Connolly) last year and fell head over heels in love with it, and my sister got it for me for Christmas, along with Nocturnes, which is the collection of short stories by John Connolly in which The New Daughter is contained. Oh, the reason why the dad kept all the doors and windows locked at night is that the creatures who lived in the mound tried to get in at night, as I believe they couldn't leave the earth by daylight. And at the end of the story, his daughter, Louisa (or actually, his "new daughter") comes to him at night, while his son, Sam, is asleep beside him, and she tells him that sometime, he will leave a door or window unlocked, and they will come in, and Sam will be taken away, and he will have a new son, and she will have a new brother. He's made plans to sell the house, and he says he won't let Sam get taken, and his new daughter retreats to the corner and watches him, and the things outside look for ways to get in. And that's the end of the story. The dad had some dreams in which his real daughter was trapped beneath the mound, "alive yet not alive", being held by the monsters that lived there. He'd gone out to try and dig up the mound and find Louisa, but hit rock a couple of inches down. I agree, I'm sure the movie will have a much happier, or at least resolving, ending, with the dad defeating the creatures, and he and his son going to live somewhere else, though Louisa probably would die. That ending might be more satisfying, but probably just would turn out to be cliche, unlike the ending in the story. However, the movie might turn out to be fantastic, you never know.
"The path of excess leads to the tower of wisdom."