Don’t get the hype

This had plenty of good stuff going for it but, as with Flanagan’s Midnight Mass, an intriguing setup and lots of slow burn character study ends up leading nowhere particularly interesting or surprising.

Great acting and amazing camerawork with incredibly choreographed single takes all just led to a very rote finale in which we didn’t really learn anything new about the house or the people in it.

It all seemed a bit arbitrary. Why was the mother crazy and seeing the future? Did the house do that to her? Why would it, especially with the good ghosts hanging around?

The complete failure of otherwise intelligent characters to simply explain what they had been witnessing became frustrating.

The kids as adults all seemed to ‘blame’ the dad. Why? He was clearly a great dad, but they never sit him down and flat out ask him what went down on the last night. Steven suspects he killed their mother for Christ’s sake, the dad is like ‘you don’t understand…’, well, fucking explain it then! Some basic conversations would have saved everyone decades of trauma.

The dad is suddenly lying there dead at the end, how did he kill himself? If he had to bargain with his wife to open the red door and save the kids then even as a ghost she’s still crazy - you want to spend eternity with that, in that house?

The boo-scare sound effects became annoying. Horrors are so much more effective when they allow silence instead of breaking the immersion with a cheap thud.

I don’t really get why the kids were haunted for the rest of their lives, they lived in the house for half a summer and it haunted them for decades? Seems rather unnecessary and tragic.

Then there’s the woke. Nearly all relationships are multi-racial (extremely rare in reality) and one of those is lesbo-gay. It wasn’t as egregious as the woke in Midnight Mass but Flanagan really has a problem here and I’ll be cautious about embarking on his future projects if they’re full of this creepy and patronising agenda.

Generally the whole thing felt safe and formulaic. When you’ve got creators like Ari Aster out there making truly nasty and unsafe horror like Hereditary, this felt kinda PG-13 and ‘wholesome’ like The Sixth Sense. There was a lot of talk too, during the final episode there was a lot of yacking and I was yearning for that David Lynch feeling of crazy imagery and atmosphere without explanation so you really get lost in the mystery. Instead everything was talked away and the only mystery was a load of plot holes and inconsistencies.

Unless I’m simply misunderstanding it? In which case please explain. I did enjoy and appreciate most of the show as it went along, but what kept me coming back were exciting mysteries like ‘what happened on that last night’ and the revelations were pretty much exactly your first thought 🤷‍♂️