IMDb plot summary: Poltergeists attack a family in Yorkshire during the 1974 nationwide blackouts.
Directed by Pat Holden. Starring Kate Ashfield, Steven Waddington, Craig Parkinson, and Tasha Connor.
This is not at all a new premise, it's not even the first movie with this plot that I've watched this month, so the question is does it do anything different with it? Well, almost. Early on the family reveals to the media that they have a ghost and start getting tourists who want to see the ghost house, and that seems like a really interesting route for the movie to go... and then that entire plotline just gets droppped. And in fact, a scene or two later, the family is suddenly having to re-convince each other that their home is haunted. This happens a LOT in this movie -- it sets up an intriguing conceit for the next part of the story which then vanishes like it never happened at all. It's one of the most frustrating movies I've seen recently because it keeps turning the corner toward something new and original and then it not only chickens out but continually retcons itself, like the scriptwriter decided to delete that scene from the final script and wrote on without it, but the director filmed it anyway. As a result, it ends up being a strange, tangled mess that mostly just goes back to the same bland tropes over and over again without any kind of narrative consistency.
How it entered my Flickchart:
When the Lights Went Out < Broken Embraces
When the Lights Went Out < As Good As It Gets
When the Lights Went Out < Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
When the Lights Went Out > Sweet Home Alabama
When the Lights Went Out < Herbie: Fully Loaded
When the Lights Went Out > All the King's Men (2006)
When the Lights Went Out > Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
When the Lights Went Out > The Incredible Hulk
When the Lights Went Out < Vera Drake
When the Lights Went Out > Live a Little, Love a Little
When the Lights Went Out < Tab Hunter Confidential
Final spot: #2953 out of 3249, or 9%.
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