AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

a_baron Jenny is an American teen; born in Italy, she visits her widowed father who lives near a mysterious lake - a real one. On the drive back to his house she sees a young boy in the road, but he doesn't. This and her subsequent meetings with a bizarre collection of apparently sick boys and girls - including one who appears to be blind - beggar the question is it all in her head, or is something else going on?Daddy is a retired surgeon, who retired to study what, precisely? Whatever it is, there is good reason for her to believe it is not what he says it is, not quite, anyway.The riddle of the ghosts is resolved, but wildly improbable plot though this may be, the real monsters are closer to home, and both what they did in the past, and what they intend to do to her is unthinkable.

petra_ste I believe it was Aristotle who claimed that in fiction the impossible works better than the improbable. In other words, a horror movie with Etruscan ghosts haunting a Tuscan lake? I'm along for the ride. A guy managing to keep many people in captivity for years, successfully performing complex surgical procedures on them and getting rid of the corpses, all without anyone ever noticing? And not somewhere in the Gobi desert, but in one of the most densely populated European countries, to boot? I'm not buying it. And I will mention neither his demented motivations nor a spoiler - his connection with the victims - which make the premise even more ridiculous.Neverlake suffers from a case of overplotting. Either you go with the supernatural storyline or with the "medical experiments/abductions" cases: pick one and run with it. The two don't glue together well, and structure gets wonky; any horror movie where a medusa-like monster is there merely for a cameo, where a surgeon performs ludicrously difficult operations and follows them up with esoteric rituals, or where the protagonist first has to throw some relics in a lake to appease phantoms and then to recover other relics from the same lake to appease other phantoms... well, it should probably rethink its storytelling choices.5/10

lazarillo A teenage girl who was born in Italy, but raised in America (none of which explains her crisp British accent) returns to Tuscany where her father, once a medical doctor, is now engaged in an archaeological project at an enchanted lake once worshiped by the ancient Etruscans. There she befriends a group of weird disabled children kept in a country asylum. Eventually a terrible family secret is revealed.This is in some ways a ghost story like "The Devil's Backbone" or "The Orphanage", but it also hearkens back to the classic European "medical horror" films of the early 1960's like "Eyes without a Face" and "The Mill of the Stone Women". Like a lot of classic Euro-horror films this British-Italian co-production doesn't make a lot of logical sense but rather follows a kind of dream logic. The rational plot is often overwhelmed by powerful and striking visual images and kind of surreal mood reminiscent of Euro genre films of yore. This will no doubt annoy many of the terminal Americans out there unaccustomed to this kind of filmmaking (really though, Hollywood films aren't any more "realistic", people are just more used to their brand of unreality).The movie does have its flaws. The Etruscan mysticism and the medical horror don't really gel together very well, and all the characters remain rather opaque. Its strengths though lie in its atmosphere, its arresting visuals (especially the underwater scenes in the lake) and its use of the beautiful Tuscany countryside and some haunting poetry from British Romantic poet Percy Blysse Shelley. Daisy Keeping who plays the protagonist is a strikingly beautiful young Brit actress who really complements the natural scenery and turns in a very decent performance (her unexplained British accent notwithstanding). This isn't a perfect movie, but I'd still definitely recommend it.

Jesse Boland I was impressed with the first 5 minutes or so, and that kept me around through this entire movie, however though it was a decent ghost story, there are a lot of really boring moments in it. I felt over all that the first half of the movie could have been titled "The blind leading the ignorant" and that would have been enough to just move past the whole getting to know the children stage. The main theme hidden under the ghost story, and the mystery itself is that you must pay attention to the foreshadowing, and they try very hard to get you to notice this "subtly". Jenny's Dad is evil, sorry I had to just blurt it out like that but without that he just look like a looming specter himself, and you need a bit more Dad meat in the first half of the story to establish him, or he just comes across as flat as he does. Joy Tanner is as good as she usually is, except, well what accent is she supposed to have, and where does it keep going. Beyond the accent she is as evil from the first scene she appears in as you think she will be, and that takes something right? Overall I Enjoyed this, I would say it is aimed at a younger demographic surely, the romantic poetry spouting twenty somethings, and younger yet, but you young at heart, lonely hearts might like it as well. It is not a scary sort of ghost story, it is simply a story of revenge that has been a long time coming as these stories usually are.Jesse of www.Jesse.ca