Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Josephina Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Mihaela_Lacramioara I finally had the opportunity to watch this movie and really enjoyed it. I thought the Marsh was put together very well.For the most part, the acting was great. Gabriele and Forrest were a great team. The supporting actors and actresses played their parts well. There were good twists and turns, good effects, and little else to be asked of a low budget horror movie. The movie was genuinely suspenseful, definitely scary in spots, and full of surprises.Although the ending seemed a bit just "thrown together", I still recommend this to viewers and would watch it again.

Michael O'Keefe Its a chiller. Better than average special effects. A story that seems to just not come clear. Claire(Gabrielle Anwar)is a stressed out , sophisticated author of children's books. She will soon take the lead role in a story a little too heavy and scary for a kid's book. She has frightening dreams and even sketches faces she'll see soon enough. Clair takes some time off and decides to stay at the Rose Marsh Farmhouse, which looks very much like a house she has sketched before. Strange things begin to happen when Clair settles in the farmhouse. She meets Noah(Justin Louis)the publisher of the local newspaper and historian of the small community. The apparitions she begins to see in the house causes her to call on Noah Hunt(Forest Whitaker), a consultant on the occult and paranormal. Together, they begin to unravel the town's dirty, dark little secret. But has she found meaning to her previous nightmares?

rlange-3 SPOILERS-------------------------------------------SPOILERS It starts out in high gear. The reading of the children's story is both clever and positively spooky through tonal inflections, camera angles, and the music. This moves into a throwback to the events that start the plot which is well done, raising expectations that this might actually be a scary movie. Unfortunately, it is simply a dream, and thus begins the gradual ratcheting down of the hoped for evening of horror and devolution into standard gimmickry inserted into a very slowly progressing plot.It's got to be almost impossible to be very original in the genre. There are so many horror movies over the past hundred years that it is unlikely that many are going to come up with a startling new special effect or twist which is going to take the experienced movie goer out of their seat.Rating a movie like this as a 2-3 reflects unrealistic expectations in my opinion. It is far from schlock. I also appreciated that there was not a reliance throughout the movie on gratuitous sex, language, or graphic violence. In fact, there was no dumpster diving at all -- kudos to the director and all involved. I freely admit to "lusting in my heart" (heh) during some of the shots of Claire, but at least I wasn't forced to endure a cheap scene waggling in my face to sell the prurient interest tickets.The upside was the cinematography, atmosphere, decent acting by Anwar and Whitaker, a fair score, Anwar's clothed attractiveness, and the somewhat spooky but overplayed power of the devouring misty marsh.The downside was that it retreated into prosaic and formulaic devices by the end of the movie resulting in a desire to fast forward it to completion. There was also a major over-reliance on musical cues followed by a noise to try to deliver a jolt. Most of the time it didn't work and by the end the "gotcha" moments were reduced to annoyances as you learned not to trust the sound track. It was also somewhat disappointing that there was not more chemistry between the leads, and the rest of the cast ranged from fair to awful. The father and Mercy fit well into the latter category.Overall a decent but not great movie. I gave it a slightly charitable six.

greensteele When I first sat down to watch this movie, I had the notion that it would be something that would not be that good. Just looking at the ratings, I knew that I probably would be telling myself at the end of it that "I just wasted time on this!" Well, all I can say is that I knew what I was going to say, and I ended up saying it.The first thing that I would like to say is that I pretty much would consider the title of this movie to be "The Rose Door", being that very little of what happened to any of the central characters in this movie actually happened in the marsh and it all happened behind the Rose door.So, on to the story. To sum up the story, basically it the classic ghost story that tries to through in a few twists in the mix. I won't go into great detail about the story, just to say that it is about Claire Holloway, performed by Gabrielle Anwar, who is hunted by nightmares and feels the need to find out clues to what is going on in these nightmares. She sees a house in her dreams and decides to investigate it. This is how she ends up in a small town at the house from her dreams, which happens to have a marsh as it's front yard. Of course she tries to make sense of the things going on in the house, so she goes to Geoffry Hunt, played by Forrest Whitaker, who just so happens to be a paranormal expert of sorts. No matter how good of an actor Whitaker is, I just could not see him as a paranormal expert so I was already somewhat mystified by his casting. This is where I will end my description because I don't want to give everything away, even though I do have to bring up some spoilers just to prove my point. To clarify my ratings though, I will point out a few things that I thought was lacking. First, the entire process of Claire finding out important events to the little girl's story seems to be a little drawn out. Usually, I'm all for a movie that wants to be thorough in this regard, but for me this movie seemed to want to force this feeling onto me and ended up failing miserably. Also, there was no tension in this movie, whatsoever. I mean, for a supposed horror movie, I believe tension is what can make or brake it. Having drawn out death scenes where the tension is built up is fine, but to not have any unexpected tension elsewhere in the movie will make it seem stale when death scenes do come around. The last thing that irritated me about this movie was that ending. Specifically, the scene with Geoffry, Claire, and Phillip getting the blanket back. I don't know if the writers or the director was trying to give any redeeming value to Phillip or Phillip's son or not, but here is my reasoning for being so upset about this scene. I felt they were trying to force me to be sorry for Phillip's family. Why would I feel sorry for this man who, not only knowing allowed his son to be brought up by a despicable mother in which he explained to them when he gave them blanket, but in some respect allowed his son to be a deviant in the first place? Was it not his son that killed the girl and stated that they should all just keep quite and let his father handle it? There had to be a reason the son thought he could go to daddy to clear things up.In the end, I wasn't disappointed by the acting. I would have given this movie a lower rating if it had not been for the decent acting. The visual effects, though sparse, where actually pretty good and weren't overly done. Other than the casting of Whitaker as previously mentioned, I thought the rest of the cast where believable.