Acensbart
Excellent but underrated film
Gutsycurene
Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.
Janae Milner
Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.
John_Warwick
Well the name of the film and the description on the back of the DVD, and even the tag line would have you believe this is a ghost story.In fact what you have here is a story of a 12 year old girl in a high rise block in Glasgow who suffered a car crash where she died but was revived.What follows seems to be more focused on her life and her mothers struggle to raise her kids in the poverty stricken area, and the ghostly elements play a very small part and the film never really takes it any further than you are expecting.OK watch this film if you'd like to see a film about the above mentioned but not if you want a ghost story urban or not.
rixrex
Is there a ghost here, or maybe not? That question is left unanswered, and left as a possibility either way. The girl who's the center of the controversy is a kind of teenage version of Candace Hilligoss in Carnival of Souls, and it seems possible that she might meet a similar fate, and indeed nearly does. The movie starts off slowly enough and it is hard to become involved, but when the paranormal investigations begin and the medium (noun here) arrives, by then it's engrossing. A nice examination of the various groups who take advantage of the folks who suffer paranormal activity, the tabloids, the parapsychologists, the séance types, all in it for their own gain and treating the "victims" as objects of study, not as people. If this is what the filmmakers intended to show, they were successful. If they were trying to create tension, they were partly successful, and if they wanted to make it a true Urban Ghost Story, they were barely successful. Not recommended for those who really like chills and scares, there are some, but not enough. But recommended for those who'd like a thoughtful examination of the society around paranormal activity.
barquing
Saw this at the Edinburgh Film Festival last year, and enjoyed it a great deal. The 'ghost' element was kept off camera which made the whole story very ambiguous - concentrating more on grief and social conditions than special effects. The acting was terrific (even Jason Connery) and the script literate and well paced. The film was interesting the way it came up with dozens of "explanations" for the events - some supernatural, some scientific - before underlining that the reasons behind such things aren't so important as the psychological effects on the protagonists. I hope it gets a wider distribution soon, as it deserves to be seen by a larger audience. Very impressive - considering its budget, doubly so.
jan onderwater
This debut by Jolliffe is not bad, but if suffers from wanting to tell too much at the same time: the guilty conscience of Lizzie, the horror of living in a block of flats, of nosy neighbours, of journalism, social service and so on, and so on. The result is an uneven, detached picture. Heather Ann Foster is very good as Lizzie.
