(This review may contain spoilers).
I like horror movies, but when I first saw the trailer for this, it seemed to start off as a comedy… a very different feeling to what I was left with by the end of said trailer.
I felt the setting was really engaging and although there were some moments where I felt the language used was less old-fashioned than it should have been, I did think that the relationships between Alice and her daughters, in particular, were shown really well.
There were a few jumpy moments in this movie, but as I was trying to audio describe, those moments… which were cheap anyway… lost a lot of their effectiveness.
I did feel a lot for Doris, but I would have liked to see more of her interactions with her sister. It was hard to see Doris as a character in her own right at times, as she seemed to spend most of the movie trying to emulate her mother. While that wouldn’t be a bad thing with a child character, it didn’t seem like she had much of a personality even at the beginning of the movie.
It was interesting to see the sisters at their school and how the priest interacted with both of them. I found Father Tom to be an interesting character, but I didn’t really believe in his and Alice’s attraction to each other.
I felt the horror in this movie was more effective when it wasn’t seen. The moment Doris saw something in the mirror, I felt it looked like a cartoon rendering of a demon. After that, it was so much harder to take the movie seriously… even though some of the things that came out of Doris’ mouth were really creepy.
There was a lot of potential in this movie, especially when it came to the foreshadowing. But I felt that the attempts to scare/disgust the audience took over the story and the potential didn’t really go anywhere. Plus, the ending completely contradicted earlier scenes.
I like horror movies, but this one was a bit of a disappointment and isn’t one I would watch again.
Ink of Blood 