Dream House Reviews
Top Critic
Was the screenplay, credited to David Loucka, this schizophrenic from the beginning? Or was some major tampering/reworking done at some point?
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
While Will and Libby struggle to adjust their thinking caps, the viewer already knows, thanks to the tell-all trailer, the reason for much of the confusion.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
This crackpot thriller from the usually competent Jim Sheridan leaves only one mystery unsolved: what on earth was he thinking?
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/5
Daniel Craig does everything to dispel comparisons to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining with a finely tuned performance, but the film flattens as it tries to explain his character's psychological state.
Sheridan's pacing is turgid and mournful, which lends the story -- sort of like The Shining crossed with Gothika during a sleepover stop at The Amityville Horror -- an air of ponderousness.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Sheridan can't ever quite get hold of the tone and falls back on a default dreaminess (the little girls play a shaky rendition of Beethoven's "Für Elise" more than once) that never quite convinces.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/5
Despite the talent involved, this is more a snooze than a dream.
There are probably some fascinating behind-the-scenes stories that would explain why Dream House is such a ruined pile of nonsense.
Full Review
| Original Score: D-
The only thing it haunts you with is: What the heck happened to Jim Sheridan?
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Sheridan's tale soon segues into an unevenly paced whodunit pockmarked with lame CG nightmare sequences and populated by hollow ciphers whose every word and action is less believable than the last.
The premise and the execution hold a lot of promise, but the film's climactic reveal will be incredibly obvious to anyone paying even the slightest amount of attention.
