Talk about a disappointment. For about 85% of its running length, this jump-out-and-say-boo ghost story about a young widow mourning her husband’s recent suicide in the lake house he built manages to stay better than average by mostly avoiding familiar tropes and plot twists and slowly ratcheting up the weirdness with a minimum of special effects or exposition, or even ever tipping its hand as to whether the haunting is actually happening. Then, in the very final scenes, whatever forces often conspire to take middling horror pictures and ruin them by jettisoning sense and writing in favor of overly familiar tropes, sentimentality, and special effects packs as much of all that into the last few scenes as they normally do into a whole movie, and completely undo everything that was good about it up to that point before concluding with an ending that neither satisfies nor even makes much sense.
