Tagline: Fear moves in.
In the haunting suspense thriller “The Uninvited,” a deadly battle of wills begins when Anna (Emily Browning) returns from a psychiatric facility and investigates the circumstances surrounding her mother’s suspicious and untimely death. While Anna recuperates from the tragedy, her father (David Strathairn) becomes engaged to Rachel (Elizabeth Banks), her mother’s former nurse, and moves her into their home. Anna’s dismay quickly turns to horror when she is visited by her mother’s ghost – crying out for revenge and pointing an accusing finger at Rachel. When her father refuses to heed their warnings, Anna and her sister, Alex (Arielle Kebbel), look into Rachel’s questionable past. But Anna may be underestimating Rachel – perhaps fatally so.
When Anna’s (Emily Browning) psychiatrist releases her from a sanitarium, where she has been recovering from an attempted suicide following her mother’s tragic death, she is shocked that her father, Steven, has become romantically involved with Rachel (Elizabeth Banks), her mother’s former nurse. Feeling betrayed and frightened, she seeks solace from her older sister, Alex (Arielle Kebbel). But Alex is strangely distant at first. As Emily Browning puts it, “Anna suddenly feels lost. Ever since her father fell in love with Rachel, she doesn’t know where she fits in with her family. Even her sister, Alex, feels a little hostile towards her. Worse, Rachel, who has taken over the house and seems determined to erase all memories of Anna and Alex’s mother.”
The Uninvited is a 2009 American psychological horror film directed by the Guard Brothers, and starring Emily Browning, Elizabeth Banks, Arielle Kebbel and David Strathairn. It is a remake of the 2003 South Korean K-Horror film A Tale of Two Sisters, which is in turn one of several film adaptations of the Korean folk tale Janghwa Hongryeon jeon. The film received mixed reviews.
On its opening day, the film grossed $4,335,000 and ranked #2 in the box office. It got $10,512,000 for its opening weekend, set on the third place, opened in 2,344 theaters with an average $4,485 per theatre. The film spent nine weeks in U.S. cinemas, and finished with a total gross of $28,596,818. It did fairly moderately for a horror film in the US markets. The film was released on March 26, 2009 in Australia, and the film opened at the fifth position, averaging $3,998 at 121 sites, for a gross of A$483,714. The second week it dipped 29%.
The Perfect House
Most of “The Uninvited” was shot at one location, a stunning waterfront property on British Columbia’s Bowen sland, a short ferry ride west from mainland Vancouver. “Eighty percent of the story takes place at the house, so we couldn’t make the movie without the right one,” says Parkes. “It couldn’t have been more important. We scouted in Louisiana, an environment which is both beautiful and slightly threatening. We had two houses, which were terrible compromises, but both of them fell through. We had a difficult time finding anything that had both the connection to the story and the right logistical possibilities.
“But then we were lucky to find in Canada a place that seemed as if it had been built for our movie,” he continues. “It was perfectly evocative and suggestive of a family that is both welcoming and forbidding. The fact that the house was within 30 miles of Vancouver was a greater plus than the minus of having to get everyone on boats to get them over there; water taxis and ferries are a way of life up there. In fact, I don’t remember ever having a more pleasant time on a location. Getting onto a boat and having a cup of coffee and then going up the little pier and the stairs we built, it focused us. We were isolated with one thing on our minds, which was making this movie. It was great.”
Well, most of the time. The isolation did have one drawback: last-minute changes could not always be accommodated. “There was a logistical concern,” remembers production designer Andrew Menzies. “Cell phone reception was bad there, which was a hindrance to doing our job. But you also had to embrace that because there were always what we call fires on the set, where you needed something, emergencies, and if it just couldn’t be done you had to work with what you had. So, there was some creativity that came from limited choices.”
For their part, the directors didn’t feel limited by the movie’s location. By the time shooting had begun, notes Charles Guard, he and his brother had “been working on the project for more than a year, so we were pretty well prepared. Even when things changed at the last minute, we still had the benefit of all that preparation and were able to work around it.”
In addition, says Menzies, the location possessed a wonderfully eerie atmosphere during scouting. “When we first came here it was at the end of winter, and it had such mood because of the lower lighting. The clouds were off the coast and you couldn’t see the mainland. It had this claustrophobic feeling because of the fog and the clouds and the storms coming in.”
For the interiors, however, “We wanted to create a romantic house, a feeling of warmth and history and tradition where a loving and nurtured family lived,” he continues. “This would, we hoped, emphasize to the audience a feeling this was a close family unit now being violated by Rachael (Elizabeth Banks), this outside element.”
The seeming contradiction of atmosphere dovetailed perfectly with the parallel storylines. The first is the story of a wealthy, successful writer who has fallen in love again and is feeling optimistic after a terrible tragedy. He lives in a beautiful home with an atmospheric backdrop. But Anna’s story is one of confusion and deception as she finds herself returning to a haunted house set in a foreboding landscape fraught with anxiety, secrets and danger. So the mixed weather of an unseasonably wet summer in CityplaceVancouver turned out to be almost perfect for everyone concerned.
Almost perfect, yes, but not quite. The house, a multi-million dollar dream home built about six or seven years ago, was a little too new and stylish to suggest the older house of the story, with its history and potential for peril. “The owners have incredible taste,” says Parkes, “so we had to take some of the chic away. Our production designer, Andy Menzies, and the whole art direction team were pretty crack; we had very strong set-decorating people to give the house its particular character.
Things like the kitchen linoleum floor we put in. And there was a big, beautiful center island that any cook would want, that we took out in favor of something more rustic. We removed every stick of furniture and brought in our own. We put a rug on the stairs and then wore it down to suggest the kids have been tramping up and down them for the last 15 years. Small details are really important, particularly when you’re working on a smaller canvas like this in which attention to detail can’t be overemphasized.”
In addition, the open-plan design of the home lacked the necessary claustrophobia required for many of the scenes. Walls and doorways had to be added but pressure fitted in instead of nailed so as not to damage the home. “Because it’s a new house and very expensive, we weren’t allowed to do a whole lot. We couldn’t do anything that we couldn’t reverse,” says Menzies. “But we did what we could at a superficial level to take the newness out of it.”
One item that did require more than just a superficial alteration, however, was the main stairwell. “This was a detail in our pre-production that exemplified why we made the right choice with the Guard brothers,” says Parkes. “Tom and Charlie said that one of the iconic images in horror movies are staircases; there’s something about them that sticks in our minds. We had a great staircase but the banister had very thick pieces of wood with just little slats; we would have gotten a strobe effect when shooting through it. And the guys were, `Well, we have the greatest location in the world; want to take down the banister?’ So we did.”
They did it, fully prepared to restore it, in keeping with their desire to respect the architectural integrity of the house. “We created a new banister to accommodate certain shots,” Parkes continues. The directors were right: it became a really important part of the filmmaking. I really admired these two guys who, considering this was their first movie, were that specific about the needs of the genre and pushed for something like this.”
Luckily, says Andrew Menzies, the home’s owner “has had film crews in here before; he knew that wear and tear would occur and that it could be repaired. We had his builder come in when we tore out the spindles on the stairs, which was a major deal; and we arranged for him to redo the stairs when we left, so the owner would have exactly the same house when he returned.”
Crucially, the house lacked one very important element – a boathouse. With no suitable properties anywhere that contained one, the producers decided to build one from scratch. It was a beautiful addition to the property, designed to blend in as if it was part of the original design; any homeowner would have been delighted to see it stay. But that was not to be, since the story called for its destruction as Anna’s memory flashes back to the tragic night of the fire. The shooting of the fiery explosion met everyone’s expectations, the flames bathing the darkened lake below with a fiery orange. “It was a great moment,” exclaims Parkes.
Whether audiences pick up on the visual clues in the set design the first time they see the film is not important, because repeated viewings offer insights into how the film was constructed and how it is going to end. “It’s very complicated,” says Parkes, “because, in a way, every scene is two scenes. There is the scene the audience is watching, which has to have its own emotional reality, which has to be legitimate and appear to be moving the story toward what the audience is absolutely sure is the goal of the movie; but then it has to be this other scene, which is what’s really going on. And if we did our job right, both realities will exist in every moment of the movie.”
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The Uninvited (2009)
Directed by: Guard Brothers
Starring: Emily Browning, Arielle Kebbel, David Strathairn, Elizabeth Banks, Maya Massar, Kevin McNulty, Jesse Moss, Heather Doerksen, Ryan Cowie
Screenplay by: Carlo Bernard, Doug Miro
Production Design by: Andrew Menzies
Cinematography by: Dan Landin
Film Editing by: Jim Page, Christian Wagner
Costume Design by: Trish Keating
Set Decoration by: Dominique Fauquet-Lemaitre
Music by: Christopher Young
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for for violent and disturbing images, thematic material, sexual content, language and teen drinking.
Distributed by: DreamWorks Pictures
Release Date: January 30, 2009
Visits: 82
