Synopsis
When the Solomons trade in the craziness of big-city life for the quiet of a North Dakota farm, little do they expect the nightmare that follows. Soon after arriving, teenage Jess (Kristen Stewart) and her younger brother see terrifying apparitions and endure attacks from a supernatural source. Jess must warn her disbelieving family before it is too late to save them.
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Cast
- Kristen StewartJess Solomon
- Dylan McDermottRoy
- Penelope Ann MillerDenise
- John CorbettBurwell
- William B. DavisColby Price
- Brent BriscoePlume
- Jodelle FerlandMichael Rollins
- Tatiana MaslanyLindsay Rollins
- Evan TurnerBen
- Theodore TurnerBen
Recommendations
- 50
TV Guide Magazine
The trouble isn't just that this haunted-house story, written by Mark Wheaton and directed by Hong Kong filmmakers Danny and Oxide Pang, is both formulaic and derivative. It's that it's completely free of atmosphere, the very thing that their 2002 "The Eye" had in such creepy abundance. - 50
The A.V. Club
The Messengers, dutifully cobbles together a pastiche of successful horror films past--"The Grudge," "The Sixth Sense," "The Birds," "The Amityville Horror," and "The Shining"--without asserting a single original idea of its own. - 50
The New York Times
Like too many horror pictures, The Messengers becomes more boringly prosaic as it goes along, and there's an 11th-hour plot twist so dumb and poorly articulated that it destroys the movie. That's a shame, because shot for shot, the Pangs might be the most terrifying filmmakers alive. - 50
Variety
Though the Pangs prove culturally adaptive on a visual level, they seem completely clueless as to the tonal modalities of Mark Wheaton's admittedly undercooked, all-American script. - 40
Los Angeles Times
The Messengers is at once ruthlessly efficient and shamelessly distended. - 38
Boston Globe
The Messengers is textbook, and the course it's teaching is HSL: Horror as a Second Language. - 38
ReelViews
It's a little sad that The Messengers is ultimately a good candidate for burial in a toxic waste dump because there are some good elements contained herein. - 30
The Hollywood Reporter
A tepid ghost story filled with all the usual things that go bump in the night minus the somewhat crucial element of suspense, this bland effort from Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert's Ghost House Pictures is surprisingly devoid of the creepy, claustrophobic atmospherics that haunt the brothers' Asian work.
