One of these days, someone is going to get it right. With so many ghost-related horror films coming out of Hollywood, someone's bound to hit on something eventually. Having always held a personal interest in the paranormal, I always hope that the next film concerning the supernatural is going to be the one, and most of the time, I walk out disappointed and cheated. The Messengers is the latest disappointment. Asian filmmaker siblings Oxide and Danny Pang (best known for the Asian horror film, The Eye, and making their U.S. debut with this film) certainly know how to stage a creepy sequence, and even manage to build a quick jolt or two from their audience. Unfortunately, they are held back by a plodding and meandering screenplay by Mark Wheaton, that often confuses loud noises and rapid edits for genuine scares. Emotionally hollow and highly derivative of everything from The Grudge to The Birds, The Messengers just can't find its own voice, or even figure out what it's trying to say.

Angst-filled teenager Jess (Kristen Stewart, best known for playing Jodie Foster's daughter in Panic Room) has just moved from Chicago to North Dakota with her dysfunctional family as the film opens. They move into a creepy-looking and run down old farm house in the middle of nowhere, because apparently the family has hit hard times the past year or so, and Jess' dad (Dylan McDermott) wants to make a go at raising sunflower seeds for a living. With Jess' mom (Penelope Ann Miller) and toddler brother Ben (twins Evan and Theodore Turner) along for the ride, the family moves into the house, unaware of the dark secrets it holds. We witness part of what happened in the house beforehand in a stylized black and white prologue sequence where a family is killed one-by-one by an unseen presence. As soon as they move into the house, Jess feels like something's not quite right. She keeps on seeing dark shadowy figures scurrying by out of the corner of her eyes, mysterious black stains appear on the wall and re-appear after being wiped clean, a strange ooze-like substance keeps on seeping through the floorboards, and crows start ominously hovering around the outside of the house, swooping down and attacking people at random. Young Ben seems to see these apparitions as well, but because he is unable to speak, Jess is pretty much on her own as she attempts to unravel the history behind her new home and find out what these spirits want from her.

What we have here is another case of a horror movie that is nowhere near as thrilling or scary as the trailers would like you to believe. The Messengers is strangely slow-paced and leisurely, when it should be pumping up the tension. That's not to say there are not a couple successful creep-out moments. A scene where Jess is left in the house alone with Ben, only to have the entire house seemingly come to life through ghostly possession, or a later scene where Jess and her younger brother explore the house at night with a ghostly presence following close behind them offer hints at what the movie could have been. Most of the time, however, we get Jess or someone else poking around in dark places where we already know they shouldn't be in the first place, and we're left to just sit and wait until the all-too predictable scare moment to pop up. I realize that I've just made it sound like the movie has a lot of scare moments, but it actually does not. A vast majority of its scares are of the "false alarm" variety, and usually results in some innocent thing suddenly popping up out of nowhere while a booming sound effect blasts our ears on the soundtrack to try to make us jump. The false alarm can be an effective tool to make your audience jump, but if you rely on it as heavily as The Messengers does, the audience starts to lose interest and look negatively upon the film. There's only so many times we can be satisfied by having something thrown directly in our faces while a "bang" rings out, only to have the camera pan back to reveal that it's a crow that landed outside the window. In fact, the crows that start gathering outside of the house pop up and are involved in more scares than the actual ghosts haunting the house. You almost start to wonder if the Pang Brothers were trying to do a haunted house movie, or if they were trying to get a jump on Michael Bay, and do a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

The film's slow pace and emphasis on Jess and her family seems to suggest that the filmmakers were ultimately trying for a more human approach than the usual supernatural thriller. The film comes up short here too, due to how it generically tries to keep its characters a mystery to us. We know almost from their introductory scene that Jess' family has a lot of baggage. They've been through a lot, and the mother seems to be somewhat untrusting of Jess, not even trusting her behind the wheel of a car. We don't learn exactly what happened until very late in the film, and that's unfortunate, because this forces the screenplay to choose the words it uses so carefully in the dialogue of the characters that everyone sounds overly wooden and forced. In every scene where tension is supposed to be building between the family members, they seem to be beating around the bush, almost as if they want to tell us what happened, but they are waiting for the exact moment for the big revelation as to why Jess' family has had it so hard the past year before their move. It gets to the point where the characters seem to be toying with us, giving us just enough to know that not everything is well, but being so vague that we don't have a single clue as to what they're talking about. Needless to say, it gets frustrating quickly, and when the big reveal comes, it doesn't seem like something that should have been kept from us for so long. The few characters outside of the family who pop up don't fair much better. There's a gun-toting redneck hired hand (John Corbett), who offers to help Jess' dad with his crops, and whom the family welcome into their home rather quickly without knowing a single thing about him. There's also a nice young local boy (Dustin Milligan) whom Jess strikes a friendship with. Unfortunately, his character may as well have been written out of the script completely, as he serves no purpose to the actual story itself, and never gets a chance to create anything remotely resembling a character, the fact that he stinks at playing basketball being the only thing we learn about him.

It always infuriates me when I see good actors stuck with underwritten or lousy roles, and that's definitely the case here. Kristen Stewart is a natural beauty, and definitely is likeable enough of a screen presence to carry a movie. This is not the movie for her to carry, however, as she spends most of her time wandering in dark places she really should know better than to stick her nose into. She needs a role that allows her to display some charisma, and the character of Jess offers no such opportunities. In the role of the parents, both Dylan McDermott and Penelope Ann Miller are passable, but since they are forced to keep the reason why their characters act the way they do around their daughter for almost the entire movie, we never feel as closely connected with them as we feel we should be. Since these are the characters that we are stuck with for literally the entire running time, aside from a few local townsfolk who pop up now and again, the screenplay really should have paid more attention to them, or at least tried to make everyone more interesting. The sole aspect that the keeps the movie afloat is some rather appropriately dark and moody cinematography by David Geddes. The movie has a strong look, and does a good job at playing up the isolation aspect of the horror as Jess slowly realizes she is alone in her trying to find out the truth. This is further supported by a strong visual sense by the directors, the Pang Brothers, even if they do seem a bit too heavily influenced by past horror films. Besides the many moments that bring forth memories of The Birds, the film's climax seems to owe a huge debt to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, with some references to past Asian horror films thrown in for good measure.
While not completely unwatchable, The Messengers never comes across as anything more than a film trying desperately to learn from other movies, only to make the same mistakes, or even make some new ones in a few circumstances. All the elements are there, but they don't work in the way they're supposed to, so the movie never quite manages to succeed. If the movie had concentrated more on the actual scares instead of the false alarms, I probably would have been able to give a pass on some of its narrative flaws. As it is, all this movie made me do is long for some of the true classics in the haunted house genre such as the original Poltergeist, the 1963 Robert Wise adaptation of The Haunting, or The Changeling. If you're contemplating giving your money to see The Messengers, I'd recommend you use it to rent one of those three movies over this any day of the week.

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