Movie Review: "The Uninvited" with Emily Browning **SPOILER ALERT**

So I just finished watching "The Uninvited", starring Emily Browning. I had seen a girl that reminded me of the actress, so I was interested to look up her name. Upon finding her IMDb page, I saw something familiar, It was the movie photo of a shadow peering in through a dark window (an image that was in the background of one of my recent modeling photos, so I was interested to know that that photo belonged to a movie, nonetheless starring an actress that I really liked.) So I decided to watch the movie. The Uninvited is a psychological thriller directed by the Guard Brothers, and is very much like the movie "American Psycho" (starring Christian Bale) which I reviewed about a month ago.

It begins with our main character, Anna Rydell (Emily Browning), having a dream, and then she is explaining the dream to her therapist. She is in the hospital due to trauma after her mother died in a tragic fire. She has a discussion with him about how she can't remember certain details of the night of the fire. She leaves the hospital with her father, and it turns out that he is engaging in relations with the nurse that the family hired to take care of her mother when she was ill prior to the fire. Anna and her sister, Alex (Arielle Kebbel), suspect that the nurse that goes by the name "Rachel Summers" (played by Elizabeth Banks) murdered their mother. Over the course of the movie, Anna's mother tries to communicate with her from the other side, she has many hallucinations, the two sisters try to warn their father about Rachel but he brushes them off. One day, their father leaves and Rachel tries to hurt them, Anna tries to talk to the police and tell them she thinks Rachel is really a woman named "Mildred Kemp" wanted for killing 3 children of whom she was a nanny, but the police man sends her home with Rachel, drugged to sleep and hardly able to move. She wakes up and sees blood leading down the stairs and to the dumpster outside. She opens it, pushes aside a trash bag, and sees Rachel's blood-covered face, and turns to see her sister, wielding a knife. They embrace. Their father comes pulls into the driveway to see them covered in blood and holding a knife. Anna tries to explain that Alex had to do it.. He doesn't understand and he tell her that her sister, Alex, died in the fire the year before.. Anna is confused.. She snaps back into reality and suddenly remembers everything that she couldn't in the beginning of the movie. She had seen the nanny and her father in a compromising position, she left angrily and went to the little boat house to get some gasoline, her sister is drunk and trying to talk to her, but Anna leaves. Alex closes the door to the boat house and the force knocks over the lantern. The gasoline was left dripping, and it catches fire. Alex goes in to check on their mother, and the little house explodes in flames. The movie ends with Anna ending up back in the hospital, and we find out Mildred Kemp was one of the hospital wards that Anna knew and Rachel wasn't a murderer, she only changed her last name because she was running away from an abusive ex-boyfriend.. When Anna sees her therapist she says, "I finished what I started."

Wow, so this movie really has me going. Just like with American Psycho, I HAD to read a plot analysis of this movie. Whenever I watch a movie that leaves a lot of unanswered questions about what happened and what didn't, it makes me want to get to the bottom of it and find out what really happened and how much of what we saw was the reality and what was only in Anna's perception! I believe that what Anna meant by "I finished what I started" is this: She was about to try to kill the nurse somehow with the gasoline, and she had finally finished it. She had blocked out the memories of the deaths of her mother and sister because she had not intended for them to happen, and it traumatized her. This movie really has you asking all kind of questions and thinking very deeply. I give this movie a 10/10! I'd really like to hear your opinion about this movie, so leave me a comment below telling me what you thought, maybe one of your theories about the plot, your favourite scene, what rating you'd give it, or anything else! Until my next post, Ciao!

Emily Browning in The Uninvited