he latest adaptation of an Asian (Korean in this case) horror flick has become the perfect matrix in typical Hollywood style (though, apparently, it has been made in Canada, likely for economic reasons). It's standard horror flick stuff, but it's exceptionally well made.

It has everything a good horror flick should have - devious family members doing devious things, doors that always squeak when opened slooooowly (to reveal nothing when fully open, of course), shadow movements seen passing closed doors (that prove nothing), eerie & disgustingly distorted faces & body parts that are found inside garbage bags, liquids turning to blood, thunder & lightning at appropriate moments - all within a perfectly ubiquitous horror plot right down to the surprise ending.

The focus is on Anna (Emily Browning), a young teen just returning home after nearly a year at a spooky psychiatric hospital for attempted suicide. She seems fine, is greeted heartily by big sib (Arielle Kebbel) who becomes her best friend & confidant, but Anna finds keen disappointment in the fact that her dad (David Strathairn) has been bedding down a gorgeous, stone-faced blonde (Elizabeth Banks) who originally nursed Anna's mother (who died, mysteriously, in a raging home fire).

Anna & Alex suspect the blonde is a murderess preparing to do her & her sister in (?) or is psychosis setting in (?) or guilt (?) or a return of real ghostly figures to offer clues to skeletons in the family closet (?) - or all of the above? Only a totally unpredictable five minutes at the end of the film clear everything up in a rapid series of flashbacks that - aha! - tell all.

As with any good horror flick, the spook values should be on a "quality" level, and they are here. To begin with, the cast is almost uniformly above average (Strathairn excluded, though his wooden, laid-back persona might be due more to the script & director than anything else). Banks, in particular, maintains the cool, beautiful mask that never reveals anything beneath it, while Browning (onscreen nearly all the time) gives an equally strong performance as a young girl experiencing dozens of varying emotions. The British brothers Guard direct assuredly; they know all the tricks (including cinematic devices to mix everyday realism with things that go bump in day or night), screenwiters Craig Rosenberg, Doug Miro & Carlo Bernard are aware of and use the roller coaster technique; and Christopher Young has carefully created all the musical effects - the sweet, romantic moods to the eerily building spook music that leads to something terrible, and anything in between.

It's a well built movie, and it does what anyone would want in the genre to hold interest. Not a great movie, but a satisfying, atmospheric 90-minutes in the dark.