The Secret of Marrowbone

Marrowbone is proof that with a strong sense of place and characters an audience cares about, you can make a good horror movie without games, gimmicks, or even much narrative coherence.

The direction by Sergio G Sánchez is uneven, the narrative consistently illogical...and the final "twist" visible from early in the first act. Disappointing.

Consider the Marrowbone glass to be either half-empty of potent horror, or half-full of everything else it's got going for it - a decent glug, stylistically speaking, but not quite enough.

This distinctively terrible film is a hideous hotchpotch of shouty overacting and muddled storytelling, unable to make up its mind if it's a family drama, a supernatural chiller or a psychological mystery.

Powerfully frustrating, undone by an ornate storytelling style in which twists only beget more twists, all in service of some fairly obvious observations about guilt, self-deception and devotion.

Scary enough to please most genre buffs, it would also play well in art houses: If you were to go through and remove every hint of ghosts, you'd still have a drama well worth seeing.

A solid rather than spectacular creepshow thriller that would have benefited from Sánchez employing a few more original ideas.