Lovely Molly

The latest effort from Blair Witch Project co-director Eduardo Sánchez, Lovely Molly follows a pair of newlyweds (Gretchen Lodge's Molly and Johnny Lewis' Tim) as they move into a rickety old house and immediately find themselves prey to strange happenings - with the situation ultimately impacting Molly to an increasingly sinister extent. Sánchez admittedly does a superb job of getting things off to a tense start right from the get-go, as the movie boasts an impressively suspenseful interlude near the beginning in which Molly and Tim hear a strange noise in the middle of the night. The tense atmosphere persists for quite some time, with the slow build certainly proving effective in perpetuating the movie's old-school ghost story vibe. It's only as Sánchez begins emphasizing the title character's progressively unhinged mental state that the movie slowly but surely loses its hold on the viewer, with the ambiguity surrounding Molly's situation - ie is she possessed or is she just nuts? - growing more and more oppressive as time progresses. There reaches a point, then, at which the viewer begins to crave a more substantive vibe, and although the film does kind of work as a low-key character study, Lovely Molly is finally a rather colossal disappointment in terms of its horror elements.