Pretty Good

Admirable film.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Ellie, supposedly about 25 years old, is played by a woman easily in her 50s. There is a problem at the outset. The director had some good ideas, and hired a good photographer, but overall the story is a failure--a weirdo slasher ghost story failure. Skip this one.

This is a confusing mess by design. Ellie Rose's mom (Kika Mirylees) changed when she was a child. She has a sister Chloe (Alexandra Moen) who apparently mom liked best. Ellie (Lucy Benjamin) has flashbacks to her husband Frank (Bill Ward) apparently slapping her and causing a miscarriage, although the flashbacks hide faces. Then there was the night her and Chloe go to visit mom and she finds blood everywhere, and if you missed that flashback, wait as it is repeated as it takes up half the film.As I watched the film I was confused as to what was flashback, what was real and what was the present, and what was a dream. In the end things did come together and the imagery made sense. I can even say it was smartly done for what they wanted to do. However the fact is I struggled through the film and wasn't entertained seeing the same faceless scenes repeated over and over. Nice era recreation. Did they have underground power lines to remote areas?Guide: F-bomb. No sex or nudity.

Type-casting can be unforgiving. Lucy Benjamin, well known for years in cockney soap 'EastEnders', plays the title character here, and it took me a while to get used to her with an American accent. This is short-sighted of me because, to my UK ears, she is very convincing as Rose, returning to her remote family cabin after suffering an abusive marriage.However impressive she is, I'm not quite as in love with her as Director Tristan Versluis seems to be; much time is spent with her alone living day to day, sleeping, eating, day-dreaming and running from spectral images, presumably from her past.Whilst his lingering execution conveys very well the isolated monotony of her existence amidst these beautiful but unforgiving surroundings, it slowly dawns on me that nothing at all seems to be happening. I love slow-burning stories, but apart from her remembering her abusive past, there is nothing going on.Joining Benjamin are other UK actors with American accents – fellow soap actor Bill Ward as Frank and Alexander Moen as Chloe. Moments are repeated, an occasional well-executed shock-effect occurs, but these moments are in isolation and don't appear to lead to anything. It's as if every scene has been thrown into a hat and picked out at random and made into a film.The impressive finale threatens to almost make sense of it all, and it becomes apparent that the twist simply isn't hugely emotive because apart from Rose, all the characters are so sketchily written. This is a shame because visually, everything is great. Ultimately 'The Haunting of Ellie Rose', also known as 'Not Alone' is rather like a David Lynch film, only not terribly well made. It emerges as a muddle, despite the best efforts of the cast.

Another low budget horror film that is completely worthless. Absolutely no energy in this movie about a woman who is haunted by her past. It was impossible to create any suspense and the acting was very poor. In this type of film it's really important to feel something for the lead characters and instead we're treated to long, boring passages that don't amount to anything. The director needed to make the start much more involving. Simply not at all scary which is what you want out of a picture like this.Don't waste your money on this. In fact, don't waste your time on this. Truly awful.Please give us quality scare films. Not stuff like this!