Pretty Good

Don't Believe the Hype

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Megan's sister dies, she commits suicide and no one know why she made this gesture. Trying to forget this tragedy her along with three friends go to a house in the forest to a city with very few inhabitants. But here she starts to have some visions and thinks that her sister is trying to transmit something. How everyone else believes that she is crazy it's now up to her to find the message using the signs which she receives. At the same time she has memories of the past where she was at a party with her friends and also using these visions will have to put them together to find the truth. But what will find will lead her to something else than she could have imagined and that the ex-boyfriend of her sister and who is now her actually BF committed a crime while they were driving and in a moment inadvertently killed an innocent little girl that was on a bike.Solstice is meant to be a horror film but unfortunately sequences that had to scare us are too few and a fan of this genre, this film would not move even a hair from their head. The story is good, I personally liked the beginning but in the process gets frustrating, boring and slow advancing to the outcome.

Megan (Elisabeth Harnois) is still grieving her twin sister Sofie's suicide. She goes to her family's Louisiana house with friends Christian (Shawn Ashmore), Zoe (Amanda Seyfried), Mark (Matt O'Leary) and Alicia (Hilarie Burton). She befriends local Nick. She feels a presence imagining it to be Sofie. With the Solstice coming, she hopes to reconnect with her but finds a darker secret.Daniel Myrick who brought the world The Blair Witch Project is going with a more traditional horror movie. Without a gimmick, he gives few scares and little suspense. This one stars some pretty good actors. Although I like all the actors, the characters have little chemistry. This is more due to a very bland script. The ghost story has very few scary moments. The reveal lacks any tension or satisfaction. If not for the likable actors, I wouldn't care about anything in this movie. It is simply forgettable. Nothing annoying or offensive. Just bland.

I personally felt that the story had some familiarity but also a bit of originality to it as well. The acting was reasonable for a teen crew, cinematography was good, and the score was eerie enough to keep it interesting. I agree with another poster who said this was more a mystery movie than a horror movie and it definitely had a "noir-ish" atmosphere to it. Also - completely irrelevant, but did anyone else think that Elisabeth Harnois looks like Taylor Swift?I watched the movie from a R1 DVD with 5.1 audio (released by Alliance) and thought the mix was quite good. The DVD itself is pretty bare-bones with no real special features other than an audio commentary; kind of disappointing as it would have been neat to see a featurette on New Orleans post-Katrina in the area the movie was filmed. I couldn't help thinking of "The Skeleton Key" - another mystery/suspense movie filmed in New Orleans as well.

We have here another thriller in which a bunch of young people head out into the middle of nowhere and find themselves stuck in a "scary" situation. What I will say in favour of this movie is that at least it avoided the cliché of having some type of cannibalistic mass murderer out to get them (a cliché that was actually mentioned by one of the characters when they met up with the creepy old guy from the other side of the lake.) In this case, we have young Megan, still tormented by the suicide of her twin sister six months before, heading off with a bunch of her friends on their annual trip to celebrate the summer solstice in the Bayou of Louisiana. Why they do this wasn't entirely clear to me, except that Megan's mom is some sort of anthropologist or something who specializes in culture and so apparently they celebrate every holiday known to humanity (which is a pretty nice gig if you can get it!) Once they're in the Bayou, Megan starts to have visions which she thinks are of her sister, and she discovers in a magazine (quite conveniently) that the summer solstice is the perfect time to contact the dead. She also conveniently runs into a local hunk of a grocery store clerk who happens to know how to contact the dead because his grandmother was involved in voodoo. I'm not kidding.Now, as truly silly as that all seems, I have to say that, while it's full of mostly forgettable (although not bad) performances, this movie isn't terrible. There's a pretty decent buildup of the intrigue and suspense until the final secret which finally connects both Megan's visions and the creepy old guy is revealed, but you do have to get through a lot of pretty cliché type situations to get there. As a timewaster this isn't bad, but if you want a really good thriller, this is not going to satisfy at all. 5/10