everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

I absolutely loved this movie. The visuals are stunning, director and actors are good, audio work is flawless, and the story is really interesting.In my opinion, what makes this a great horror piece is the incredible sense of loneliness the main characters manage to express so well, and the idea of how creepy and sad decadence can be for an isolated family.I've found the water scenes particularly haunting. People with deep water fear could have trouble watching.Only reason I don't give this a 10 is the plot failed to properly justify including the townsfolk in the story. There's also a pointless dream scene, but it's short.

Ireland, early 1920s. Twins Rachael (Charlotte Vega) and Edward (Bill Milner) are twins cursed to live their lives alone in a magnificently gothic mansion, lest they break the rules set by a mysterious presence from generations past. This presence insists that no-one else may enter the dwelling, and that they must be in their beds by midnight. And something mysterious exists beneath the trapdoor.The twins are unfortunately rather defined by their current characteristics - Rachel is headstrong and sensible, and Edward is weird and more subservient to the presence. Apart from that, there's not a great deal in the script or dialogue that allows us to get close to them.The arrival of one-legged Sean (Eugene Simon), a World War 1 veteran who has returned to a village that now spurns him, finds himself attracted to Rachel, and that the feeling is mutual causes an imbalance in her ordered life. David Bradley makes a welcome appearance as solicitor Bermingham, reluctantly on hand to deliver bad news about the twins' financial state.That hoary old cliché 'style over substance' may well apply to 'The Lodgers'. Filmed in one of Ireland's most haunted houses, Loftus Hall, the story takes its time - which is something I have no problem with - but the mansion, village and surrounding locations look breath-taking. Director Brian O'Malley ensures that everything is a scenic as it can possibly be, and that the surroundings strike that perfect balance between beauty and gothic horror. A closed society, living in a resplendent land.Whilst the atmospherics, and Edward's strangeness - as well as Rachael's longing to leave - are handled very effectively, actual scares are thin on the ground. When they do occur, however, they are very well handled. All in all, I really enjoyed this. An elegant, strangely tragic horror excursion.

The Lodgers: Gothic Irish Horror set in a decaying mansion in 1920. Twins Rachel (Charlotte Vega) and Edward (Bill Milner) live alone in this crumbling manor, their parents having committed suicide four years before. Strange entities also dwell in the house and force the twins to follow three rules: they have to be in bed by midnight, no stranger may be admitted to the house, if one of them flees then the life of the other is forfeit. Now they are eighteen and Rachel falls for Seán (Eugene Simon) who has just returned to the local village having lost a leg in WW1.Seán and Rachel are tormented by local yokels who resent his service in the British Army and her ascendency background. But Rachel and Edward are very much in reduced circumstances having to get food on credit from a local shop. A creepy solicitor (David Bradley) arrives and tells them that the house must be sold.The film is perhaps an allegory for the fall of British Rule in Ireland, the manor crumbling like the old institutions, the Anglo-Irish being lodgers but the locals also being lodgers in their own land which they still don't rule. The director (Brian O'Malley and screenwriter (David Turpin, a real life Goth) confirmed this in a Q&A session after the film screening. But in spite of any allegories it is very much a horror film. The twins parents drowned themselves in a lake as did their grandparents and generations before them to atone for some original sin. The question now is whether or not Rachel and Edward will escape the fate which seems to be predestined for them. Ghostly naked figures appear in the mansion, water seeps upwards through a trapdoor to the basement where the entities dwell.Some great scenes of terror as waterbound creatures drag people down and existential terror is expressed through shadows and filtered light in a forest. 8 /10.

Im very fussy about horrors and like many from hellraiser to the descent to The Autopsy of Jane Doe. I dont usually like the watered types of pseudo horror for the masses like Woman in Black. But I did really like Crimson Peak and this movie is similar to that - a great historical setting and very atmospheric. well paced and great set design. It looked gritty & dark. Great acting and the sister was yum. the story is good too. Very good direction. Recommended if you like The Others.