Heartless

Unpredictability isn't this horror film's strength, but it's stylishly crafted and excellently acted, and it boasts an abundance of heart in every sense of the word.

There's more mood than matter here, but suspenseful atmospherics effectively distract from minor plot holes.

Heartless gets progressively better as it goes along, and benefits from a poignant late cameo from Timothy Spall as Sturgess' beloved father, but it never recovers from a dull first hour.

A supernatural take on "Death Wish" meets "Faust," Heartless is an uneasy mixture of B-movie shocks, social commentary and sentimentality that shows a potent imagination at work.

Best appreciated for its sustained creepy vibe and sporadically arresting images, Heartless moves from one outré moment to another, from one self-conscious allusion to the next ("Donnie Darko" and "Taxi Driver"). It doesn't go anywhere special or much of anywhere, though it goes there in appreciably icky style.

Heartless seems eternally at war with its own genre, unwilling to succumb to bloody mayhem yet neither smart nor coherent enough to transcend horror convention.

This is the art-house equivalent of a Clive Barker splatterfest, punctuated by mildly amusing stabs at Lynchian absurdity and compromised by an incoherent plot twist that would leave M. Night Shyamalan rolling his eyes.