The Manor

The Manor establishes itself as a solid piece of paranoia horror.

With its tight structure, adequate level of suspense and inventive plot, The Manor more than fulfills the requirements of a thrilling horror flick. But its clumsy and at times repetitive script, along with its beautiful but predictable cinematography, kept me from feeling fully immersed in Belgian writer-director Axelle Carolyn’s project.

Director Axelle Carolyn maintains a pleasingly teasing rhythm so it’s a pity that, as the sprightly nursing-home gothic fun winds up, it descends into Scooby Dooish over-explication.

Despite some flat cinematography and borderline goofy special effects, The Manor gives us a distinctive 70-year-old woman as its protagonist and a twisty ending sure to polarize.

As with most of the Welcome To The Blumhouse movies, The Manor has flaws that could probably be attributed to scant resources and a quick turnaround time.

The premise isn’t thoroughly uncomfortable so much as it is simply tedious; Barbara Hershey’s focal character Tabitha is made to appear more and more helpless in the film’s scant psychological thrills, and yet we’re stuck with a flat anxiety for a feature's length.

Of all the films to be released in the Welcome to the Blumhouse anthology, The Manor was the one that had given me the most hope, and sadly it turned out to be one of the most disappointing. The proposal with Barbara Hershey as the lead, and with a story that takes place in a nursing home, sounded pretty good, but The Manor makes the mistake that even with its short duration, it takes a long time to tackle its twist, and when you find out about it, it's very late, because the way in which the concept is brought to life is quite boring, and it's far away from any horror perception. At its climax, it becomes almost a comedy, both for the bad performances and for how painful it feels in terms of resolutions. What a waste.

(Mauro Lanari) Harmless "Dorian Gray" lacking in inventiveness. That's all.

With the aging Boomers, nursing homes have become the settings for more films, including these 3 recent ones: Queen Bees (awful), Poms (awful), I Care a Lot (clever). That last one is the closest to this film because it trades on the same paranoia that comes from becoming a helpless senior in one of these homes. Barbara Hersey moves into the titular residence, only to suspect that something sinister is happening. This Blumhouse production trades in the familiar spooky themes, but the holes in the logic and the predictable plot interfere with any suspense. Meanwhile, the pedestrian direction never lends itself to any real scares.