A brilliant young violinist inherits the music of her estranged father, a mysterious composer, but it leads her down the path to darkness ...
Curious case of an ordinary tale with extraordinary potential. I was looking forward to a cinematic treatment of an evil phenomenon in music, but it didn't go there in the end, although I do think the idea was covered in the score.
Instead, we get a traditional story with a puzzle in the symbolologicaltastic manner of Dan Brown - clever, but not enlightening, and nothing that couldn't have been dealt with in a 60m TV episode.
The performances are good, with an odd difference in height between the two leads. There is material for the actors to get their teeth into, but the characters remain fairly simple, despite the dark past of family estrangement (the mother's story wasn't followed up) and alcoholism. I'm also thinking of the housekeeper, who really just shows up for exposition - in a film noir or in David Lynch she would serve several purposes at once and deepen our unease, focus the drama.
The cinematography is quality. Not so sure about the direction, and certainly the editing and story line are a bit plain. The opening scene is effective, but had the feel of a first person POV sequence in an old video game. The choice of location at the old mansion was way over the top, immediately raising all sorts of irrelevant questions - it's not Dracula's Castle!
The evil phenomenon in the music is the Devil's interval, which the lush score hits repeatedly - that unresolved discord made familiar through so many genres of disturbing music, and I hoped the story would somehow turn on this. Hard to say how to do it without ending up as '60s psychedelia, but I think it would need a shift of perception, a shift in the story-telling itself, to provide an interval in reality through which we slide down to Hell. Ahem. You know what I mean. But not this time.
Overall: Good production, but lack of depth in the story.
