A father and his three kids are moving into a new house. The price is surprinsingly low for such a beautiful mansion, what’s the catch? Well, the real state agent forgot to mention that the house belonged to a medium in the 1800 and appears to be have been haunted since…

Slamming doors, broken glass and an hormonal teenager, everything is there to make your typical haunted mansion movie. Yet, The Remains manages to reach the sweet spot between haunted cliches and heavy dramas. The movie starts with a pretty strong scene and brings us to the conclusion with a decent rythm, avoiding a common flaw in that genre: needlessly long scenes.
Even if the Remains is not the creepiest of them all, it certainly manages to create the right ambiance. It even gave me an eerie feeling before going to bed, and that isn’t an easy feat to accomplish, especially after the hundreds of haunted house movies I’ve already seen.

A young journalist gets obsessed with the disappearances of several tourists in the fictional Polish village of Alvania. Despite her boss’ disapproval, she drags her boyfriend and intern along on an adventure that quickly changes into an unexpected struggle against a mysterious kind of evil.

Despite its’ bad rating, I think that “The Shrine” deserves more credit than granted for. It’s a sincerely original and frightening movie with the right amounts of suspense and gore. The effects were credible and the fact that there were no subtitles during the Polish scenes added to the growing tension in the movie. These people must have felt clueless, living such a creepy adventure and having no idea of what those angry locals were talking about, especially when things turn out for the worst. I don’t want to spoil anything further, but if you like movies about European vacations gone wrong, you’ll enjoy this one. Watch The Shrine and I assure you that you will be scared.