The Messengers

The Solomon family moves to a farm in North Dakota to plant sun flowers, after they have had a rough time of it in Chicago for the last two years. The father lost his job and the daughter got into trouble back there.

The house they bought with their last money is, unsurprisingly, haunted by the ghosts of a family that died there. There are ominous shadows in the background and the daughter and her toddler brother seem to be the only ones seeing them - the teenage girl terrified by them, the boy having a blast.

When a mysterious stranger shows up and stays on to work on the farm, nothing much seems to happen for months, however. Then suddenly the visions come back with a vengeance. Nobody believes the teenager, however, as she is a known troublemaker.

In the end, it turns out that the farm hand was involved in causing all of the trouble back in the day, he was actually the father that did away with his entire family and loses it one day, after he has been attacked by the ever present crows. He suddenly cannot tell the new and old family in the house apart and tries to kill his all over again.

There are a lot of eye-rolling moments in this, mostly about the philosophizing of the farm hand and a local teenage boy. The scares are kind of interesting. The film also gives Kirsten Stewart an opportunity to show off the entire range of her acting.

Yes, I was being sarcastic just then.

Why the ghosts would be called "messengers" is not ever addressed. They don't appear to be giving any messages to anybody, unless you interpret their weird behavior in trying to scare the hell out of people and possibly trying to kill them as warnings. Come to think of it, though, the  crows on the farm are the probably the messengers.

Maybe we get confirmation in the sequel. Yes, there is a sequel! Part two at least bears the promise of some serious eye candy in the form of Norman Reedus. The only saving grace in part one was William B. Davis (the cigarette smoking men from The X Files).

4/10