'she brought something back with her. The sheep started dying'

Everything about this movie was bad: the idea was hackneyed, the casting dreadful, the development of the story hurried and often confusing and without explanation, the characterisation leaving you with absolutely no sympathy for the protagonists who are, with the exception of Sean Bean's character (what was Sean Bean doing in this film? That can't have been cheap), irritating. I like Maurice Roëves as an actor, but his welsh accent slipped into geordie/irish and it's difficult to be fair about the rest of the actors given the rubbish that passed for a script:


And, let's face it, the script was horrible. Example: Adelle: "I thought it was her. But it wasn't". Lets analyse this, shall we? You lost your daughter on the beach, and in the middle of the night you see a girl of identical description running away from your window, and you thought it was your daughter? Take my word for it, no one is going to criticise you for that.

'she brought something back with her. The sheep started dying'. So what? The sheep started dying? That's it? Are they magical, fairy sheep? Can they fly and talk?

Here's a tip: don't kill her, GET RID OF THE BLOODY SHEEP. Just an idea. Or I suppose you could drill holes in your daughter's head. Matter for you.

'I can't open the tin box'. What?! You can't open a bloody tin box?! Tip: GET A TIN OPENER, or a knife, or just smash it to bits. And if you want to make that hole in the wall bigger, put DOWN the tin box, put UP the hammer you were just using. And when it's finally opened, it has a hair brush, photo and some (not described) papers in it. So what was the point in all that then?

and just when you get the the end, having asked yourself every preceding minute 'I should turn this rubbish off and re-arrange the books on that shelf [or some other such task you've been putting off]', the ending is just a mess. How many of you were just like me who, when observing the 'morse code game' played by James and Sarah thought, well, obviously this is going to be important later. And it was, but also, strangely, it wasn't. I wonder if more was made of it in the book? Not that I would, for one moment, ask anyone to read 'sheep'. ('Sheep'. A book called 'Sheep'. As if that wasn't a good enough indicator of the quality of the story therein....)

The only slight chill in the film coming right at the end with the appearance of that masked figure in Annwyn. But by that time you're so intensely annoyed by Adelle you're quite happy for her to spend the rest of her time in eternal torment.

Now, I've been guilty of winding up people on these boards, I'll admit it. Particularly those good anally-inverted people on the 'Lost in Translation' board, but 'The Dark' deserves to be heaped with damnation. It leaves you wondering how it got made in the first place.