Seriously guys, the ending is not hard to understand.

Maybe you should write a movie.

The ending was easy to understand, but id did NOT explain ANYTHING that happened in the entire movie, really. I thought we were gonna see some sort of manifestation of her powers or something and she'd kill her father and some other ppl...SOMETHING like that! But NOTHING! It was awful and totally unresolved.

I see a lot of posts where people nail a portion of it, but then add something contrived and bogus. It's really not hard to understand what we saw on the screen (which, sadly, doesn't alter the fact that it all really blew).

1. Mystery lady appears and offers Mom & Dad a deal. Most likely it was Mom that said, "Yes!" while Dad just mumbled something like "sure, whatever." Either way, the baby is revived, Mom puts it out of her head for awhile, and dad ignores it, merely happy his kid's alive.

2. Mom tries to "save" her daughter by killing her as she nears 18, and fails.

3. Dad & Molly move away and try to get on with their lives.

4. A bad script allows them to relocate right smack into the middle of a bunch of the devil worshiping idiots who just happen to be "waiting" for her.

5. Molly fills-in most of the movie by acting like a teenage girl in teenage situations. One can only assume this is to lull the audience into a false sense of security so the "big reveal" will mean something. (Fair warning: It doesn't) Insert the occasional "spooky" aspect here and there to remind the audience that the title had the word "haunting" in it. (This, too, will make little sense by the end.)

6. Cut to obligatory "scared protagonist runs around frantically, being betrayed by people the story has established as friendly and/or trustworthy" montage.

7. Poirot, er, I mean, the "evil lady" gathers everyone together in one spot so she can pompously explain everything.

8. Molly, who clearly has been born into a world with a sadistic, contradictory cosmology bearing little resemblance to our own, attempts to use her teenage brain to come up with a solution. She's told she has no "free will" (ironically the one person who believed she did, and had faith, opted to try and kill her as well, proving she herself had no faith in her own beliefs. This is common in modern movies that enjoy making Christians look like idiots because it's apparently the "cool" thing to do). So, not falling for the trick of killing her father (an act that would indeed have been evil and selfish, despite the father's pleas to the contrary), she attempts to sacrifice herself to save her father and prove she's not evil. Sadly, she waited a few seconds too long (which is perhaps what the woman wanted her to do, and may be an additional reason for giving her the dilemma of killing daddy), so her powers, now "active" by the fulfillment of her turning 18 at the arbitrary stroke of midnight, keep her from dying from the blade.

Note that, unless she was actually born at midnight, Satan's clock is a little bit stupid. Apparently it's all about the dates, not the actual time of birth. Those kooky cultists.

9. For dramatic effect, and to avoid the audience laughing too hard at actions and dialogue that would make no sense at all, we skip any further activity with the cultists and Molly, and jump straight to the villainous aftermath. Had we remained in the room, we would have seen Molly take the next step, which would likely have been a sudden realization that A) she's got her as-yet not-described powers now (she's stronger than normal and can't be killed, but that's all we know at this point), B) she's holding a big, nasty knife, C) she's surrounded by evil jerks that have made her life a living hell and destroyed her family, and D) they're still restraining her father. Now, I don't know about you, but it's my assumption that if I ever kicked a dog repeatedly in the ribs that it's not going to crawl over and start licking my face as if I were its dearest friend. In fact, I'm pretty sure that it would either run away whimpering, or turn on me and try to eat my face. The most likely scenario to my mind involves Molly laughing maniacally as she shows them all the meaning of "supernatural teen angst," which is to say, she'd zap, nuke, slice, kick, and punch them all into a vast purple puddle, then carry Dad home and give him some soup.

But no, we're expected to believe that either there is no actual free will in this movie's universe and she truly has been "taken over" against hers, or that she's the dumbest teen girl ever born (and here they'd told us she was "special") and simply believed what she was told, and somehow began acting on the belief, ignoring her own nature. Yep. Shakespeare it's not.

Oh, and regarding the idea that she's possessed. Let's keep a little tidbit in mind, shall we?

This movie's "world" clearly has demons and assorted evil stuff, straight from Satan's armpit. Ok, so we know they went looking for "special" children like Molly, who would someday have "powers" of some sort. There are lots of people in the world that could be possessed, so clearly Molly wasn't just taken over by a demon. They needed a "deal" and a gullible target that would grow up to believe in it. She's still her, just evil now. Why she went over to the dark side, of course, is baffling (my polite way of saying "really frickin' stupid").

Anywho, we now see Dad in the nuthouse, and Molly acting like a junior Stepford Wife, basking in the glow of evil and all the bliss it brings to teens, and, just to make the audience really scared, we briefly see a "Missing" flier blow past showing that her new BFF has vanished without a trace.

Ooooh, spooooky.


10. Jake Weber sues for all copies of this film to be burned.


I need an Alka Seltzer...