My opinion - hard left turns are only cute when they're clever.

This movie really had me, and then it really lost me.

INCLUDES SPOILERS

The whole concept of "nothing you've seen up to now has been real/true" is only cute when it's clever. Like in the Sixth Sense or even The Others, where you're like WOWWWW I COULD HAVE SEEN THIS ALL ALONG BUT I DIDN'T.

With this it was just "hard left turn, this kid is actually a ghost, the main character actually grew up here and forgot her entire childhood, nothing you've seen so far has had anything to do with any of it, and ACTION!".

It's only clever when the story flips the table and you realize you've missed clues. There were no missed clues in this. There were no reasons to presume Tom was a ghost, there was no reason to presume she misremembered her childhood and there was no reason to think at all that she'd been at this house before.

They could have at least bothered to drop a few odd clues in the first half.

So by the time they threw the entire first part of the movie out the window I was like... nope, not buying it anymore... what's next... we've been speaking to aliens all along but that just never came up?

It really is too bad because the acting was great, so was the cinematography and the atmosphere.

Also was kind of taken aback by how blase the movie was about the fact that she was an educated woman who just wrote books and yelled science a lot. Women's access to education was limited to begin with, educated women were rare and fairly shunned, especially if they didn't even study something respectable (like law or medical science) and this movie just glossed over how weird this was in its time.