The New Daughter
2010
Luis Berdejo
Following a divorce, John James (Kevin Costner) moves into an old house in the middle of nowhere with his daughter, Louisa (Ivana Baquero) and son, Sam (Gattlin Griffith). The kids decide to explore the nearby woods and come up on a mound. Louisa possesses a strange attraction to it. She keeps returning to it. John discovers her coming home covered in mud, and afterwards she starts acting strange and aggressive. He learns that a formers occupant of the house disappeared under mysterious circumstances and it’s tied to the strange mounds in the woods. As Louise begins to act more and more sinister, John hears things moving through the woods and crawling over his house.
I didn’t expect much from a direct to video release starring Kevin Costner, so it was a pleasant surprise that The New Daughter actually manages to generate some menace. The plot is a little obvious, but Berdejo is good at using Louisa as more of ticking time bomb than a mystery to be solved. Young actors are often the weak points in movies, but both do just fine here. Costner is asked to really do much here expect looked worried for his daughter. The pacing is excellent and the atmosphere is quite ominous. The New Daughter gets the most points with for remembering that it is a horror movie and sometimes that means bad things happening to people who don’t deserve it. This film was better than expected and worth a view sometime when your Netflix queue is tapped out.
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