Ever wonder what happens
to someone after they die?
The latest movie from the
Palatine-based production company, CNGM Pictures NFP, shot
entirely in the Chicagoland area, mixes drama with sci-fi suspense
as a family grieving the loss of their mother notices the presence
of an uninvited entity in their home.
"Uninivited",
written, directed and edited by Michael P. Noens (whose directing
credits include "The Legends of Cuba Road" and
"Please Wait to be Seated") is the most complex of their
movies to date. The movie does exhibit some technical issues, for
example, when someone puts down a glass on the table, the
accompanying sound distracts with its loudness in addition to the
score occasionally drowning out the dialogue.
Ray (Palatine resident
John Anthony) loses his wife (Palatine resident Judy Klingner) in
a car accident and must raise his family of three teenagers on his
own. The film focuses on the early days of the greiving process.
Ray grows distant from his children as they struggle to handle the
death while he claims to be "just fine."
The opening sequence uses
hand-held camera technique, which effectively demonstrates the
urgency Ray feels as he rushes to the hospital to find his wife
and son after the terrible accident.
A well-played Alice
(Hoffman Estates resident Colleen Longo), the eldest child,
attempts to step in for her now absent mother after she sees her
father begin to disengage himself from the family.
As their breakfasts and
dinners grow silent, Ray signs up the family to take to a grief
counselor, but he refuses to go with them demonstrating his need
to deal with it on his own.
Lisa (16-year old Kristin
Higgins), the youngest, begins to have encounters with a strange
and mysterious visitor, whom she thinks is her dead mother. In her
superb performance, she never exhibits fright, only curiousity as
she gets drawn closer and closer to the enigmatic figure. She even
stays up all night waiting for it to return. Simon (Hoffman
Estates resident Mark Iverson), the middle child, carries around a
lot of believable emotional baggage from having witnessed his
mother dying in his expertly executed performance. He begins
having blackouts and goes into trances while saying uncanny things
that he can't remember saying, mostly about "killing
her".
Alice must step into a
motherly role to care for her brother and sister, as the father
moves farther and farther away from his parental duties. Noens
does a great job of showing the solitude of each family member's
grief. The family falls apart after the accident.
As the Ashby family
struggles to get through the pain of loosing their wife and
mother, a variety of everyday life issues evolve.
It demonstrates how life
must go on after death, but also how it can stop when people can't
quite move on through their grief. Noens' script and direction
shows how grief affects everyone differently.
With a running time of 125
minutes, the movie suffers. The score detracts from the movie
because, many times, the music does not fit the scene. The
lighting in most scenes is excellent, although in one or two
scenes, it is either so dark that it obscures the actor's face, or
is so bright it's washed out.
The camera angels
throughout the film add to the complexity of the story. Although
the surprise ending came as a shock, it seems some issues went
unresolved.
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