The Cradle - a Movie Review

The Cradle is a 2007 thriller starring Lukas Haas and Emily Hampshire. Lukas stars as Frank, an author who has moved his wife Julie and child to a small isolated town for a fresh start with his family. Soon creepy things start to happen to Frank. The DVD box cover reads that "driven by terrifying nightmares of torture that comes true Frank begs a local midwife Helen to care for Sam as he desperately searches for a way to stop the curse on his family. When he discovers that they are being tortured by the vengeful spirit of a child that was buried alive years earlier, Frank is pushed to the brink of madness as he tries to stop he ghost and save his dying family." Warning: I do spoil the plot of this movie in my review.

I thought this movie was going to be a creepy thriller with ghosts. When am I ever going to learn not to trust movie box covers. As usual the box cover is completely misleading. The movie is not about a vengeful spirit. Instead it is about a wife dealing with post-partum depression and a father going insane.

I did not like the movie at all. It moved extremely slowly. The lighting in the movie was terrible. I am sure that was done on purpose to make the movie spooky but really it just made the characters hard to see. The scenes of the baby in constant peril were just too much. After the baby in the oven scene I was ready to shut the movie off.

So really Frank was never haunted by a vengeful spirit. He went mad with grief over the loss of his wife and child. He imagined that both his wife and child were alive when they were actually dead. I think the only ghost was Julie who was trying to tell her husband that she was dead. Julie killed her baby and then jumped off a cliff to kill herself. She was dead and Frank just imagined her and their son throughout the whole movie. The director does do a great job at the ending tying all the parts together. But I still hated the movie. I give it 1 out of 5 stars.