Dream House is a 2011 American psychological thriller film directed by Jim Sheridan and starring Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, Naomi Watts, and Marton Csokas. It was released on September 30, 2011, in the United States and Canada by Universal Pictures and Morgan Creek Productions. Upon release, Dream House was panned by critics. The film was released by Warner Bros. in international markets.
Video Dream House (2011 film)
Plot
Will Atenten returns home to his wife and daughters. His wife is increasingly uneasy due to a series of events, including their daughters seeing a strange man outside their home.
Will tries to enlist the help of the local police but they appear strangely unwilling to assist. He also approaches one of his neighbours who seems apprehensive. He decides to conduct his own investigations and in doing so finds out that he is a mental patient who recently left a psychiatric hospital and then a halfway house and his real name is Peter Ward. Five years earlier, his wife, Libby, (Rachel Weisz) and daughters Trish and Dee Dee were murdered at their home. During the attack, Peter was shot in the head, and so he has no memories of the murders. Instead, he has created a fantasy world in which his wife and daughters are fine. He created a new identity for himself in order to cope with the grief of his family's death. In his fantasy, he is a successful book publisher named Will Atenten based on his inpatient ID band W1ll 8-10-10.Peter moves back to his abandoned old house and lives inside. It is boarded up and unsafe and covered with graffiti, but in Peter's disturbed mind, the house is gorgeous and his wife and kids live there happily.
The audience learns that everything that has occurred up to this point in the movie was just fantasy. He is informed by the doctors that he claimed he was innocent. He returns to his house, which is actually abandoned and decrepit, and converses with the projections of his wife and daughters, who claim that they believe in his innocence.
His neighbour Ann (Naomi Watts), reaches out to him. Ann believes in his innocence and encourages Peter to live a new life in order to heal himself. Peter eventually decides to return to his old house to confront his memories and, with Ann's help and support, realizes that he did not kill his family. It was a local man named Boyce (Elias Koteas), who broke into the house and shot Peter's family.
Peter and Ann are suddenly attacked by Boyce and Ann's ex, Jack, who reveals that he had hired Boyce to kill Ann so he could get revenge against her for divorcing him. Boyce got into the wrong house and accidentally killed Peter's family. Jack decides to kill Ann and set the house on fire, framing Peter for her murder, and shoots Boyce as punishment for his early failure. As they try to ignite a fire, Peter escapes, overpowers Jack and saves Ann. Boyce douses Jack in gasoline in revenge for being shot, but Jack shoots him in the head before being consumed by the flames.
While Ann and Chloe reunite, Peter confronts the ghosts of his wife and children, who forgive him and say goodbye. Peter escapes, having finally discovered the truth and gained inner peace.
One year later, Peter has returned to New York City and published a book called "Dream House," using his real name, Peter Ward, about his recent experiences.
Maps Dream House (2011 film)
Cast
- Daniel Craig as Will Atenton / Peter Ward
- Rachel Weisz as Elizabeth 'Libby' Atenton
- Claire Geare as Katherine 'Dee Dee' Atenton
- Taylor Geare as Beatrice 'Trish' Atenton
- Naomi Watts as Ann Patterson
- Marton Csokas as Jack Patterson
- Rachel G. Fox as Chloe Patterson
- Elias Koteas as Boyce
- Jane Alexander as Dr. Fran Greeley
- Brian Murray as Dr. Medlin
Production
Director Jim Sheridan reportedly clashed with Morgan Creek's James G. Robinson constantly on the set over the shape of the script and production of the film. According to the Los Angeles Times, Sheridan tried to take his name off the film after being unhappy with it and his relationship with Morgan Creek Productions.
Reportedly, Sheridan, Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz disliked the final cut of the film. The trailer, cut by Morgan Creek Productions, came under fire for revealing the main plot twist of the film.
Soundtrack
The score to Dream House was composed by John Debney and conducted by Robert Ziegler. Christian Clemmensen, reviewer of Filmtracks.com, gave it four out of five stars, declaring it "among the biggest surprises of 2011" and stating, "It's not clear how badly Debney's work for Dream House was butchered by the studio's frantic last minute attempts to make the film presentable, but Debney's contribution does feature a cohesive flow of development that is, at least on album, a worthy souvenir from this otherwise messy situation." The soundtrack was released 11 October 2011 and features fifteen tracks of score at a running time of fifty-six minutes.
Reception
The film was not screened in advance for critics and was critically panned. On review aggregation Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 6% based on 83 reviews, with a rating average of 3.7/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Dream House is punishingly slow, stuffy and way too obvious to be scary." Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average rating to reviews, gives the film a score of 35 out of 100, based on 16 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".
References
- Content in this article was copied from Dream House (film) at the Universal Monsters wiki, which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (Unported) (CC-BY-SA 3.0) license.
External links
- Official website
- Dream House at Box Office Mojo
- Dream House on IMDb
Source of article : Wikipedia
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