![]() ![]() ![]() But she's pretty worked up even before he arrives, wilting from the effort of running errands in the village. ![]() Merricat naturally hates Charles, as he represents a threat to her carefully conceived order of the house. But Sebastian Stan, as the dashing cousin Charles who shows up at the house to woo Constance and make a stab at the family fortune, is never quite able to pull off the duplicitous charm of this strange new interloper. Two men are also in the picture: Crispin Glover is always halfway to disturbed, so he makes a fine Uncle Julian, the girls' dithering relative who was paralyzed by the poison attack and now spends his days obsessively recreating that deadly dinner in his memoirs. Taissa Farmiga plays Merricat with her anxieties front and center, blindly battling a world she doesn't understand, while Alexandra Daddario makes Constance into a beautiful, naive waif whose cluelessness practically renders her a ghost. It's a shame, then, that director Stacie Passon (who previously helmed the erotic drama Concussion) makes the creepy stuff too low-key, less a case of building dread than growing impatience. But any adaptation that can't sell this central hook will put the story's other elements - Constance's sexual repression and the public's simmering hatred of the Blackwoods chief among them - out of whack. ![]() This mystery is tough to render on film, because it's so dependent on the inner mindsets of the characters. ![]()
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