But the most disturbing facet of this intensely disturbing film is, as is often the case with great horror, one of cruelty. When you think about it, it's actually kind of obvious that all horror is about cruelty: "Look at what we're doing to your precious status quo. Look at what we're doing to everything you believe. We're destroying it. We're destroying you." But this is a different status quo than that of the small towns and suburbs that are so often the locus of horror. I'm not referring to the traditional business wherein the kids who smoke pot and fuck get chopped to pieces by the masked killer--no, not at all. This isn't rebellion that's being punished by the motiveless agent of horror--it's a whole new status quo that's being destroyed, one of leveling, of comfort, an "I'm OK, You're OK" world. Our hero, Rachel, is a foul-mouthed absentee parent who has her son Aidan call her by her first name. The kid's father, who Rachel insists must "grow up," talks to Aidan as though they're on the same level: "I just don't think I'd be a good father," he explains to the little boy the same way he'd explain it to Rachel, or to one of his buddies. Moreover, Rachel views the terrifying supernatural occurrences that befall her as a mystery she can solve, preferrably with comforting life-lessons about love and acceptance. She believes that heartless psychiatric workers and a domineering, abusive patriarch are to blame for it all, and that the murderous "sickness" that has infected her world can be soothed away through understanding. The filmmakers aid us in buying into this, slowly transforming the movie into a relatively traditional beat-the-clock mystery.

In the end, though, we understand nothing.

I won't go into it any more than that--I don't want to spoil this film, which should be viewed as unspoiled as possible--except to say that depictions of evil and malice as purposeless and uncompromising as this one are rare, perhaps mercifully so. Mockeries of goodness, of the soporific means of understanding the presence of badness in our world that we feed ourselves, are rarely this vicious, this unrelenting, this frightening. We're scared, alright. And we're more scared still, because we've been shown that the presence of that which scares us will never, ever end.