NEVERLAKE (2013)

Studio:       Uncork’d Entertainment
Director:    Riccardo Paoletti
Writer:       Carlo Longo, Manuela Cacciamani
Producer:  Manuela Cacciamani
Stars:     Daisy Anne Keeping, David Brandon, Joy Allison Tanner, Eva MacCallum, Martin Kashirokov, Anna Dalton, Lisa Ruth Anreozzi

Review Score:

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Summary:

A teenage girl uncovers a connection between a dark secret in her family’s past and the ancient mystery of a haunted Italian lake.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

When her mother became sick, Jenny Brooks’ father decided that Jenny should grow up in America with her grandmother Rose. Now 16 years old, Jenny returns to visit her father in Italy for the first time since leaving as a child. Jenny meets her father’s wife Olga, who was Dr. Brooks’ assistant when he was a surgeon.

During her stay, Jenny’s father disappears suddenly for extended periods of time without explanation. Olga also acts strangely and insists that Jenny take a handful of pills daily, claiming they are vitamins.

Jenny takes a walk to the nearby Lake of Idols and meets a young blind girl named Malila. Jenny escorts Malila back to the home for hospitalized children where she lives. Jenny meets the other sick children who reside there with Malila: Anthony, Bill, Aurora, and an aloof older boy named Peter. The children warn Jenny to be wary of adults. Jenny promises to visit again and read the children Shakespeare as well as the poems of Shelley.

On a trip into town, Dr. Brooks tells his daughter about how the Etruscans believed that the Lake of Idols had therapeutic properties. In ancient rituals, the Etruscans threw small bronze consecrated objects into the lake that represented sick persons or parts of the body that needed to be healed. Dr. Brooks leaves Jenny alone while he secretly commissions a shopkeeper to craft a bronze idol for him. Meanwhile, Jenny experiences a series of strange dreams and visions involving the lake as she continues visiting the sick children.

Jenny wakes in a hospital bed. Her father explains that she collapsed due to an adrenal gland infection and had a minor operation. Sedatives are administered so that Jenny is unconscious for the trip back home.

Dr. Brooks picks up the bronze cast of a kidney made for him by the shopkeeper and throws it into the lake. Later that evening, Jenny goes to the lake with the sick children. Peter touches the water and the ghosts of several children appear in the lake’s center. The sick children explain that the spirits of the lake need Jenny to return the statues of them that her father stole from the water.

Jenny tries to get into her father’s study, but the door is kept locked. Peter shows her a way inside and Jenny steals her father’s Etruscan idols. She and Peter go to the lake and Jenny throws the statues into the water.

Jenny returns home and finds a secret room with a sick girl lying in bed. Dr. Brooks and Olga surprise Jenny. Dr. Brooks reveals that the girl in the bed is Jenny’s half-sister Maya. Olga and Dr. Brooks gave birth to Maya four years before Jenny was born. Due to a debilitating disease, Dr. Brooks was only able to keep Maya alive by using the healing powers of the lake. However, Maya has lived her entire life confined in secret to a bed in the Brooks home. Dr. Brooks admits that he impregnated Jenny’s mother so that one day Jenny could provide Maya with her organs. Jenny realizes that Olga and her father removed her kidney when she thought she was in the hospital. As she tries to escape the house, Jenny finds an operating room made to look like a hospital. Olga and her husband capture and sedate Jenny.

Peter comes to Jenny in a vision while she is unconscious. He tells her that she needs to find six bronze objects in the lake and return them to a secret attic room at the children’s home. Jenny recovers and does as Peter asks. Her father tries to stop her, but he ends up drowning in the lake. Jenny recovers the six objects, each in the shape of a body part. As each idol is removed from the lake, Maya’s body begins failing until she ultimately dies. Distraught over her inability to save her dying daughter, Olga ends up being taken away by the police while covered in Maya’s blood.

Jenny returns the objects to the children’s home. There, it is revealed that the afflictions suffered by the children she met were due to body parts stolen from them by Dr. Brooks to save Maya. Inside another room, Jenny finds her mother restrained to a bed. Mother and daughter embrace as the now whole ghost children look on. Jenny’s mother reveals that the afflicted children were actually Jenny’s brothers and sisters.

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Review:

16-year-old Jenny narrates her own story in “Neverlake,” a gothic fairy tale rich in chilling atmosphere.  Born in Italy, Jenny was sent to live with her grandmother in another country after her mother fell ill.  Now a teenager, Jenny is returning to Europe’s boot for the first time as she reconnects with her father, Dr. James Brooks.

James knows a lot about his daughter’s life, including the name of a boy she was involved with, yet the narration is clear that Jenny hasn’t visited Italy since early childhood.  Jenny and James do not appear to be terribly estranged, although their relationship is awkward.  Perhaps he visits her or they stay close another way?  Along with what exactly happened to Jenny’s mother, “Neverlake” is unspecific in a number of details, some of which have story purposes, and some of which set up a core dynamic between Jenny and James with a somewhat hazy family tie.

A former surgeon, Jenny’s father now spends his time collecting artifacts from the nearby Lake of Idols in Arezzo.  Ancient Etruscans believed that the lake had therapeutic properties.  Bronze idols crafted to represent afflicted parts of the body or even entire people were cast into the water as part of a strange ritual to heal the sick.  James is suspiciously secretive about his research, to the point where an ominously locked study door and a short temper when Jenny pokes around hint at a conspiratorial mystery.

Jenny becomes further embroiled in that mystery when she stumbles upon a nearby home for sick children.  Jenny learns from the children that the Lake of Idols not only heals, but it is also haunted.  And the ghosts inhabiting the water want their statues back.  Now Jenny has to figure out how to put the spirits to rest while uncovering the secret of her family’s dark connection to the lake.

The ideas behind “Neverlake” are very good.  The ghost angle blends with real-world history for an authentically unsettling supernatural backdrop.  The other part of the plot involves a body horror drama more grounded in reality.  The mixture of both along with how they weave together creates a “best of both worlds” scenario that makes for an engaging thriller culminating in a highly satisfying conclusion.  Where the plausibility is undercut however, is in some quickie characterizations that come across as convenient cheats meant for particular actions to take place without reasonable explanations.

Actress Daisy Keeping is incredibly charming as Jenny.  Her natural likability reads in her screen presence and establishes a near instant familiarity with her character.  But the screenplay gives her traits that try their hardest to unplug Jenny’s connection to the audience.

For some reason, the word “why?” appears nowhere in Jenny’s vocabulary.  Her stepmother Olga gives Jenny a handful of capsules and tells her they are vitamins that James wants the girl to take.  Rather than verify what they are for, Jenny accepts the pills from the woman she just met and gulps them right down the hatch.  Later, one of the children tells Jenny that she has to be the one to throw the statues back into the lake.  There is a story reason for this, but the eagerness Jenny displays in doing anything anyone tells her without knowing the context distracts from an otherwise likable character.

Not all of the acting is as good as Keeping’s.  David Brandon is well suited as her secretive father, even though their father-daughter bond does not always play as genuine.  But while the young actors playing the sick children look their parts, their acting consists of wooden line reading in performances that are more grimace-inducing than they are believable.  Although the biggest distraction with the supporting cast is a character so obviously modeled to look and to brood like Edward Cullen that anyone with even a passing notion of Robert Pattinson’s appearance will instantly recall “Twilight.”

The story still remains strong throughout the film, and nearly always sustains intrigue even when the script moves too neatly from one beat to the next.  In one instance, James and Olga keep strict tabs on Jenny and go to great pains to keep their secret hidden from her.  Then the only time they finally leave her alone in their house is immediately after the children explain that Jenny needs to break into her father’s study.  Similarly, to provide closure on one thread, the police arrive at a particular location in a situation where it makes no rational sense that they would have been the first responders, if they would even have been called at all.  “Neverlake” instead puts its focus on meatier matters, but it is not as smart as it could be in justifying how all of its pieces sensibly fit together.

“Neverlake” earns a great deal of mileage from its Italian scenery of cobblestone roads, Tuscan villas, and dreary landscapes.  Some of that atmosphere relies overmuch on classic horror imagery like creepy dolls, static on a television, and dream sequences, but it still works to complement the setting.

This may have been due to seeing the film on a screener DVD provided by the distributor, but the version I viewed had a fair amount of color desaturation.  At first, the bleak palette amplified the dreamlike tone of the movie.  After awhile, the energy being sapped from the colors stole a great deal of vibrancy from the scenery.

With moderate tweaking to deepen character development, and cleverer motivations to explain some puzzling behavior, “Neverlake” might have been a true stunner.  As is, the film is still an effectively eerie blend of classic ghost story and modern medical horror mystery, as well as an impressive first narrative feature from director Riccardo Paoletti.  But a handful of cut corners in the script have “Neverlake” coming up just shy of landing a complete knockout punch.

Review Score:  65

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