The Messengers
The Messengers
PG-13 | 02 February 2007 (USA)
The Messengers Trailers

When the Solomons trade in the craziness of big-city life for the quiet of a North Dakota farm, little do they expect the nightmare that follows. Soon after arriving, teenage Jess (Kristen Stewart) and her younger brother see terrifying apparitions and endure attacks from a supernatural source. Jess must warn her disbelieving family before it is too late to save them.

Reviews
StunnaKrypto Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.
Softwing Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??
Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.
Skyler Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.
lorcan-61881 The Messengers is a horror film with Kristen Stewart and Dylan McDermott. The film revolves around family,haunted house,dead ghosts,wow! how f'in original. The Messengers was a film I probably got in a thrift shop and left in my room and I found it then and decided to watch it as an original horror film that could be worth it..boy,f*****g was it..The Messengers is a boring horror film that has terrible acting considering it has good actor Dylan McDermott who i was actually depending on to make this film good but instead,was a boring actor who played your usual uh..dad. The Messengers is a boring,not good,very UNoriginal horror film
alfiecycling Spoiler Alert !!It's a pleasant horror movie, that is to say, it isn't very scary.Basic outline is; the Solomons', a family of four, move into a house in North Dakota that is scary looking from the get-go that was previously owned by the Rollins family who most towns-people think just moved.this movie has a very good cast. there appears to be a deliberate act to unify a story-line using symbolism and biblical names.in this movie we see many ravens and they usually represent death and darkness.we also see many Sunflowers. the Sunflower in Greek mythology symbolizes unrequited love. a water nymph named Clytie was in love with the Sun God Apollo. She eventually was turned into a Sunflower and watched him traverse the sky every day. the head of the Rollins family was John and he must not have loved his wife and kids if he killed them.the head of the Solomon household is Roy. Roy can mean King , as in Roi in French. So here we have, King Solomon, the wise man. He, unlike John the previous farm owner, loves his wife and kids and is trying 'to keep his family together.Jessica , the daughter of Roy and Denise, is also a biblical name meaning , God Beholds.the Messenger ghosts have a strange way of reaching out to her... they scare the hell out of her.Their toddler son, who is traumatized from a serious car accident back in Chicago and doesn't speak, is Ben , and that means , son of my sorrow. he and Jessica are the only two people that can see the ghosts.the most glaring flaw in the plot is, why would the messenger ghosts terrify Jessica if their intention was to lead her to the truth ? there are nicer ways to accomplish that. they instead should have terrorized their father, who killed them, and was working for Roy and living in the their barn.the special effect of the concave spoon reflecting the child ghosts was cool. but the pitchfork through the walls was not.so it balances out.I do enjoy listening to commentaries as a rule this one unfortunately had too many people talking. the solution may have been two separate commentaries as some DVD's wisely do. BTW, Dustin is a little too obsessed with his own nipples. but in all fairness, he was good in the movie. and to hear Kristen say, "Sushi in Regina" had me LOL.Lastly, the music score by Joseph LoDuca is perfect and very much influenced by Krzysztof Penderecki's , "Threnody For The Victims Of Hiroshima," a revolutionary piece of music in 1960.
Wizard-8 Even if you haven't seen as many haunted house movies as I have, odds are that you'll frequently have a feeling of deja-vu while watching "The Messengers". Now, I will say that the movie doesn't LOOK bad; for what wasn't a megabudget, it looks reasonably slick and is technically competent. But all the polish can't hide the fact that we have seen all of this before. The opening pre-credits sequence is familiar stuff, the central characters are stock characters, the shock sequences have been done before... the screenplay has absolutely no surprises. Well, except maybe for how it unfolds. Unlike other haunted house movies, this movie often takes its sweet time. For example, more than a THIRD of the movie passes before anyone gets a clue that there are supernatural going-ons in this house. Eventually, you'll start to tell the movie to get on with it because of the deadly combination of familiarity and slow speed. The only audience I can think of for this movie is for young kids who haven't seen a haunted house movie before and are whining to see a horror movie. (The movie isn't particularly graphic, which while may make it okay for kids, will at the same time disappoint die hard adult horror fans used to more graphic stuff.)
Howard Vause As it goes, I'm rather fond of a well used horror cliché (and this movie has the lot) but it's the incoherent storyline which is so bothersome here. How does a film like this ever get made? Why no story editor pointing out the glaring holes in the story? Irritatingly, it really wouldn't have taken that much work to make a decent haunted-house-horror movie of this shambles - the acting, sets, lighting, photography etc. are all perfectly competent. And although the film is never authentically scary, there are plenty of well handled BOO!-made-you-jump moments.But the film is bursting with inconsistencies. By far, the most grievous and unresolved is the function of the ghosts themselves - what is their motivation, dear? Are they Goody Ghosts on a mission to protect the innocent family from The Killer in their midst? Perhaps - but why then keep attacking the nice family with brutal, spooky violence? They're an ugly bunch, so perhaps they are Really Evil Baddie Ghosts, intent on mindless mayhem. So how come they stop "haunting" as soon as they have exacted their revenge on the perpetrator of their own murders? And why would they be EVIL anyway? I mean, they seemed like perfectly nice (if a bit screamy) people when they were alive. And we never did find out who that little monkey ghost thing is which scuttles around the ceiling. The spirit of dodgy CGI perhaps. I could easily (easily) go on.One (of many) lingering mysteries this movie leaves in its' wake is "who are the "The Messengers"?" Are they perhaps those squawky Hitchcockian crows, who flap about the film delivering no clear message of any sort? Or are "The Messengers" those confusingly nasty ghosts? Come to that, what exactly is The Message?Anyway, my message to you - discerning, intelligent connoisseur of horror movies that you are - should be clear enough; don't waste your time on mediocrity, it'll only make you grumpy.