The New Daughter
starring Kevin Costner, Samantha Mathis, Ivana Baquero and Gattlin Griffith
screenplay by John Travis
directed by Luis Berdejo
Rating: ♦♦♦♦◊
Called “Nest” in Japan, The New Daughter is based on a short story of the same name by John Connolly. It is about human female puberty and competition between opposing sexually mature females in a close community. “Nest” is actually a better title than The New Daughter, so I will call it Nest instead. You have to imagine a bee hive or an ant colony harboring a single queen. Alternately, it could be called The Mound, because it features evil emanating from an old Indian burial mound on a man’s rural South Carolina property. Monsters come out of the mound to have their way with his young teenage daughter, like incubi. - demons sexually pursuing human females in their dreams.
It also bore some resemblance to the Joaquin Phoenix, Mel Gibson movie Signs (2002), only better: a lot of scary things going Bang! and Bump! in the dark. Only Signscould not pull it off very well. I mean, it was a typically underwhelming M. Night Shyamalan movie, unfocussed almost to the point of mediocrity.
Both films feature a single father caring for his two children in an isolated house when aliens (Signs) or monsters (Nest) come calling in the night. The horror was too slow to get going, and I wasn’t satisfied with the ending. I wanted a more Disney ending.
Costner is too slow to understand that something wrong is going on with his daughter in their new home. Then when the pace of the horror picks up he’s always dangerously behind the learning curve. Consequently I found myself doing what I do more and more these days, yelling my advice to the actors on the TV screen like this,
“Look behind you!”
“Lock the door!”
“Call the police now!”
“Dial 911!”
“Don’t wait. Reload now!”
“Why don’t you call the police already?”
“Get out now!”
It makes me feel good.
Later I had scary monster dreams.
I like Samantha Mathis. She used to be hot, but she’s still warm.