After his wife (Irving) dies suddenly, David Callaway (DeNiro) packs up 9-year-old Emily (Fanning) and moves to the country to get some air. A psychiatrist (Janssen) thinks Emily's new obsession with an imaginary friend is almost to be expected after the trauma, but things soon get out of hand as "Charlie" starts playing some pretty macabre games.

Polson clearly has an early-DePalma obsession (pun intended), as he saturates the film with furious colour, lurid camera work and dense orchestrations. Subtext is the name of the game--red herrings, furrowed brows and the expectation that something supernatural is going to rip through the walls at any moment. There's even an eerie music box playing a sinister version of "Mockingbird". All of this creates a wonderfully moody atmosphere, combined with Fanning's twitchy, dark-wigged performance and DeNiro's gloomy sulking.

With such a blatantly silly thriller, it's probably nit-picking to raise the logic question (why, for example, does a man with one child buy "the biggest house on the lake"?), but these things jolt us out of the story. It also doesn't help that Fanning is laughably made up to look like a demon from hell--all dark mascara and sallow cheeks. Or that the artful atmospherics are actually rather dull and pointless, building to a tedious thriller finale that's impossible to care about.

But Polson (Swimfan) is good at keeping us hooked, and in the absence of a solid story he just piles on suspense for suspense's sake alone, with glimpses of sharp implements, lighting tricks, musical jolts, shadowy side characters. By the time it erupts into horror-movie chaos, we've begun to chuckle at the film's desperate attempts to unsettle us. Honestly, if Polson wants to truly scare us, he needs to insert at least one thing we haven't seen before.