The Pact

With its unpredictable twists and turns, this low budget horror from a first-time writer-director is an engaging affair. Pity about the Home & Away dialogue, though.

When her mother dies, former junkie and single mum Nicole (Agnes Bruckner) moves into the house to tie up some loose ends. While Skyping late one night, her young daughter innocently asks, 'Who is that behind you?' Nicole spins around but, hey, no one's there. Hmm. Someone had to be there, though, as Nicole disappears that night. Enter estranged sister Annie (Mad Men's Lotz) who tries and piece together the clues to her sister's vanishing and inadvertently digs up buried memories of parental abuse in the process. But when Annie realises she's not alone in the house she asks local cop (Starship Troopers' Van Dien) and spirit guide (Hudson) to help.

Nicholas McCarthy messes about somewhat with horror expectations: the setting is an ordinary house in the suburbs, not a Victorian rectory on a hill outside town, and a lot of scenes take place in broad daylight. Despite the daytime setting, McCarthy's obvious love for ghost stories shine through and the director has a real knack of slowly cranking up the tension.

The spooky bits work and McCarthy gives the proceedings a real mystery, keeping the audience guessing - you'll guess wrong but it's fun guessing anyway – but it's the bits in between, when the characters are asked to voice the dodgy dialogue that things fall down. The Pact gets too Soapy and all momentum slips away. The acting can be on the amateurish side too. With his perfect hair and unshaven chin, Van Dien's cop looks like he came second in a Viggo Mortensen If He Was In Miami Vice lookalike contest, while Lutz looks like she blew away the opposition at the recent Young Gillian Anderson competition.

The ending too is a confusing one. McCarthy panics and fires every idea he has at the screen in the hope that something will work but it just falls apart one silly twist after another. Some subplots are left hanging, and what pact is the title referring to remains the mystery.