Lavender

The screenplay, co-written by Gass-Donnelly with Colin Frizzell, manages to be simultaneously lacking in coherence and utterly predictable, with viewers earning no points for guessing which one of the characters turns out to be the villain.

Boring, derivative, and infuriatingly illogical, Lavender is a ghost story with no thrills, no surprises, and no sense.

"Lavender" means well, but it ultimately proves that not all ghosts need a backstory. Often, just being scary - even inexplicably - is more important than being meaningful.

As old-fashioned as Hitchcock's Spellbound, Lavender presents the unlocking of suppressed horrors as a freeing experience, without the messiness of further analysis.

Leaves no cliché unturned ...

Style trumps substance in this atmospheric and mildly creepy low-budget thriller.

[Abbie] Cornish's strong performance [...] serves as an anchor that keeps this slow-burn thriller [...] from wearing out its welcome before the third-act revelations.

Beyond its unsettling intro, it steadily becomes a middling thriller.

It's not always a tasteful film, eventually making positive accomplishments difficult to track by the third act.

While it succumbs to a lot of clichés that blunt its impact, Lavender shows that there are interesting ways to apply genre elements beyond the bump and chills, and in the service of story about memory, trauma, and resolution.

Lavender won't keep you in suspense long about what's going on. In fact, it won't keep you in suspense at all.