The Messengers

Although Danny and Oxide Pang’s first English-language movie is a cut above most Hollywood supernatural thrillers, it inhabits an awkward aesthetic limbo. A gothic ghost story, it harks back to the stylish creepiness of their breakthrough Hong Kong movie, ‘The Eye’, but is constrained by an over-worked generic plot.Seeking a fresh start, Roy Solomon (Dylan McDermott ) moves with his wife and three kids to a remote North Dakota farm. Drifter John Burwell (John Corbett) helps plant sunflowers and becomes a trusted employee. Then, as harbinger crows swirl about, two of the children see pale-skinned spectres scuttling across the ceiling and floating down hallways. But one stays mute and the other’s visions are dismissed as attention-seeking.Mark Wheaton’s genre-savvy script and the Pang brothers’ fluid visual style generate some powerful scares and involving emotional undercurrents. Yet many of the images feel over-familiar, and the shocks a mite too forced.