Marsh Harm
Successful children's novelist Claire Holloway (Gabrielle Anwar - Try to Remember) finds her self plagued by a recurring nightmare surrounding a small girl running from a farm building into a marsh at night. With the creepy dream getting progressively worse her therapist recommends to Claire she needs to confront it. So when she spots the house from her nightmares on a TV report she tracks it down and hires it out. As the nightmares start to manifest themselves in the real world she gets the help of local historian Noah Pitney (Louis Ferreira) and paranormal investigator Geoffrey Hunt (Forest Whitaker - Panic Room) to try and help her understand what is going on and her connection to it all.
There are two remarkable things about "The Marsh" one is that Forest Whitaker whose considerable talents as an actor are wasted and the other is that Gabrielle Anwar is very attractive. Ignore those two things and "The Marsh" is nothing more than familiar territory, a woman with nightmares, a scary little girl, a scary house, ghosts and a creepy man. Basically it feels like an American version of a Japanese horror as it has all the elements.
But the trouble is that "The Marsh" is nothing more than another one of these horrors, it makes some mistakes, it has some cliche dialogue as well as flat characters but it isn't terrible. Now for creepy horror virgins it probably works well and director Jordan Barker along with cinematographer David Perrault deliver plenty of creepy footage of spooky things going on in the dark, from flashing lights to blood oozing from stain glassed windows but it is nothing which hasn't been done before.
In the end the best things about "The Marsh" is Gabriel Anwar who gets to over act being scared and Forest Whitaker who even when he is coasting with a flat character is still entertaining to watch. But this is certainly not a movie which tests either as actors and unfortunately the supporting cast ends up blending in to the background.
What this all boils down to is that "The Marsh" has a problem and it is that it is just another creepy house/ creepy ghost story and so ends up far too similar to other and better movies. It isn't terrible but neither is it memorable.
