The female characters are badly underserved in this story of an off-the-rails brother and sister that gravitates around the monstrous men
“Your dad kept you locked up in an old house,” a character drunkenly blurts out in this adaptation of Kelly Braffet’s gothic novel about childhood misery and brother-and-sister incest. “It’s soooo Flowers in the Attic.” If only! The most shocking thing about this movie is how stale and lifeless it is, as if entire scenes had been placed into a vacuum storage bag, zipped up, and sucked of all energy and human feeling.
Set in the 1990s, it begins in rural
Pennsylvania where 16-year-old Josie (Olivia DeJonge) and her older brother Jack (Alex Neustaedter) have been raised in a spooky old house by their physics professor father (William Fichtner). He’s a violent pompous drunk who homeschools the kids rather than sending them to “the idiot factory” local high school. In a few flatly acted scenes, he rants grandiosely about his university colleagues and hurls crockery at his children.