I was tempted to give this film only 1 star, but some of the actors worked fairly hard at making it credible and the location, the setting, is good. The script is rubbish though. It is not a coherent narrative but many disjointed scenes and events that do not flow, the way a story should. WHAT exactly is the purpose of the daemonic ritual that (accidentally) killed Petal/Isabella? Evidently, something to do with metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls, but WHOSE soul is being moved on and WHY, and into what new body? We are never told. So far as I am aware, the Rosicrucians do not go in for that sort of thing; they just have a lot of harmless, if silly, rituals and ideas - rather like the Freemasons.The female ghost haunted her husband and drove him mad to the point where he jumped out of an attic window. Why? If "he loved her more than life itself" and her death was an accident, this makes no sense. The male ghost appears in broad daylight, wearing modern apparel, desperate to gain entrance to the house. Surely a ghost has to wear the apparel he/she wore when murdered or killed or committing suicide? He also ought to be speaking the English that was spoken in his own lifetime; NOT modern, present-day English. His language would have been the English spoken in Regency times. Did they have the concept of a "local historian" in 1845? These things do annoy me! The writing is unforgivably sloppy in every possible way. The husband is fixated on blood. Why? This is evidently the male ghost possessing him, but why was HE fixated on blood? None of this is clear. The writer has just cribbed bits from every major horror and ghost story, it seems, but sadly, he is unable to give his story a credible voice. The self-driving car sequence is utterly ridiculous, with the symbols written in blood appearing spontaneously all over the car. What is that crouching creature running around in the cellars? How does that fit into the narrative? Why is a disconnected telephone ringing late at night? The Holy Water the ghost whisperer gave to the daughter did not work, as you will discover right at the end. Possibly it would have been more effective had he been permitted by the mother to perform an exorcism. I am amazed that the writer actually made money from this very weak script and that it was filmed at all.
Review of Altar
