Welcome to the Haunted House of Sleep
There are horror movies that make your heart race, horror movies that make you scream, and then there’s The Remains—a movie that makes you question your life choices and your caffeine intake. Written and directed by Thomas Della Bella, this 2016 film is what happens when a director watches The Conjuring and says, “But what if… absolutely nothing happened for 90 minutes?”
This isn’t so much a haunted house movie as it is a sleep aid wrapped in cobwebs. It’s the cinematic equivalent of an abandoned attic full of mildly cursed leftovers.
The Plot: Ghosts by the Numbers
The film opens in 1891, because every ghost apparently has a Victorian origin story. A couple visits a spiritualist, Madame Addison, to contact their dead daughter. As usual, things go wrong—candles flicker, people scream, demons RSVP late—and everyone dies.
Fast forward to the present day, where John (Todd Lowe), a widower and father of three, buys the same house, presumably because Zillow doesn’t include “site of mass demonic slaughter” in the listing. He moves in with his teenage daughter Izzy and two younger kids, Victoria and Aiden, all of whom are apparently allergic to common sense.
Soon, the kids find an old chest in the attic—because horror movie children never find, say, a box of Beanie Babies. Inside are haunted items: a doll, a camera, a pocket watch, and the faint whiff of disappointment. Each family member conveniently “bonds” with one item, because what’s a family without matching cursed accessories?
Then weird stuff starts happening—or rather, mildly inconvenient stuff. There are whispers, flickering lights, and ominous shadows that look suspiciously like bad lighting. At one point, John dreams about murdering his son, which would’ve been shocking if the dream sequence didn’t move at the pace of a broken metronome.
By the time the ghost of Madame Addison shows up, yawning would be a reasonable audience reaction.
Todd Lowe: The Dad Who Deserved Better
Todd Lowe, best known as the lovable drunk cook from Gilmore Girls, does his best to inject life into a movie that seems actively allergic to it. He plays John like a man perpetually one coffee away from a breakdown. He’s grieving, confused, and apparently blind to every red flag in the house.
When his children find dusty, demonic relics in a century-old attic, he doesn’t call a priest or even a plumber. Instead, he shrugs and says, “Neat, a pocket watch!” as if possession is just another stage of grief.
By the time John realizes the house might be haunted, the furniture has already filed for emancipation.
The Kids: Young, Innocent, and Shockingly Chill About Ghosts
Victoria and Aiden, the youngest children, are the kind of horror movie kids that make you reconsider birth control. They discover a creepy doll and immediately treat it like a surrogate mother. When lights flicker or whispers echo, they stare blankly as if haunted by nothing more than bad Wi-Fi.
Victoria faints, Aiden zones out, and together they bring the same emotional energy as a wet paper towel. Later, when they become possessed, there’s no real difference—you could swap their pre-possession dialogue with their demonic dialogue, and nobody would notice.
Izzy, the eldest, fares no better. She’s too busy being a stereotypical moody teenager to care that her siblings are turning into extras from The Exorcist Jr. Her main contribution to the plot is looking vaguely annoyed until everyone’s dead.
Madame Addison: The Least Motivated Demon in Cinema History
Every haunted house needs a good villain. The Amityville Horror had its malevolent presence. Insidious had the Lipstick-Face Demon. The Remains has… Madame Addison, a spirit so underwhelming she makes Casper look ambitious.
Maria Olsen gives her best “I read the script five minutes ago” performance. She drifts through scenes like a ghost who’s clocking overtime. Her motivation? Unclear. Her powers? Inconsistent. Her vibe? Spirit Halloween clearance bin.
She kills people, but not before giving them ample time to monologue or faint dramatically. For a supernatural being supposedly fueled by dark energy, she moves with the urgency of a DMV clerk.
The Atmosphere: IKEA Haunted Collection
Visually, The Remains tries very hard to look like a horror film. The lighting is dim, the house creaks ominously, and the color palette is washed in blue-gray misery. Unfortunately, style only works when paired with substance. Here, every frame feels like a stock photo titled “Mild Unease in Suburbia.”
The haunted house itself is so generically spooky it could double as a Spirit Halloween backdrop. Creaking floors? Check. Old mirrors? Check. A mysterious attic filled with cursed objects and zero logical explanation for why no one’s cleaned it in a century? Check and double check.
The production design screams “haunted on a budget.” Even the jump scares feel factory-produced—cheap, predictable, and accompanied by that one violin screech sound effect horror editors love like it’s oxygen.
The Script: A Seance with No Signal
Thomas Della Bella’s script reads like it was cobbled together from every haunted house cliché available at a yard sale. The dialogue is robotic, the pacing sluggish, and the scares telegraphed from miles away. Characters make decisions so stupid you half-expect the ghosts to roll their eyes.
Lines like “We need to stick together” and “There’s nothing in the attic” are delivered with the enthusiasm of an audiobook about drywall. Even the emotional moments—like John’s grief for his dead wife—are undercut by clumsy writing.
At one point, John dreams of murdering his son with a hammer, wakes up sweating, and immediately goes back to making breakfast. It’s that kind of emotional consistency that makes you root for the ghosts.
The Final Act: Burn the Chest, Burn the Script
When the climax finally arrives (around minute 80, though it feels like 300), the movie tries to go full demonic showdown. The possessed kids beat up their dad, the chest of cursed knick-knacks gets burned, and Madame Addison kills everyone anyway—because apparently this ghost hates happy endings.
The whole thing plays out with the intensity of a school play about haunted furniture. Even the big “twist”—that the curse resets when the next family moves in—isn’t a twist at all. It’s a shrug disguised as a plot device.
By the time the final scene fades out, you’re left with one haunting question: Why did I watch this instead of napping?
The Verdict: Demons, Dolls, and Dullness
The Remains is what happens when someone feeds The Conjuring through a photocopier until all the ink runs out. It has ghosts, creepy objects, traumatized families—all the ingredients of a decent horror film—but no flavor, no tension, and no bite.
It’s not terrifying; it’s tranquilizing. The only “remains” by the end are your lost 90 minutes and your will to live.
If this movie were a haunted object, it wouldn’t possess you—it would just sit quietly on your shelf, collecting dust and wondering why nobody’s scared.
Verdict:
⭐️½ out of 5.
A lifeless parade of clichés with all the horror of a lukewarm séance. If ghosts are real, they probably left halfway through this movie out of sheer boredom.
