More to this mound than meets the eye.

Director: Luiso Berdejo
Starring: Kevin Costner, Ivana Baquero, Samantha Mathis, Sam James, James Gammon

Kevin Costner plays John James, a writer and single father of two children who moves his teenage daughter (Louisa) and young son (Sam) to rural South Carolina after a divorce. In the woods behind the house, the children find a mound of earth… and that’s when things start to get spooky.

Strange noises are heard coming from the woods and Louisa begins to change, she becomes obsessed with the mound behind their house. When her behaviour starts to worry him, her father begins to investigate and discovers that the mound is an Indian Burial Mound and that the house has a rather unsettling history – that may be about to repeat itself.

The New Daughter appears to rely on some tired old classics: and ancient Indian Burial Ground, an adolescent girl on the verge of change… we’ve all seen it before. However, Costner manages to pull a decent performance out of the bag and his mild-tempered style adds to the slowly building tension throughout the film. The atmosphere is constructed well, it is genuinely eerie, and the growing sense of dread is helped by Berdejo employing a less-is-more approach to what we see on screen.

A couple of good scares, decent performances and some very clever cinematography save The New Daughter from being yet another cliché horror/thriller. Worth a see, but it won’t blow you away.

Genre: Horror | Thriller
Age Restriction: PG-13
Runtime: 108 min