Review of Soulmate

Soulmate (I) (2013)
3/10
Hello, I'm a ghost! Look at my white face! Awfully sorry for scaring you back there!
14 August 2014
To be honest, Soulmate is a semi-decent film, in an escapist-fantasy-about-vulnerable-woman-who-meets- unattainable-man sort of way, but what it's not by any stretch of the imagination, is a horror film. And it's this fact that kind of makes it a victim of its own construction; the slow build of the first third (which is both effectively creepy and unsettling) ends up working against the film by setting a tone that the leads the big "reveal" and it's fallout to seem utterly silly and laughable. It's literally like Emily Bronte started a ghost story, and then it was picked up and finished by an aspiring self published YA author who's done too much Twilight fan fiction. What starts with one set of audience promises, just dives into a Gothic soap opera which aside from being a crippling disappointment, I found impossible to take seriously. If the film had launched straight in with the "reveal" (which it could easily have done without losing anything in terms of the narrative), I think it would have set a bar it could have sustained and been a reasonably engaging fantasy drama. As it stands, though it's just a very disjointed and untraditional ghost story that pulls in two directions and doesn't really succeed in getting anywhere in either.
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