Down a Dark Hall

Based on Lois Duncan’s novel, Down a Dark Hall follows AnnaSophia Robb’s Kit Gordy as she encounters mysterious happenings within a remote boarding school run by Uma Thurman’s sinister Madame Duret. Filmmaker Rodrigo Cortés, working from a script by Michael Goldbach and Chris Sparling, delivers a seriously unimpressive thriller that establishes its less-than-captivating sensibilities right from the get-go, as Down a Dark Hall suffers from an often aggressively generic feel that’s compounded and highlighted by its myriad of underwhelming, incompetent elements – with, for example, the movie saddled with an assortment of hopelessly one-dimensional characters that remain impossible to sympathize with or care about. (Thurman’s scenery-chewing turn as the heavy is virtually a carbon-copy of various other similar figures in like-minded films, as well.) The picture’s unreasonably deliberate pace results in a midsection that grows more and more interminable as time slowly progresses, and it doesn’t help, certainly, that the uneventful narrative is mostly concerned with the been-there-done-that exploits of its dwindling protagonists. (There is, for example, just so much exploring of dimly-lit hallways and rooms.) By the time the egregiously (yet predictably) overblown climax, which is excessive even by the standards of the genre, rolls around, Down a Dark Hall has completely and thoroughly cemented its place as a worthless ordeal that fares much, much worse than one might’ve feared.

1/2* out of ****