Dream House

Everybody has a dream, to be rich, to be famous, maybe to have that one piece of art that is the most coveted, but for Will Atenton (played by Daniel Craig) his is to be with his family as he writes his novel. For Will life is great, it’s perfect in fact, he has a beautiful wife Libby (played by Rachel Weisz) and two perfect daughters who love him. With the perfect house, Will has taken his family into a new neighborhood, a new home, where he will write his novel while have the perfect family. Just as he gets settled into his new world, Will is told about a gruesome murder that took place in the house he just move into and now he must uncover what happened in his new home.

THRILLER OR HORROR?
I love movies that give me one expectation than by the end it becomes something I never expected. Dream House did exactly that, made me think that this was going to be a horror/thriller movie about Will Atenton who has quit his job as an editor so he can move into his new home with his beautiful wife Libby and their two daughters so he can write his own book. While in the house strange events start to happen, the girls see people in the window, and Will is having bad vibes from the house that lead to Will finding out that the previous owners where killed by the father. It’s at this point Dream House changed gears from seeming to be a horror/thriller to becoming a murder mystery as Will goes around trying to solve the case of the missing father Peter Ward who had killed his family and survived being shot in the head by his wife.

Now I won’t say anymore about the plot than that because Dream House is one of those movies that once you know how it ends it will ruin the journey of getting there. What I will say though is the movie has a good plot, a nice twist to it that kept me second guessing myself, and actors that do a great job in their roles. Daniel Craig’s character evolves over the progression of the plot where with each time he realizes something or finds a clue into the mystery of the murder you can see how his character starts to change and how the murder is affecting him. When he first starts off as a clean cut editor wearing expensive clothes with a professional haircut becomes a man who has cheaper clothes, with greasy hair, and looks like he’s about to break. Though Will Atenton is the key character in this movie it’s the supporting roles of Rachel Weisz’s Libby and the minor characters from around town that give the movie a realistic feel to it.

Dream House still has more going for it than a good plot, it has some good special effects. There’s not that much effects happening in the movie but what few of them there are and the few times they occur, they are pretty cool. The most notable and coolest is how the house transforms from the past to present that shows the same progression that is shown with Daniel Craig’s character but only with a house. Dream House is a fun movie to watch because of so many working parts that I can’t go into them all and with some I would be giving away important elements that would take away from that first experience when watching the movie. Something else that makes this movie good is that it’s a movie that can be watched multiple times but it will continue to be good and quite possibly offer up some other bits of information that wasn’t caught during the first time.

A DREAM HOUSE IN BLU RAY:
Now this is the kind of movie that makes Blu Ray movies worth watching and buying. The picture quality is really good, it’s sharp, it’s clear, and most importantly I didn’t see any noise and grain in it. Even when there’s scenes that happen at night, and there are a lot of those, and even more scenes that are just in the dark, there’s no grain that I could see showing up. Sadly however the bonus features on this Blu Ray is few and not that impressive. Though I didn’t expect a movie that has such a serious plot would have a gag or bloopers reel as a bonus feature but I would have liked to have seen some deleted scenes.