A relationship that is

torn to pieces is more frightening than a supernatural monster.

At least in Andra sidan, an unusually ambitious Swedish horror film in which a newly formed star family is driven to collapse in a haunted house.

Fredrik and Shirin will buy a villa and start a new family.

The broker explains the floor plan.

A chance to turn the page, the couple hopes.

So naive, the past always comes back, the audience thinks.

Soon we will be right.

The father and the

widower (Linus Wahlgren) keep a good face despite the great challenge.

At the same time, Shirin (Dilan Gwyn) struggles a bit with her role as a bonus mother to her son Lucas - a five-year-old boy who is still lost after his mother's death.

Soon after moving in, Fredrik gets a job in another place and for some reason his children can not go to preschool.

Lucas is instead left at home with Shirin, who has a hard time helping the boy with his complicated feelings.

During one of his games in the constantly extinguished house, another boy who lives inside the wall starts talking to Lucas.

The ghost warns Lucas that the "old man" who lives nearby should come and take him.

Shirin has a hard

time believing in Lucas, while Fredrik thinks that the boy's increasingly disturbed behavior is due to his new stepmother.

Horror film that is not of turkey quality is unusual to watch in Swedish, so the bar is low.

Much of the script is certainly worn out since Hollywood movies like The House That God Forgot, its various sequels, clones and imitations.

The other side is thus a shameless remix of a copy.

Still, the direction is empathetic enough that the conventions to which the film leans should not be turned into pure clichés.

It will never be

an original story, but nevertheless an impressive craft in acting, effects, light and photography where the eerily creepy atmosphere has a character in its own right.

"Can the dead come back?"

little boy Lucas wonders when he misses his mother.

Of course we know the answer, yet the directors Oskar Mellander and Tord Danielsson together with the very competent ensemble of actors, manage to make the journey towards the inevitable disaster really nerve-wracking.

You can have some

objections to the painted story, but what pokes down the film's rating a bit is the constructive atmosphere that comes at the end of the film, a feel good moment that irritates more than it renews.


Sometimes it is important to stick to the original recipe.