THE LEGEND OF LUCY KEYES

The Cooley family moves from the chaos of the city to the tranquility of a countryside village, where Mr. Cooley has just received a job offer from a company intending to build windmills for wind energy exploitation. However, the apparent pastoral tranquility conceals disturbing secrets: every night strange moans come from the forest, and a figure dressed in white seems to lurk near the Cooleys' farm. Initially, the newcomers think it is an attempt to intimidate an elderly lady who is opposing the construction of the windmills, but when they learn about the legend that looms over those woods, the conviction that the ghost of little Lucy Keyes wanders without peace begins to grow stronger. Imagine a film you have surely seen. A city family: he is a serious husband and loving father, she is a fascinating and somewhat tormented woman; together they raise two daughters, the youngest of whom seems to have an imaginary friend as soon as she steps into the new house. But a tragedy has recently marked the integrity of the family: a third daughter died, run over by a car while eating an ice cream and playing recklessly on the sidewalk, amidst the desperate screams of her mother who does not have time to reach her, and the tragedy repeats every night in the mother's nightmares. You have already seen this film, right? But let's move on. The little family moves into a house in the middle of the forest, and from the very beginning, the hostility of the villagers can be noticed: the old lady who does not want the landscape to be violated by the construction of windmills, who presents herself with prophetic words in the grocery store and outside the church, frightening Mrs. Cooley; the gruff neighbor with a redneck appearance who shovels manure from morning to night, threatens with a gun, and leaves disturbing animal carcasses around the house. These characters and these characteristics remind you of something, right? Then comes the supernatural twist, and the symphony does not change. Nighttime voices and ghostly figures that roam the woods, legends that tell of a child who got lost in the forest and never returned home, actions of the ancestors that reverberate on the present, a little corpse to find and give peace, a final twist telegraphed at least three-quarters of an hour in advance. Well, this film that you have surely already seen, even if you haven't seen it yet, is "The Legend of Lucy Keyes," an incredible mishmash of trite and overused elements, stolen here and there from the greatest ghost movies of the last 30 years and mixed without inventiveness, to the point of creating an embarrassing sense of déjà vu. Beyond the absolute lack of originality, which is already very serious in this feature film, "The Legend of Lucy Keyes" does not manage to stand out: the story takes too long to get to the heart of the matter, losing too much time describing characters that every horror movie viewer already knows perfectly; the pace is excessively slow, and the tension is lacking throughout the duration of the film. The complete absence of truly horrific or even remotely unsettling scenes is then a serious flaw for this type of film, which often manages to be remembered even just for a good atmosphere. John Stimpson, on the other hand, shoots with such emotional detachment that he manages to make everything so tired and heavy as to arouse in the spectator only a deep sense of boredom. It is not understandable the presence of a first-rate cast. In the role of Jeanne Cooley, there is Julie Delpy ("Broken Flowers"; "Before Sunset"), while in the role of her husband Guy, there is Justin Theroux ("Mulholland Drive"; "Inland Empire"). In supporting roles, Mark Boone Jr. ("Batman Begins"; "30 Days of Night") and Brooke Adams ("The Deadly Spawn"; "The Dead Zone") appear. All actors of a certain caliber inexplicably involved in a bland little film of no relevance. In short, one word is enough to describe "The Legend of Lucy Keyes": useless.