** - Apparently a remake of a Swedish film, this slow-moving 2007 sci-fi drama (only ‘sci-fi’ in that it has some light ghost/afterlife-related themes) is one that ends up being pretty difficult to enjoy. I can’t complain about the direction or the production values, but the story is kind of dumb, the acting is average at best, and many of the actions and decisions made by the characters are not easy to understand or justify. After shamefully being beaten to near-death by a rather small woman, a wormy high school-aged poetry geek is left for dead down a sewer but winds up as a quasi-ghost who sort of haunts the frail girl who almost killed him in an effort to get her to hone up to her actions and save his life. The whole idea that someone who is near death becomes a spirit who can wander around and attempt to change things is very hard to accept. Not only that, but the physics behind this type of haunting does not remain consistent from start to finish. Sometimes he can affect real objects and sometimes he can’t and then he can again, and none of these changes back and forth are really explained very well. There is a crummy ending involving self-sacrifice and honesty that is so blatantly obvious from the outset and also very maudlin that it ruins any enjoyment that one may get from any other aspect of the movie. This is not a film that I can recommend, despite its decent soundtrack.
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