Positives: The acting was very good. The locations feel real to the story. It does draw your interest, if not just for the performances.Negatives: Terribly photographed, to the point of being dizzy from the shaky cam operator, that must have been hired in the parking lot of a Wal*Mart, somewhere, USA.Terribly directed. You have a waitress mom separated from her husband who works with one of her best friends, whose husband she is sleeping with. Even after the cat is out of the bag, the adulterer is staying at the waitress mom's house, and her friend and the mom are either in scenes where they hate each other, or love each other. I think the friendship may have been over at that point....Ya think?? The mom's daughter goes missing because mom falls asleep on the couch when she is supposed to be attending to her daughter. Instead of combing the woods, the distraught mom is sitting in her house with a Police woman, while the entire town is out looking for her daughter. So dumb, I almost threw something at the screen. What physically fit, young loving mom wouldn't be out there looking for her child? That is just two examples of the illogical path this film goes down, unfortunately there are many more of them. There is no logic at all to many of the well acted scenes. That's what this movie is: A depressing well acted stupid movie, that could have worked, if the director would have read the novel objectively, before he wrote this mess of a script.Bottom line: If you like the actors, enjoy depressing films with few likable characters, and you want to see them do really nice scenes that make no sense.......Watch this movie, however, don't expect any satisfaction from the ending.

This movie seems like the kind of thing someone would write who doesn't have a clear picture of where they want to go with things. Predictably it never arrives. The amount of raving reviews I read on IMDb is really stunning, to the degree that I seriously paused to wonder if the director or writer hasn't payed off a few of his friends to come on here and pump up his dud. In truth, the various loosely associated story lines never really coalesce. There are characters with mildly interesting personalities all over, but there are too many and nobody ever comes to the fore and carries things. The result is a continuous sense of anticipation that slowly settles into the awareness that time has run out for substance, though this comes too late for us to turn it off with time to watch something better before nodding off for the night. The most promising character, and certainly the one we want to like most (the boy), never seems to have more than an observer role in the events on display throughout the film, and so our sympathy for him is never channeled into any direction of note. The "bad guy" crazy husband is absolutely unbelievable as a character, and is made more ridiculous by the caricature of religiosity which he is given. The director must have some personal ax to grind in that respect, but whatever it is it isn't effective. The movie literally starts where it ends, with the bulk of it being a flashback, but this is actually quite apropos of the meaningless lost-in-the-woods wandering sense of the whole piece. I like a good art film. This, friends, isn't even close. Don't waste your time. Seriously. My only guess for an explanation of the raving reviews scattered amid the much more sensible panning might be that people who have watched something else seem to have written about it here by mistake.

A sad and a hard movie. And the full extent of its heaviness you will realize not during the watching, but after that. A heart heaviness doesn't leave fast enough. This film is mainly about human or family relationships, about giving another a chance to be forgiven, the ability to ask for forgiveness. About a bunch of things that come up from the relations between people. And those items we call 'life'. Sam Rockwell (my applause) and Kate Beckinsale did amazing performances (maybe the best roles too) and at their best, revealing a many-sided personality of the characters. Playing a his character Rockwell shows us his great acting talent and being a master of many-sided personality.

I refrain from rating this one as I have a lot of mixed feelings about this film. Granted it is a very deep and sensitive foray into the trappings of human emotion and relationships, but I can't reconcile why anyone would even attempt a movie like this, especially in this day and age. Although all the technical elements remain in tact, from the impeccable direction, to the heart-rending acting performances, the depth of emotion this film challenges you achieve seems a bit parochial to me, given that all we are shown is the dark side of each situation. Isn't there enough discord we must deal with in our day-to-day lives, than having to feel our emotions tumble blindly into an abyss of despair, then having to muster up the strength to climb back up and out, just to resume our lives as usual? I can't find any redeeming qualities to this film, yet I did watch it from beginning to end. It has all the qualities of a well-made film which draws you in, but once you're in you find yourself just wanting to get out but you can't, because you have to see how it all plays out after all. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there isn't any 'entertainment value' to this film, it's almost like some extended version of a story you'd expect to find in the news today, instead of on the big screen. Hollywood, maybe it's time to get back to the basics?