The Legend of Lucy Keyes is set in the small rural New England community of Princeton where married couple Guy (Justin Theroux) & Jeanne Cooley (Julie Delpy) & their two young daughters Lucy (Cassidy Hinkle) & Molly (Kathleen Regan) have just moved into an old 18th Century farmhouse. Guy has been hired by Princeton mayor Samantha Porter (Brooke Adams) to develop a site & build eight alternative energy windmill turbines on it which has split the town down the middle, Porter stands to make over a million dollars if the deal & development goes ahead so pushes Guy. Meanwhile Jeanne digs into the history of the farmhouse & it's land & discovers that two hundred & fifty years ago a young girl named Lucy Keyes went missing & was never found, local legend says that her mother Marha can still be heard calling for Lucy even now...Co-edited, written & directed by John Stimpson I have to say that this dull as dishwater rural drama with a hint of supernatural ghost story thrown nearly put me to sleep & I am actually quite surprised I made it all the way through to the end. The biggest problem with The Legend of Lucy Keyes is that fact that it's so slow, any slower & it would be going backwards with a script that doesn't even mention Lucy Keyes & her disappearance until after the forty minute mark. I have heard of build-up & scene setting but there's build-up & scene setting & just plain tedium where literally nothing happens for ages & The Legend of Lucy Keyes falls squarely into the tedious category as far as I am concerned. The script can't quite decide whether it wants to be a rural drama with the local opposition to the windmills & a subplot about the Mayor getting rich off the development or a proper supernatural mystery with the disappearance of Lucy Keyes that predictably is finally solved. The murder mystery at the end end starts & finishes within 30 seconds & the whole film is so lethargic & slow. The character's are stock ones with urban city folk moving to a rural area, the local scaremonger who talks of local legends, the odd local who is wary of strangers & the like. The mystery element just doesn't build that well, it's all too predictable & slow & at just over 90 minutes it feels like six hours.Forget about any proper horror as there isn't any, there's a couple of flashbacks & one shot that might have been a ghost but otherwise the whole film is quite ambiguous as we are never sure what leads Lucy Cooley to find Lucy Keyes body or how the mayor died. The makers just seemed more interested in having Guy & Jeanne talk to people about nothing in particular, a lot. The whole film looks alright but there's no real style here or anything that memorable on show.Filmed in 2004 but not released anywhere until 2006 one can understand why, actually shot in Princeton in Massachusetts. The acting is alright but nothing special, I take it Brooke Adams needed the money.The Legend of Lucy Keyes is a film that I hated, it's so slow & predictable with a script that wavers between rural drama & supernatural mystery but doesn't satisfy on either count. For insomniacs only.

Being based on a true disappearance, I think the movie did justice to the mystery from the 1700s. For an independent film, it had a lot less gore than most fright flicks and it is to be commended for that. Expanding the tale to solve the mystery may have been too ambitious a project for the director. However, I find the bittersweet ending to have been well thought out and fairly executed. I think the fear that the Keyes descendant felt should have been explored more in the script, but perhaps explanation for that was left on the editing floor. All in all, I felt it was a decent attempt at solving a centuries-old mystery in a manner that unfortunately, sadly still occurs in this day and age.

This film is an intriguing story about an old New England legend. Anyone who likes a spine chilling ghost story will love this film. John Stimpson does a great job juxtaposing the family life of a 21st century family with a 250 year old folklore story. Having lived my whole life in New England I could relate to the telling and retelling of old stories and how they become part of the fabric of a small town. The symmetry between Lucy Keyes, who goes missing in 1755, and the modern day Lucy who has moved to the countryside with her family is brilliant. I won't give away the ending, but the symmetry gathers onto itself as the film continues. And the eccentric character of Caswell fits the small town setting superbly. You will enjoy this film!

I'm from Princeton, so I know all about Lucy Keyes. And since this movie was filmed on site at Princeton (this was cool for me because never before could I point at a scene in a movie and say: "I went there yesterday" every other day), I recognized everything-but the people. All of them were hired actors pretending to live in the town, when I knew well that they didn't belong. But this was only a feeling one living in Princeton would get.In perspective to the quality of the movie; it was great. And it included quite a bit of background of the town, not just the ghosts: the clam bellies on the farm, and the windmills on the mountain. And although the actual legend as told in the story was off (Lucy went into the woods to follow her sisters to a pond without their knowledge, not blueberry picking) it was well told through the scenes of Jeanne's research. The frequent fade-ins and -outs became somewhat annoying, but seemed to heighten suspense. The acting was mediocre at parts, but that made the movie seem to be real, rather than obviously great actors doing obviously well-written scripts- life isn't like that. As for the whole plot, it was good, and maintained an amount of suspense, although a climax was never fully reached. As for the ghosts, they were creepy, but a bit inconsistent, and almost all of the cliché spook-scenes are used, so not much in achievement there.As for the ending, this was disappointing. I won't give it away, but it doesn't fit the story. If you've lived in Princeton and know the story, you will know that there is no solution to the mystery, and to place one there doesn't seem right.So, all in all, the movie was an exciting experience, with chilling fright-scenes, with parts of love, sadness, desperation, and comedy, too. But still, a bit of a let-down near the end.