She amps up Lesley Barber’s score to counterproductive effect, while Declan Quinn’s cinematography settles for TV blandness at every opportunity.Īs the girls’ identities blur, the school’s past as a hotel is explored and nocturnal insects obey human control, the template seems to be some combination of Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Dario Argento’s Phenomena – the mid-‘80s shocker which propelled a young Jennifer Connolly towards stardom. Harron, who came similarly unstuck when bringing Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho to the big screen back in 2000, piles on the chills with an uninspired, heavy hand. Klein’s novel is constructed as a series of journal entries, allowing for the possibility of Rebecca being a less-than-trustworthy narrator on the screen there’s no real sense that what we’re seeing could be the result of delusion. PHOTOS: Anatomy of a Snow White Smackdownīut as the plot piles up all manner of wildly histrionic developments, it becomes apparent that writer/director Harron - in her first feature since 2005’s The Notorious Bettie Page - expects us to take them at face value. Perhaps she’s even a vampire in the mold of the eponymous bloodsucker from Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, the 1872 novel inaccurately described by Davies as “one of the originators of the Gothic tale.”įor much of The Moth Diaries, however, the key literary inspiration would seem to be Jane Austen’s 1817 wryly comic Northanger Abbey, in which an impressionable young woman mistakenly believes herself to be in the midst of a Gothic nightmare, as a result of reading too many fashionably lurid novels. Davies ( Scott Speedman), Rebecca comes to suspect that the strikingly mature Ernessa may have supernatural powers and origins. Studying Gothic literature in the class of dishy Mr. PHOTOS: The Scene at the Venice Film Festival

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The moth diaries by rachel klein