Getting Some Heir

The Heirloom is an odd little horror movie from Taiwan, and one that has taken me a while to write about as I try to explore my relationship to spooky movies in general. I have this problem, you see, with taking a movie to task for predictability when the very reason I rented it was that I saw the cover and immediately knew someone, maybe more than one someone, would be wiped out by a vengeful spirit probably emanating from a house or large article of furniture.

And it was so. So what the heck do I have to complain about?

The plot is simple, its broad outline familiar even if the details are not:

Tragedy takes place in a creaky old house.
In this case, an entire family is found hanging, all the same distance above the ground.

Unknowing young person inherits and uses creaky house as the jumping-off point for a new life.
That would be James and his dancer fiancee, Yo. The twist here, if any, is that it's she who has the fear of commitment. Since James turns out to be the kind of guy who ignores a MURDERING SPIRIT in favor of working on his architectural blueprints, who can blame her?

Soon, spooky manifestations begin.
These are, I believe, one of the movie's weak points, as people who visit the house become ensnared by it, suffering blackouts after which they find themselves transported back to its eerie precincts. This makes for the movie's goriest scene, as a policeman manacles himself to his bed in order to escape the phenomenon. He really shouldn't have done that.

An explanation is discovered.
This is usually my favorite part of the movie. Alas, The Heirloom loses much of its power in this respect by featuring a title-card prologue explaining about fetus ghosts. (You heard me.) In case you somehow missed that part, Yo does finally track down an elderly relative of James's who turns out to be The Old Lady Who Knows All About The Family's Secret. Except the fetus ghosts are not that secret. Because we read about them before the action started. Oh, well.

A surviving character, quite often a woman, attempts to stop the vile manifestations.
Nothing surprising here except a sort of Buddhist exorcism angle. Anyone who misses Carnivåle's Fetus In A Jar will, like me, get a small kick out of this part.

The remaining characters will believe this worked....UNTIL--!
Remember the good old days when you could actually get rid of a supernatural force that wasn't named Freddy or Jason? Those days aren't back in The Heirloom, either.

I won't spoil the rest of the ending, and the movie does have a lot of virtues: good performances, a fascinating if poorly deployed back story, gorgeous set pieces and at least one very disturbing death scene. Ironically, however, the movie that starts with a family hanging doesn't hang together well itself.