Paul Andrews The Cradle starts as a young couple Frank (Lukas Haas) & Julie (Emily Hampshire) together with their young baby Sam move into an old house deep in some woods, Julie has postpartum psychosis in which she cannot even touch Sam or go near her so Frank has to act as two parents while he also learns that their neighbour, an old woman named Helen (Amanda Smith), is a little bit crazy & doesn't seem to like people. During the night Frank begins to think he hears strange noises & becomes convinced that the ghost of Helen's dead sister is haunting him & his family but the truth is even more terrifying & shocking...This Canadian production was co-written & directed by Tim Brown & I have to say that I have been on a bad run of films lately, I have had to sit through some reals tinkers from Transmorphers (2007) to Stealth (2005) to Hell's Gate 11:11 (2004) which have all been terrible in their own way & The Cradle is right down there with them as it barely even constitutes a film since so little actually happens in it. The Cradle is one of the slowest most uneventful films I have ever seen, at one hour & forty seven minutes long it's amazing just how little happens. A guy, his wife & baby move to a new house, they move in, walk around a bit, talk a bit, a creepy neighbour turns up a few times before a so-called twists ending & that's your lot. The Cradle really will put most viewers to sleep & most of those that have managed to stay awake will have lost interest well before a twist ending which is confusing, badly edited & makes no real sense. Are we saying then that the ghost was a total coincidence & therefore the neighbour also was utterly irrelevant? Why are they even in the film? It just slows it down even more. There are only three people in the whole thing, the mother's rare condition is never really explored in any great detail & it's a mystery why Frank wanted to isolate himself & family considering the circumstances & what his wife was like. How he got the money for the house I don't know, he never seems to work & it never felt particularly real to me. I don't mind a bit of build-up, in fact you need to build the story & character's up for any sort of twist or event to have any impact but there's a limit before you just sit there praying something, just anything will happen.The Cradle looks alright but there's not much atmosphere or tension, there certainly are no scares or traditional haunted house antics, in fact I barely remember any horror orientated sequences at all. The opening credits list both 'Special Effects by' & 'Special Make-up Effects by' but I struggled to remember any special effect of any description, I certainly can't understand why they get top billing in the opening credits. For get about any gore as there isn't any, at all. The Cradle takes ages to get to the point & even then it feels underwhelming & confusing, I am not sure if the makers knew what sort of film they wanted as it has bits of horror, bits of thriller & some dull drama all of which feel very bland.Apparently filmed in Hamilton in Ontario in Canada this looks alright but nothing more. Lukas Haas has had a steady career & also appeared in the almost as slow moving ghost story Lady in White (1988) while none of the other cast members seem to have done anything else of note.The Cradle is a terrible film that is part horror, part thriller, part drama & all bore, The Cradle is surely one of the slowest & most uneventful films ever made & there are much better ways you can spend an hour & fifty odd minutes.

cbfan1-1 this movie had great build-up...although a little far-fetched at times. i was generally interested in what was going on. but thats the problem i don't know what was going on. the movie just ended. it started this whole rerun thing at the end, showing you scenes from earlier in the movie...most times that part is to help the viewer fill in the gaps and ultimately figure out the movie. that didn't happen. it just confused me more. i assumed on my own that both the baby and mom had died and dad went crazy after wards. but i don't know how or why they died or when he went crazy. i wasn't feeling the old lady especially when her part had no meaning considering the ghost turned out to be mom. or was it? i don't know and don't care. don't watch this crap. oh my mom hated it too.

sweet_like_candy_12345 OK so after watching this movie and being completely clueless and confused about what really happened I came up with this..Everything you saw before frank finding Sam "dead" Then when frank leaned over and the baby started to breath that was franks imagination it never happened through out the rest of this movie the baby was actually dead but frank though he was alive..Now when you see Julie crying in the corner say that Sam stopped breathing and she ran but came back also was franks imagination when Julie ran after finding Sam dead in the cradle that is when she fell off the waterfall and died..Frank was hallucinated through the rest of the movie so he wouldn't have the deal with the grief of losing them both..you see when he drops his flashlight that it shines in Julie's face it was trying to show him that she's dead same with the stick in her arm and her face being bloody.now as for the ghost in the nursery that was Julie trying to show frank that the baby was dead. the dreams he was having of the baby dying in the washing machine and the stove were dreams that's it.. that crazy lady that lived next door her whole purpose of the movie was basically to show frank at the end that Sam was dead she said he was dead for days..i didn't really see why they brought up Helen's sister being buried alive i don't believe she was haunting them it had no relevance to the movie what so ever cause when frank is in the kitchen and there is a face in the window that face of Julie after she died...the ending shows when it all comes together and makes sense to frank that everything that happened in the last few days was part of his imagination and not real so in conclusion everything that happened after finding Sam unconscious in the cradle was all in franks head

K-burg First off, I really didn't have the trouble understanding this movie that other reviewers seemed to have. Everyone's got films that they just don't get, so I'll assume that's the case here.The story's about a man who loses his mind out of stress and grief. I'd feel sorry for him, but he's too much of an idiot. Here's a tip, fellas. If your wife has severe post-partum depression, take her to a hospital. Do not, under any circumstances, move her to a dreary and isolated house in the middle of hazardous woods with a nutcase for a neighbor. (For the reviewer who insisted that this isn't how women with post-partum depression act, I'm sorry, but you're wrong. I'm a physician who has worked with a wide variety of psychiatric patients, and the film portrays classic post-partum depression. There's a spectrum of post-partum mood disorders, and what you're describing sounds more like the very common post-partum blues.) Also, do not repeatedly leave her alone with the baby for hours when she has demonstrated that she cannot care for him. If a doctor tells you that everything will happen naturally in time, that moving to the middle of nowhere is okay, and that your wife apparently has no need of medications, get a new doctor.When the tragically inevitable happens, the main character can't cope. Seeking the advice of a crazy neighbor lady, presumably for lack of anyone sane nearby, he discovers a quite chilling and interesting ghost story. Sadly, the movie is not about the ghost story. Eventually he resolves the parallel realities in his head and we can assume he does something akin to moving on with life. The ending implies that maybe if he hadn't moved his family to this particular cursed and haunted land, the outcome would have been different, but this is the only nod we get towards the side plot being involved in the main story at all.Overall, the filmmakers are lying to us, and unlike in a decent twist-ending movie like Sixth Sense, they had to introduce unnecessary action, characters, and plot points in order to fool the audience. The movie does not tie itself together well and leaves the viewer unsatisfied in a bad way. The concept and the atmosphere were good, but the film did not live up to its potential because the filmmakers decided that a twist ending was more important than telling a good story.