Dream House (2011)

Dream House arrives in 2011 with a prestigious cast, a director of some reputation, and the grim determination of a studio that has stopped returning calls. Daniel Craig plays a New York publisher who quits his job to write a book in a Connecticut house where a family was previously murdered. Rachel Weisz is his wife. Naomi Watts is the neighbor. The twist, which the trailer reportedly spoiled, is that Craig's character is the surviving husband, and the murdered family are ghosts, or projections, or something the screenplay resolves with a shrug. Jim Sheridan tried to remove his name from the picture. He was not wrong to try.

For the purposes of cultural classification, the film is a desert. The principal cast is white, and no effort was made to disturb that arrangement. There are no queer characters, no engagement with race, no climate anxiety, no critique of wealth, no body-image discourse, and no neurodivergent advocacy, despite a lengthy detour through a psychiatric facility. That last item deserves a moment of silence. Mental illness here is a plot mechanism, a lever pulled to produce a second-act revelation, then discarded. Nobody learns anything about the human mind. They learn who fired the gun.

The women in the story exist to be endangered. Watts' character is the target of a custody-motivated murder plot, which the screenplay treats as a scheduling problem for the assassin. No argument is being made. No thesis is being advanced. No audience is being instructed. This is a thriller assembled from parts, and its only ideological commitment is to the second-act twist. We score it accordingly. A film this incurious about the world is, in its own modest way, a kind of achievement.