Dead Daughters (2007)

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

firstly i was really shocked by those extremely negative comments below, so i decided to write this. so: i watched the movie on the la indie film fest with a bad subtitles, in horror program. there's a lot of dialog and it is NOT the horror movie. in-spite of this the film made strong impression to me, i lived it like a piece of lifetime, and i, the watcher, was changed by this movie. - this film DO NOT "entertain". art DO NOT suppose to "entertain" you. if it does, that's good for you, but entertainment is not the aim of real art - watch TV, go circus, make parties, if you need to have pleasure of just spending some funny relaxing moments. What i saw is no doubt a masterpiece, i don'n know the director but i prefer to be in "co-" with Ruminov then with some angry foolish guys (yes, YOU) which do not see, hear, feel art itself, blind mouses in a rat world of kitchen "likes-dislikes", those nazi. If you have bad taste that is your tragedy, what you see from your small eyes is not the reality. try to understand art, or don't talk and write about what you Don't understand.do not try to Analise the landscape if you are blind. don't try to Analise the movie by matching it with some other you luckily just saw. We need to fight for art if we want it to stay on this planet! Do not let them turn the art of cinema into the huge nazi fast-food! So again: this is a great movie, but it is frightening that there soon will be no viewers of such art anymore.

Well done camera work - sometimes a bit shaky but for those who watched Lars von Triers movies this is nothing :). Beautiful film. The plot is typical for horror genre, but with a Russian (Dostoevsky type) twist - the monsters don't kill "just because" but for not being "good" - giving you a chance to think about what is good and bad. Sometimes it's not so obvious. Acting could be better but generally it is a well done entertaining movie with good suspense. For reasons not clear, some Russian reviewers got so disgusted with the movie (see the 'valektburg' comment) that I honestly thought it must be personal. The film didn't deserve this kind of reviews.

Just amazing. It had all signs of at least good movie three months before started in theaters. Great previews, internet rumors, exiting director's comments with a bunch of impressive trailers and pictures. And finally- zero. Pretentious set of clichés, banality and bore. Probably, it's the worst Russian film I've seen for months. Authors of "The Blair Witch Project" successfully created faked horror documentary. I prefer Ruminov would do the next step and never show his "DD" anywhere. At least in this case with all the fusses and the buzzes around it could be the first great horror movie that nobody have ever seen. Very disappointing. 1/10

This ain't you typical horror flick, although director Pavel Ruminov makes you think the opposite for the first ten minutes or so. It soon gets obvious that this film is much more sophisticated and thought-provoking than The Ring and other Japanese horror remakes/originals. The whole "ghosts of drowned girls seeking revenge on humankind" premise serves as a backdrop to an eclectic thriller that's rich in social satire, extremely dense in visual detail and is way closer to an existential drama than any other "horror" movie out there. Basically it appeared to be sort of a shock therapy for the Russian audiences. Most of the moviegoers expected to see another quality adaptation of an old Japanese concept, but instead were bombarded with a chain of disturbing and highly involving events that made the viewing experience very personal, intimate, and, it appears, in many cases quite unpleasant. As for me, I had no problems with this film whatsoever, probably because I was already familiar with Ruminov's style of movie-making and actually expected much more than a typical ghost movie.