I'm pretty good at tempering my expectations, so while I was looking forward to Bustillo and Maury's follow-up to Inside, I knew it probably wouldn't be as good.

And it's not.

The first half of the film is an incredibly effective haunted house movie with a pretty standard set up of a young nurse who's put in charge of caring for an old lady in a creepy house. It looks great and has mad atmosphere and there's a couple of references that horror fans will pick up on. Cool, I'm with it.

Then, at the halfway mark, the film delves into the backstory of the old lady, and everything goes to shit. It seems that the filmmakers just had a…

Frustration, thy name is Livide.

There's a good film in here somewhere, and there are flashes of macabre brilliance, but they don't add up to a satisfying enough whole.

There's a fair bit that does work, the location is great, the first half of the film has wonderfully creepy atmosphere, and the gore is suitably icky. I also really admired the mundanity of the opening moments, as Lucie starts her new job as a home care giver, going great lengths to give some background on her character without having her say all that much.

And then things start to be revealed, and it all goes to crap. I don't mind having to work to be able to understand a film,…

The follow up to Inside Julien Maury and Alexndre Bustillo for the most part eschew the hyper gory intensity of that film and present us with more of a dark fairy tale.

Lucie is a young girl starting a role as an care nursing treating the elderly in their own homes. She is shown the ropes by the jaded Mrs Wilson. They visit the house of former ballet teacher Deborah Jessel, comatose for years and kept alive by machines. Wilson mentions a treausore some description hidden somewhere in the house. That night Lucie enlists the help of her boyfriend Willian and his brother Ben to break in and locate the treasure.

Of course, things take a turn for the dark,…

I never understood all the good will toward Inside, which so many horror fans hold alongside Martyrs as the finest exemplars of that continuing tendency dubbed the "New French Extremity". It was, though full of impressively unsettling gore, a film that seemed to me to waste all its plentiful potential on a cheap twist typical of the worse aspects of modern horror. Its directors, Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, seemed willing to sacrifice all possible psychological significance of their smart conceit for a typical—if excessively bloody—horror arc. With their follow-up Livid, they seem only to prove that being weird about things is their primary concern. Without even a decent concept this time, their nonsense is left to support itself, which…

I never understood all the good will toward Inside, which so many horror fans hold alongside Martyrs as the finest exemplars of that continuing tendency dubbed the "New French Extremity". It was, though full of impressively unsettling gore, a film that seemed to me to waste all its plentiful potential on a cheap twist typical of the worse aspects of modern horror. Its directors, Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, seemed willing to sacrifice all possible psychological significance of their smart conceit for a typical—if excessively bloody—horror arc. With their follow-up Livid, they seem only to prove that being weird about things is their primary concern. Without even a decent concept this time, their nonsense is left to support itself, which…

Frustration, thy name is Livide.

There's a good film in here somewhere, and there are flashes of macabre brilliance, but they don't add up to a satisfying enough whole.

There's a fair bit that does work, the location is great, the first half of the film has wonderfully creepy atmosphere, and the gore is suitably icky. I also really admired the mundanity of the opening moments, as Lucie starts her new job as a home care giver, going great lengths to give some background on her character without having her say all that much.

And then things start to be revealed, and it all goes to crap. I don't mind having to work to be able to understand a film,…

The follow up to Inside Julien Maury and Alexndre Bustillo for the most part eschew the hyper gory intensity of that film and present us with more of a dark fairy tale.

Lucie is a young girl starting a role as an care nursing treating the elderly in their own homes. She is shown the ropes by the jaded Mrs Wilson. They visit the house of former ballet teacher Deborah Jessel, comatose for years and kept alive by machines. Wilson mentions a treausore some description hidden somewhere in the house. That night Lucie enlists the help of her boyfriend Willian and his brother Ben to break in and locate the treasure.

Of course, things take a turn for the dark,…