146 - For Sale by Owner

    A guy (a preservation architect, according to the back of the box) buys a house in Virginia, which he plans on restoring.  There are implications of historical importance to the house, and some peculiar haunting things that are going on.
    I had a hard time summarizing this, because it's a bad movie.  In fact, it really managed to offend me with the ending.
    The back of the case includes this headline - "A young man's psychological thrill ride to reclaim his own flickering sanity."  I was able to ignore this phrase, in favor of the other blurb on the back, which implied that it was a historical mystery.
    And that's the angle that the movie plays.  For most of the movie, it plays as a vaguely historical mystery, then it starts to include the idea that the house is haunted.  Both of these work out fine, if not a little predictable.  There's a strange tension between the lead and his girlfriend/wife.  While she's pregnant, that isn't a plot point, and it only gets referred to once after the beginning of the movie.  Mostly, they both don't make any sense when they react to each other.  He says that he's tired, and she flips out and says she doesn't want him working on the house anymore.
    They also both get strangely angry with her father, who is also some sort of historian.  I never understood what they were angry about.  Were they worried that he would take credit for the historical significance of their house?
    The supernatural angle of the movie seems strange, like there were two types of movies going on, and this was an effort to make the movie more interesting than just being excited about a potentially important historical discovery.  Then then ending came, and that destroyed everything.
    Leading into the ending, things start getting strange.  The editing gets erratic.  There are strange cuts to shots that seem to be symbolic, but are mostly just puzzling.  Then, once the ending hits, it's the biggest possible cop-out.
    Spoiler time.  It turns out that the main character is mentally ill, and has made up the rest of the movie in his head.
    So this was an excuse to not write an ending for the other story that was being built.

    To be honest, this type of storytelling betrayal only has an impact if you care about the story that was being told.  In this case, I was pretty bored with the movie beforehand.  I was hoping to see it resolve in a traditional way.  Of course, if it did that, I wouldn't have had anything much to say about it.