The Messengers (2007)

I just came back from a preview showing of The Messengers. Here is a jangly-nerved blend suggestive of The Birds, The Grudge, Signs, Dark Water, and more. It has the loud thumps that make you jump and the things that go bump (in the day or in the night). It has the indescript blur of a something that runs past your field of vision (background or foreground but always behind the character in scene). It has ghostly images appearing under or over beds, chittering and chitonlike clattering of creatures that haunt the house, would-be homicidal crows, dangling farm implements, violent poltergeists, and a sweet little aphasic boy who points at and is drawn to the chimeras that only he (usually) can see. John Corbett does a great (Jeff Bridges-like) job as a trusted farmhand who flips out. Kristen Stewart does a yeoman's duty as the teen daughter who is the most-afflicted household member (though almost everyone gets poked with a fork till they're done). Evan and Theodore Turner steal the show as the mucus-encrusted, gently smiling tyke who sees all but can only tell some. See this movie -- it will make you tense, and glad you saw it. Four stars.