Molly Hartley (played with great sympathy here by Haley Bennett) has
suffered an extreme amount of trauma in her young life. Right out of the blue,
her mother has unexpectedly gone insane and tried to kill her--leading to Molly
being admitted to the hospital with a stab wound in the chest, and her mother
being committed to a mental hospital. Molly survives this vicious assault,
thanks to her caring father (well played by Jake Weber), who seeks to make her
life as normal as possible by putting Molly into a new school. But Molly
doesn't feel very normal; thanks to the persistent terror she feels that she
will inherit her mother's insanity. And it's not long before the young
woman--who's due to turn eighteen very shortly--starts seeing some frightening,
horrific visions…and it's not a result of what she ate at the school cafeteria,
either.
Despite its misleading title, The Haunting of Molly Hartley is actually about
the devil. Once upon a time, Hollywood produced a slew of horror movies that
featured Satan as the main villain. Rosemary's Baby,
The Exorcist, The Omen…I
tell you, Old Scratch was never busier than he was back in the 1960s and '70s.
Director Mickey Liddel is admittedly a fan of these demonic films, and he's done
everything he can to make Molly just like the films that he admires--including
copying their flaws, as well. One of the major problems I've had with devil
movies is that the deck is almost always stacked against the heroes--the devil
and his minions are constantly five steps ahead of the protagonists, who
struggle and strain just to keep up their battle with the forces of evil.
But why is this so? I mean, if the devil and his demonic hordes are going to
play dirty, using every dark magical trick in the book, then shouldn't God step
in and at least give the heroes a helping hand? After all, the Man upstairs has
a major stake in the outcome of this battle, does He not? But aside from sharing
this flaw found in most of these devil movies, The Haunting of Molly Hartley
fails just for being a flat, listless, unimaginative film that's completely
predictable. For one thing, it's filled with non-stop fake scares. The
characters are scared by birds, a dog, and even other people, and these constant
fake scare scenes only serve to exacerbate the feeling that nothing is really
happening. And, for the heroine of a film, Molly is too much of a passive person,
letting people and outside events push her around--sometimes literally.
The film also sends a very warped message. Molly must not only contend with
these overwhelming evil forces all alone, without any help, but the one time
when she shows a backbone and fights back, it's presented as being due to the
devil's influence on her. It's bad enough that many young women
Molly's age suffer from self-confidence issues, but to convey a scene where
the heroine of a film finally stands up for herself as being the work of the devil is ludicrous. And I
realize that evil is supposed to be more seductive, and easier, than the
righteous path in these stories, but the film does such a ham-handed job at
presenting both sides of the issue that there's no real argument being presented
here. In short, this movie is dull and very lame. If idle hands are the devil's
work, then The Haunting of Molly Hartley is guilty for creating bored minds.
--SF
