Anyone seen this Belgian horror film yet? It seems to have gotten generally positive reviews (and not just the ridiculous cover blurbs like "As important as LET THE RIGHT ONE IN") but I found myself unimpressed.

Athlete Marie (Eline Kuppens) is training for the track finals and suffers a mysterious injury. Unable to run, she starts a relationship with car salesman/archery guild dean Bobby (Matthias Schoenaerts) and moves into his apartment in the Left Bank area of town. She discovers that the previous female tenant in their apartment disappeared. A neighbor gives her a box of stuff the tenant left behind and discovers that the apartment building was built over a well. The missing woman's boyfriend Dirk informs her that in medieval times, the Left Bank was a place where witches and plague victims were banished and that the well under the building is known as "The White Woman's Pit" where human sacrifices were performed. Marie's injured knee starts sprouting hair and the bruise starts to grow. Marie's mother also believes that the fault line under the building is having a malignant effect on the tenants. Marie and Dirk do some additional research and learn that the Left Bank archery guild is one of the oldest and used to make sacrifices on the feast of Samhain every 7 years, the next of which is rapidly approaching.

LEFT BANK has an interesting idea but fails to do anything interesting with the more derivative elements (strange building build over a portal, mysterious fellow tenants, history of strange disappearances and deaths, a repeated striking resemblance of one character to a succession of people through the ages, a piece of jewelry linking a character to an ancient society, bad vibes, etc.). The film is also a bit tired stylstically (intentional camera shake in protracted long shots to induce an off-kilter atmosphere, shallow-focus in long shots to isolate the heroine, druggy slow-motion party sequence, hand-held, shaky rave scene with strobing cuts. Marie doesn't find it suspicious that her boyfriend is the dean of the archery guild after she and Dirk find out about its ancient traditions (most viewers will be suspicious as soon as they hear the word "guild" long long before we learn about its history). It's not as if she's in denial but it doesn't even seem in the scene as if she regards it as ridiculous. The climax can be seen coming miles away and throws in an indistinct and ridiculous make-up effect (well, two).

The IFC/MPI DVD has 15 minutes of deleted scenes, some useful, some unnecessary, a trailer, and start-up trailers for FERMAT'S ROOM (which seems like a film about mathematicians in an arty SAW scenario but it looks interesting), THE SKEPTIC (a run-of-the-mill-looking haunted house movie but it's got Tim Daly as the titular skeptic so it might be interesting), the strange animated FEAR(S) OF THE DARK, and HOW TO BE (Robert Pattinson singing and generally wearing out his welcome even more so).