Product Details

• Actors: Gabrielle Anwar, Justin Louis, Forest Whitaker, Brooke Johnson, William Cuddy
• Directors: Jordan Barker
• Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 5.1), Thai (Dolby Digital 2.0)
• Subtitles: English, Spanish, Japanese, Thai, Korean
• Region: Region 1 encoding (US and Canada only)
  PLEASE NOTE: Some Region 1 DVDs may contain Regional Coding Enhancement (RCE). Some, but not all, of our international customers have had problems playing these enhanced discs on what are called "region-free" DVD players. For more information on RCE, click here.
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Studio: Sony Pictures
• DVD Release Date: April 17, 2007
• Run Time: 92 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000MTFDBK
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #52,951 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "The Marsh" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

The subtler scares work best in the Canadian-made chiller The Marsh, which stars a pre-Oscar Forest Whitaker as an investigator who aids an author in unraveling the mystery behind her terrifying dreams. Gabrielle Anwar plays the troubled writer, whose visions of a young girl in peril lead her to a remote town. There, the secret behind the disappearance of a local girl and boy--and Anwar's dreams--seem to be hidden behind the frightening façade of an abandoned house. Anwar and Whitaker are fine in their lead roles, but the film succeeds in raising the most gooseflesh when it tones down the blaring soundtrack and overwhelming barrage of special effects and concentrates on atmosphere and suspense. As it stands, The Marsh's mix of old-fashioned creeps and computer-generated flash is an uneven offering for horror fans. The DVD includes a behind-the-scenes featurette. -- Paul Gaita

Product Description

Claire Holloway is a young, sophisticated author of a series of successful children's books. Her personal life, however is far from a storybook tale. Visions of violence and death haunt Claire. She is tortured by a darkness that seems to seep from the corners of her subconscious. In hopes of clearing her mind, Claire takes her doctor's advice to go on a sabbatical. She decides to stay at the Rose Marsh Farmhouse in the countryside, which looks suspiciously like the house she sees in her nightmares. Almost immediately upon arriving at the farmhouse, Claire is jarred by a series of escalating and unexplained happenings. She has plunged into a frightening world controlled by the ghost a ten year old girl the very girl that Claire has seen in her dreams many nights before. In her search for clarity, Claire is joined by Noah Pitney (Justin Louis), a charming and handsome publisher of the small town newspaper and by Hunt (Forest Whitaker) a paranormal consultant. Claire and Hunt start to unravel the village's dark secret.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars little predictable but good, April 29, 2007

By	R. A. WOMACK - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have been looking for a good ghost story to come around. As a fan of the Ghost Story movie with Fred Astair and the Chowder Society. I was hopping that Hollywood would start coming back with some old fashion ghost stories. The creature stuff with the fancy graphics has become somewhat repetative. An American Haunting is another good break in the monotany.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Forest Whitaker in Derivative Supernatural Thriller, February 18, 2008

By	Tsuyoshi (Kyoto, Japan) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Popular children's book author Claire Holloway (Gabrielle Anwar) is tormented by nightmares. It is about a spooky mansion and the surrounding marsh and in the dream she always has to witness something very disturbing, which is getting worse every night. Following advice from her therapist (and watching a TV program), she moves into a farmhouse in the countryside that looks exactly like the one in her dreams. And of course, she soon learns that the house is haunted.

Claire's decision to live in the house seems quite a drastic method to face her fear, but she is helped by a kind local resident, paranormal phenomena consultant Geoffrey Hunt (Oscar-winner Forest Whitaker). They investigate the strange occurrences in the house and the marsh, but the process is not particularly new or unique.

"The Marsh" has right ingredients to make a good ghost story - good actors, good photography and good production designs - but they forgot one thing: good script. The story is derivative and the film is not scary. The film becomes interesting in the final chapter, but the wait is too long.

Forest Whitaker gives a solid performance (as always) and Justin Louis is also effective as support, but even these talented actors cannot do much in the predictable plot and narrative that include typical sound effects, flashbacks and a creepy little girl in white. How many times have we seen creepy little girls since "The Ring"?

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Lacks originality, yet atmospheric and creepy, July 15, 2008

By	z hayes (plano,texas) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

I had mixed feelings watching this movie. The Marsh is not an original horror movie as I kept comparing it to movies like Stir of Echoes, Dark Water etc as I watched it. That being said, it has an interesting though not remarkable premise, and is well-shot. Gabrielle Anwar [who seems to be in quite a few horror movies these days] plays a children's book author, Claire Holloway who keeps having disturbing nightmares about her childhood and events she no longer remembers as having occured. Upon seeing a familiar place on tv, she ventures out to a small town in Westmoreland County, Marshville, where she leases a house she finds disturbingly familiar.

It doesn't take long for Claire to encounter spooky entities and experience disturbing visions. She enlists the aid of a spook consultant, Geoffry Hunt [Forest Whitaker] and he helps her discover the truth behind Claire's visions. It appears that Claire's 'return' to the town of Marshville has unleashed supernatural entities that are seeking revenge for a tragedy long past and Claire is somehow in the center of it.

The effects are good for what I assume is a low-budget movie - the entities look creepy enough, and the scares are the usual blink and you'll miss it kind. The movie also has a sufficiently bleak and menacing atmosphere, especially in the scenes where the entities wreak havoc.

As for the acting, both Anwar as Claire and Whitaker as Hunt do a credible job with the script they are given, though I felt this role was far beneath Whitaker's talent [this movie was before The Last King of Scotland for which he deservedly won an Oscar].

True horror fans who feel they deserve better may not appreciate this as much, but I felt it was worth a rental and the story held my attention till the end.