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Absolutely brilliant

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

It's sad to think what has happened to once promising actresses Brittany Murphy and Thora Birch: Murphy is dead, and so is Birch's acting career. But while the exact cause of Murphy's death is still something of a mystery, the reason for Birch's fall from fame is obvious… it's down to bad career choices like this one.Deadline stars Murphy (looking far from her best) as screenwriter Alice, who travels to an abandoned Louisiana house to try and finish a script on time; while there, she experiences several strange events that lead her believe that the house is haunted, before discovering a box of video tapes that reveal precisely what happened to previous occupants Lucy (Birch) and her obsessively jealous husband David (Marc Blucas).However, with Alice having recently recovered from psychological problems stemming from a troubled relationship, could everything that she is experiencing be symptoms of another breakdown caused by the stress of producing a new script? Well, duh! The whole ambiguous 'is there really a ghost or is she mad?' plot line is terribly trite, and with dreary direction from Sean McConville, who aims for 'atmospheric' but only achieves 'stupefyingly dull', Deadline is one hell of a chore to stay awake through.

I don't mind bad movies if they are funny or make sense in some way but this movie is really bad storytelling. It really makes a mockery of everything a Hitchcock or a Poe stand for. I wanted to like this movie because of Brittany Murphy co-star of 8mile but the rest of the movie is just so bad that she has no chance of saving it. Especially the story within the story is a real insult to the intelligence of the viewer and the actors are playing it with strictly phony feelings. Moreover, the plot avoids all chances of a good plot twist and runs perfectly predictable and really tries not to be too scary or profound in any way. This movie is a good example of very bad storytelling.

Deadline definitely held my attention, despite there being little to no plot movement in the film. The cinematography was really cool and the soundtrack was interesting - added to the creepy vibe. The movie was a ghost story that Alice seemed to be living in as she was trying to write a screenplay in the middle of nowhere in a big, old, creepy house. We have hints that she may be imagining it all, due to her forgetting to take her medications... even though we see her taking them every day. The theory that Alice is imaging the ghosts seems to be dismissed when her friend, Becky, confirms the existence of the people in her ghost story over the phone... only to tell her later that she never talked to her... which again makes us question the entire narrative. What is true and what isn't?There are too many sudden reversals of the plot to make this a truly good movie. A lot of the conclusions the movie comes to feel like a cop-out. We become convinced that David and Lucy don't exist, only to have Lucy save Alice from drowning. We watch the whole thing unfold on tape... only to find out in the end that it was Alice filming Becky... but clearly Becky's not dead. Is she about to be? The movie ends without really explaining anything except that Alice is seriously disturbed and the movie we're watching seems to be all written down in her script.I think the best explanation I've heard for this movie is that Becky is Lucy and Alice is David and Alice is trying to sort out some previous trauma (which is never really disclosed to us) by writing about it. Becky says at one point on the phone to Alice that Ben (Alice's ex-boyfriend) tried to drown Alice b/c he thought she was seeing someone else and having another man's baby... only for the Becky=Lucy analogy to make sense, that would've had to happen to Becky, not Alice... unless that was another made-up phone conversation.Another thought I had is that maybe Alice is both Lucy and David. Maybe Ben did try to drown her, but she is the one obsessed with Becky. Maybe Alice was leaving Ben to be with Becky? There certainly were quite a few lesbian hints between the two of them, although nothing was said outright to that end.All in all, I think that the fact that Lucy and David didn't actually exist makes their creepy presence in the house very confusing. The images of Lucy as a ghost are creepy and all but don't seem to have much to do with the plot. It's also confusing when Alice and Lucy seem to be talking to each other, leading us to believe that Alice is Lucy, or perhaps at the very least that Lucy is really in the house and is trying in vain to rest in peace. There even seems to be a cliché'd bring-closure-to-the-ghost scene with Alice near the grave, but then it just kind of fizzles out with no conclusion to the ghost story... just an interruption in the form of a phone call from the mysterious Ben. If Alice is truly imagining Lucy & David as she is writing her screenplay (which has nothing to do with ghosts), why does the movie make it seem like someone is haunting her? I guess, anyway you slice it, this is a classic example of an unreliable narrator. We come away from this movie not knowing what to believe, largely due to the fact that our narrator was nuts and we can't be sure that anything she (Alice) told us was true. For all we know, Becky isn't real either.

I just watched this horrid film 2 days ago. At no point did I think this was in any way good. The only reason I suffered/survived the whole thing was that I was trying to see if maybe it was one of those slow at first and then gets good movies. I was wrong. I spent the last two days trying to figure this movie out. The way it ended, it all made NO sense to me. Then as I was reading other reviews to see if anyone felt the same, or if someone had understood it and explained. Thankfully, someone did explain it. Sort of. It was more of a 'theory', but I'll go with it, since it made sense to me after I thought about it. Basically, Alice goes to the supposed creepy house to finish a screenplay, her 'girlfriend' drops her off and then leaves. Alice starts seeing/hearing weird things in the house. Alice finds a box of tapes and starts watching them. Uses them to write her screenplay. Witnesses a murder on it. Turns out a lot of what we saw, happened in her head. She was reliving repressed events. After, unfortunately remembering the movie, Alice called Rebecca at one point and asked her to look up information on David and Lucy. At the end, when Alice calls Rebecca again to tell her that David is in the house, Rebecca has no idea what Alice is talking about and says "I haven't talked to you in over a week, I've been worried about you." And that leads me to believe that the conversation with Ben didn't happen. For one, if Rebecca hadnt heard from Alice all week, she didn't really tell Alice that Ben was out of jail. Which lead me to believe that Ben isn't really out of jail... And he couldn't have possibly known where Alice is, nor could he have gotten her number.From what I gathered, Lucy=Rebecca, Alice=David... and Ben seems pretty unimportant...but maybe he plays Davids mom or the one that 'David' thought 'Lucy' was cheating on him with? Who knows.. If you notice, at the beginning of the movie, when they're in the car, Alice has the video camera and is recording Rebecca. At the end of the movie, Rebecca goes downstairs to look for David, she finds only the video camera on the floor and on the tape she sees herself on a bed, just like when Alice first found the tapes and it showed Lucy on the bed and David recording her. There was so much and nothing at all going on in this movie at the same time.