The Unquiet (review)

With her bipolar disorder seemingly under control, sixteen-year-old Rinn Jacobs is looking forward to a fresh start as a "normal" girl at her new school. She discovers, however, that moving with her mother back to Mom's old hometown comes with its own set of emotional baggage: the house they're living in most recently belonged to a suicidal old lady, the hot guy across the street is the son of her mother's cheating high-school ex-boyfriend, and Mom herself is acting all kinds of weird, forgetting to monitor Rinn's meds and snapping at the slightest infraction. Meanwhile, Rinn finds herself strangely drawn to the swimming pool at her new school, the site of the tragic drowning accident twenty years ago that has given rise to the town's most notorious ghost story. A séance gone awry leaves Rinn questioning her sanity, but when her friends start dying, she's certain that the voices she's hearing this time are real. The focus here lies much more on the chill factor than any sort of credible character or plot development, and Garsee sets a spine-tingling, creepy stage of shadowy hallways and disembodied voices; supporting players, however, are straight from central casting, including the bitchy queen bee, the poor, rejected fat girl, and the hunky, wholesome farmboy. Rinn herself seems to be merely a vessel through which the story is told, with even her bipolar condition an overconvenient device. Nonetheless, Annaliese, the ghost of the drowned girl, is deliciously wicked, and there's something perennially appealing about vengeful ghosts. Just be ready to answer questions about your own local haunts after this one circulates.