DVD Reviews

The New Daughter – DVD Review

By Jeff Swindoll May 19, 2010, 0:30 GMT

Academy Award® winner Kevin Costner stars in this brand-new thriller as John, a newly divorced father who moves into a rural South Carolina home with his adolescent daughter Louisa and young son Sam. But when Louisa begins to behave in a bizarre and increasingly violent manner, John must uncover the truth behind her transformation. Is the former owner s shocking secret to blame? And how far will a father go ...more

Kevin Costner stars in this thriller about an author charged with caring for his kids.  However, when they move to a mysterious old house things start to take a turn for the worse thanks to an ominous burial mound in the backyard.

John James (Kevin Costner) has recently gotten custody of his kids, teenager Louisa (Ivana Baquero) and the younger Sam (Gattlin Griffith), when their mother runs off with her boyfriend.  He moves his new, stressed out family to an old house in the country. 

Louisa and John have a tense relationship since she thinks that he should’ve fought harder to keep his marriage from crumbling in the first place.  John takes his kids to the small town to attend school and meets their teacher Cassandra (Samantha Mathis), who is a fan of John’s books. 

When John is in the local grocery store he gets some odd looks when they find out which house he’s living in.  It turns out that the previous tenant had some mysterious problems with her teenage daughter, locking her in her room, and then the mother vanished. 

Louisa is becoming more fascinated with an old burial mound in the back of their house and soon she’s behaving in strange ways and John thinks that whatever fate befell the other girl is now happening to his daughter.  

There was a time when Kevin Costner was all powerful at the box office.  He even used some of his powers to interfere with a competing Wyatt Earp film, not that it helped his own, but such was his prowess at the time.  Now he’s been reduced to a PG-13 direct-to-video horror film. 

You’d expect that the results, considering the film’s nearly direct-to-video pedigree, would be pretty dire.  The thing is that the film is actually pretty good and Costner does a good job in the lead but he’s really just playing Kevin Costner. 

The star of Pan’s Labyrinth makes her English speaking debut here and is also good as the “new” daughter.  The mythology behind what exactly is scurrying around in the woods is interesting, though it’s still the same “family moves into creepy home and finds evil” plotline that we’ve seen before. 

It’s the difference of the menace, the sense of dread, and the performances that make the film rise above the “direct-to-video” stigma.  

The New Daughter is presented in anamorphic widescreen (2.35:1) and is enhanced for 16x9 televisions.  Special features include a commentary by director Luis Berdejo, an 11 minute behind-the-scenes, 22 minutes of deleted scenes, and the 2 minute theatrical trailer.  

The New Daughter may seem like it should suck, but that it actually has some chill and thrills overcomes any stigma that the film may appear to have.  Kevin Costner and the rest of the cast acquit themselves rather nicely.  The film overcame whatever expectations I had for it and actually ended up being a nice little trip to the menacing woods.  

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