The Tall Man (2012) Review (Spoilers!)

Is a Canadian and French horror mystery movie directed by Pascal Laugier.

Plot:

A widowed nurse whose child is abducted, leading her on a desperate chase to recover him.

Despite what the title and the poster said, this is far from a horror movie. The story itself is interesting with a local legend called "The Tall Man" who abducted children. It seems similar to another urban legend creature. This one is far different. As I mentioned before, this isn't really a horror movie because there's barely anything creepy about this movie, and the poster and trailer make you think it's one. Also, they found the movie to be muddy on how the plot handles itself, and the pacing is off on how the nurse son gets kidnapped. In the middle part of the movie, things change that is something different for a horror movie, but it feels like a different genre on what happened during it. I do like the atmosphere of the movie with it being gloomy and how the town is falling apart.

The characters themselves are fine for the most part, but have something about them.

Julia is a local nurse of the town who seems to love her son a lot but has a dark secret about her. I am going to talk about her later in the review, but her character is different in the middle of the movie.

Jenny Weaver is a mute girl who mostly draws on her journal and is the narrator of the movie. She doesn't have that much development to her and also doesn't appear that much.

So who is the Tall Man, well its actually an organization that "rescue" young children from bad homes and places them with good ones. Juila is somewhat a part of them who kidnaps David (who is not her real son) and give him to a better family. She also martyring herself to save the organization in an attempt to break the cycle and abuse, which es from one generation to the next. Also, Jenny is taken to a better family and debate if this is the right choice for her. This twist is the reason why the movie isn't horror because it seems like the organization wanting to give the kids a better life than what they have back in the town. Now, I don't know if this is a right or wrong choice that they are doing, but it gets muddy to even think about that.

The Tall Man is a misleading horror movie that isn't a bad movie, but I don't know why they call this a horror movie.

Rating: 5.4/10