Marrowbone (El Secreto de Marrowbone)

 Rose (Nicola Harrison) brings her children to rural Maine from the UK escaping their father (Tom Fisher). They get a new house in the boondocks, and carefully start building a new life for themselves as the Marrowbone family.

 But Rose is very sick, and soon dies, making her eldest son Jack (George MacKay) promise to keep her death a secret until his 21st birthday so the family won't be split apart. And shortly after her death a man (presumably dad) comes back. With a hunting rifle.

 Cut to the credits, and then six months later, with the Marrowbones carrying on as their mother requested - Jack goes to town every now and then, maintaining the fiction that her mom is still alive (albeit sick) and courting a local girl (Anya Taylor-Joy) while his siblings (Charlie Heaton, Mia Goth and a very young Matthew Stagg) remain cooped up in the house.

 The kids live in terror of some sort of ghost haunting the house, there's a pesky lawyer (Kyle Soller, who's also a romantic rival) insisting on house visits, and some missing money - but the film is mostly structured around the mystery of just what went on in those missing six months.

 It's a handsomely mounted gothic tale clearly modelled after The Others, written and directed by The Orphanage scribe Sergio G. Sánchez under the auspices of executive producer J.A. Bayona; That's a pretty good lineage! I wish I could be more positive about it.

 For one, the tone - which goes a little too thick on a sort of deeply nostalgic 'gee whiz' innocence - put me off immediately; The film opens with someone browsing a home-made diary with plush covers labeled 'Our Story', and a narration that's prone to make all sorts of melodramatic pronouncements.
 The characters are all just barely defined; Jack is the responsible one, Allie (the local friend) is infinitely understanding and forgiving, and loves Jack very much, and the younger siblings also can be described with a couple of adjectives each. Sollner's lawyer villain is a bit more fun, though the script often contrives to make him more of a menace, to provide a momentum that the film sorely lacks.

 The film gets by for a while thanks to some beautiful cinematography by Xavi Giménez and a drip feed of revelations regarding the situation at La Casa Marrowbone. But these revelations get more convoluted and more melodramatic as the story heads towards its conclusion; There's one admirably brutal secret at the heart of the film, but the way its consequences spread outwards to explain all the weirdness can get bracingly stupid. The script twists itself into knots trying to explain away every detail, and while there's some interest in seeing how the pieces fall into place, the whole ends up being a disappointing mess.