Starring Fairuza Balk – still most famous for her role in The Craft – Grindstone Road is a Canadian horror film from newcomers Melanie Orr (director) and Paul Germann (writer.) The film operates on a basic haunted house storyline, but takes a couple of turns in the meantime.
The Premise of Grindstone Road
Hannah Sloan (Balk) has recently been in a serious car accident, in which her young son, Daniel, was severely injured and left in a coma. After a year of holding onto him, she decides that it is time to start afresh – she finds a home for sale in the small town where she grew up, and she and her husband Graham (Greg Bryk) move in. It’s a fixer-upper, but for some reason, Hannah feels a strong attachment to the house.
Almost immediately, Hannah begins to experience strange noises and other phenomena in the house. She sees people out of the corner of her eye, hears her name being called, and finds moving toys roaming around the floors of the kitchen and bathroom. At the encouragement of her husband, Hannah chalks it up to stress and post-traumatic anxiety, but soon things grow too strange for her to deal with.
Hannah learns from her elderly neighbours that something terrible happened in her house a number of years ago – a young boy went missing and was never found – but she cannot get enough detail from them, so she does her own searching at the town library. As it turns out, the young boy who went missing was the exact same age as Hannah’s son (11), and shared the same name, Daniel.
Forgettable Storyline Moves Too Quickly
Ultimately, the audience is told that Hannah actually knew Daniel Jenkins, the boy who went missing from her current home. She starts to converse with him in her dreams, and it is eventually revealed that Hannah and Graham’s seemingly sweet old neighbours, Ted and Linda, are actually Edward and Melinda Jenkins, Daniel’s parents. They abused and killed him, and finally had to abandon the house when his ghost wouldn’t leave them alone.
All of this back-story, though, is fed to the audience line by line near the end of the film. As a result, the audience spends a great deal of the movie not really knowing who Hannah and Graham are. Even discovering that Hannah knew Daniel Jenkins doesn’t help much – you still can’t help but wonder how long Hannah and Graham have been married, what life was like before their son fell into a coma, and why Graham has such serious trust issues with his wife.
Graham is an altogether frustrating character, as he becomes the stereotypical unbelieving husband. At times, you almost wish he would be pushed or scared stiff by the ghost of Daniel Jenkins, just so that he would stop harassing his wife for being “crazy” – and he should know, since he’s a psychiatrist and has been supplying Hannah with medication for years.
In the end, it is difficult to sympathize with anyone in the film, since nothing has really been offered to the audience to sympathize with. The over-used haunted house storyline is not revamped in any original way, and on top of everything, Grindstone Road ends with Hannah and Graham’s son miraculously awaking from his yearlong coma. If anything, the audience could have done without this final, stereotypical moment.
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