Dark Places

(Image credit: 2014 DAMSELFISH HOLDINGS, LLC A)

Charlize Theron is suitably haunted as the grown-up survivor of a family massacre 30 years earlier

Charlize Theron is suitably haunted as the grown-up survivor of a family massacre 30 years earlier.

The tragedy left her debt-ridden single mother (Christina Hendricks, excellent) and two sisters dead and her teen brother jailed for life on the suspect testimony of her seven-year-old self. Now true-crime buff Nicholas Hoult and the morbid crew of geeks in his Kill Club want her to revisit this horrifying episode and help them re-open the case and exonerate her brother (Corey Stoll).

Seen in flashback, the events leading up to the slayings (which also feature Chloë Grace Moretz's thrill-seeking rich girl and a dose of Satanic panic) are fittingly twisty and dark, but the eventual resolution of the plot - the film is based on a story by Gillian Flynn - is too contrived to be fully satisfying.

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