A haunted house thriller set on the coast of Oregon, The Tank raises expectations it never quite delivers. Carefully written and shot, the movie features great production values and a strong performance by New Zealand-born Luciane Buchanan. It’s also slow, obvious, and almost completely devoid of genuine thrills.
Buchanan plays Jules, a wife, mother, and pet-shop owner who travels with husband Ben (Matt Whelan) and daughter Reia (Zara Nausbaum) to investigate a mysterious inheritance. Turns out Ben’s mother was institutionalized before she could let him know about a house and several oceanfront acres that his father purchased long ago.
The dank, boarded-up house is isolated from roads and overgrown with weeds. Despite the lack of electricity and running water, Ben decides to fix up the property with the hopes of selling it. To do so requires ignoring a plethora of clues to run away as fast as possible.
Locked doors leading to rickety basement stairs; bedroom windows nailed shut; a manilla envelope of newspaper clippings about earthquakes and unexplained deaths; sheds filled with rusty cans of bomb mixings; and most of all a concrete water tank whose lid keeps popping open — the omens pile up as Jules and Ben pretend nothing is wrong.
Writer, producer and director Scott Walker throws in overexposed, blue-tinted 1940s flashbacks that spell out in greater detail the dangers facing Jules and her family. Plus Jules starts reading diary entries that describe in guarded detail what actually happened those decades earlier.
I’m circling around The Tank the same way Walker’s script does. Everything is drawn out far too long: the stairway descents, the midnight forest walks, following the track of wet footprints across a hallway. It’s almost an hour into the movie before we get a good glance at what’s happening in the tank.
Until then Walker does a pretty good job evoking a sense of Oregon woods and beaches. The swaying pines, crashing surf, endless vistas of green are beautiful, but also help convey the family’s isolation and peril. You can imagine many different causes and reasons for the mysteries afflicting Jules and her family, that is until the monsters arrive.
Wētā Workshop co-founder, CEO and creative director Richard Taylor takes credit as creative lead on The Tank, but the film’s effects are surprisingly derivative and disappointing. Alien-like creatures attack from the water tank, so slow and lumbering it takes seriously bad choices to get caught by them. Fire and bleach seem to be strong deterrents, so the only way Walker can build suspense is to have the characters run out of same and return to a creature-infested spot to get more.
On the positive side, The Tank does what it sets out to do, so if you’re looking for a haunted house with monsters this will fit the bill. Just don’t expect much more. The surprise will be an extremely appealing turn by Luciane Buchanan.
Directed by: Scott Walker
Written by: Scott Walker
Produced by: Scott Walker
Creature Effects by: Wētā Workshop – Richard Taylor
Cast: Luciane Buchanan, Matt Whelan, Zara Nausbaum, Regina Hegemann, Jack Barry, Holly Shervey
Well Go USA opens The Tank in select theaters on April 21 and digitally on April 25. https://wellgousa.com/films/tank
