Movie review: Dream House **

Stars: Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, Naomi Watts
Director: Jim Sheridan
Rated: PG-13
Showing: Speciality Cinema week of Friday, October 7. For more information call 292-2135.
Runtime: 90 minutes
Thriller/drama

Will (Craig) is a New York book editor who quits his job and rides the train home to his lovely wife (Weisz) and two kids. He's going to write a book himself, and they're going to fix up their suburban Connecticut home.

"I feel so safe when you're here," she says, reciting a line straight out of Foreshadowing 101 in film school.

"I'm not going to go anywhere," Will says back, reading from the same textbook.

But first, there's the matter of what happened to the last family there. The neighbor lady (Watts) is close-mouthed about it. It was bad.

And it might be happening again. The children see a man in the window. There are footsteps in the snow. Goth teenagers hold strange candlelight rituals in the basement. And the cops are no help, even when Will blurts out "I bought the freaking crime scene!"

If you've seen that trailer, you know what comes next. And that revelation leaves the movie no maneuvering room. So many peripheral characters have stood out in earlier scenes that we know that Elias Koteas and Marton Csokas will have something to do with the solution to this not-that-mysterious mystery. So much is just so ... obvious.

But the actors and their director (My Left Foot, In America) saw something here, so maybe you try to figure out what that was. Without rolling your eyes.

A happy memory - Craig met Weisz on this movie and they married last winter. And they manage a poignant moment or two, to go along with the film's two decent chills. But something tells me they won't be treasuring photos or memories from this one in their "How we met" scrapbook.