My Sister’s Bones review – lackluster adaptation doesn’t pack the dark punch of the bestselling novel | film

FNuala Ellwood’s best-selling psychological thriller about a war correspondent who revisits the horrors of her childhood in Herne Bay may decide to continue with the book after this monotonous edit. Like a black sock that crept into a set of white bed sheets, the story came out in a dull, dreary grey. The film is uninteresting despite the wonderful cast doing their best. Even the omnipotent twist ending fails to pick up the pace.

Jenny Seagrove plays Kate Rafter, a hardened reporter haunted by PTSD. She returned from a stint in Aleppo to attend her mother’s funeral and stay at her childhood home. Seagrove plays it hard, his eyes flashing; Kate has witnessed terrible atrocities, and seems disturbed by the smallness of life in her town. But it is raw and damaged. There are flashbacks to Iraq where she befriends a young boy, and some unconvincing scenes of sessions with a psychologist trying to unlearn her childhood trauma in a home terrorized by a violent, alcoholic father. When Kate started hearing a baby crying next door, no one believed her.

Anna Friel gives a brilliantly messy and real performance as Kate’s alcoholic sister Sally, whose daughter has moved to Australia to get away from her. Sally’s husband Paul (Ben Miles) appears to be the sensible person holding the family together. Returning to Kate’s childhood home, creepy horror movie footage and blaring music tell us this is a dark place, but there’s little room in the film to explore the idea that terrible things can happen behind the closed doors of beautiful semi-detached homes as well as in war zones – and there’s not enough heat to intensify the plot.