The Tall Man: Critic Reviews

"The Tall Man" opens like a ghost story and closes with its feet firmly in the real world. Until then, Pascal Laugier's chilly little thriller manhandles our sympathies and gladdens our eyes in almost equal measure.

Once you get through the flaming, Bowser's Castle-like gauntlet of the rest of the story's implausibilities, you end up in a different movie than the one on the creepy poster.

The movie itself draws on too long, and eventually goes past at least two potential endings and heads right into the ridiculous.

"The Tall Man" spits out enough scares and twists to maintain our interest, but the film's psycho-sociological layer is almost as cheesy and unconvincing as its low-rent action scenes.

I like to imagine the pitch meeting for "The Tall Man" as something like this: "It will be like 'Twin Peaks,' only absolutely terrible on every level."

Long on atmosphere and short on sense, "The Tall Man" becomes less gripping as it grows more ridiculous.

The Tall Man comes as close as anything in recent years at matching the better monster-of-the-week episodes of The X-Files.

for all this thriller's tautness, its true horror emerges from the uncomfortable ethical questions that it poses - and leaves us to answer for ourselves in the dark.

The Tall Man is a fine thriller that tragically falls off the rails, spiraling into dark, morally corrupt territory.

Laugier, as was the case with Martyrs, takes the story in a completely unpredictable and, for a while, baffling direction.

Despite the excellently creepy subject matter, The Tall Man contains very little actual horror and ends up being quite a dud.

... can't decide if it wants to be 'High Tension,' 'Jeepers Creepers' or 'The Piped Piper of Hamelin' ... results are arty, jumbled and, ho-hum, Sunday School preachy.

The result is tedious instead of suspenseful.

Works surprisingly well, given where it winds up. Give it a chance if you're looking for an unexpected surprise.

Leaving behind any trace of her eye-candy image, Jessica Biel delivers the performance of her career in 'The Tall Man.'

A spooky and atmospheric little thriller that contains some actual and unexpected surprises.

If you're a parent who ever, for one cold-sweat second, lost sight of your child at a playground - "The Tall Man" will tap into your darkest fears. And then make them even darker.

Child abductions plague a rural Washington State town, but the more pressing affliction in Pascal Laugier's film is the absence of chills, logic and coherence

Pascal Laugier's film illustrates the problem of class mobility with a dark, troubling premise that holds a harsh light up to our own assumptions and expectations.

What begins as an intriguing Stephen King riff devolves into a Lifetime Original, effectively burning off the potential of the complex misdirection.

It's novel, thought-provoking, and defiant of genre expectations.

Almost to the same degree as Laugier's Martyrs, it changes its game midway through and makes audiences radically shift sympathies as its plot develops.

Laugier's toiling with the seed of a good idea and interesting moral questions, but his own commitment to constructing the first half like a horror film (despite it not really being a horror film) leads to pacing issues as the film progresses.

A sly, strange and subtly engaging horror story that will no doubt leave several viewers angry, confused, or arguing on twitter.