Flowers in the Attic

After their father dies, four siblings move with their mother into their wealthy grandmother's mansion. To secure the inheritance, the mother has to hide the existence of her children; they are shut in the attic, and years pass there. The film is not interested in horror. It is interested in the slowness of neglect: at first the mother comes daily, then weekly, then not at all. The punishments the grandmother administers on religious grounds are laid on top of that. The form is television scale: enclosed spaces, a small cast, unshowy photography. Its strength is in the child actors, particularly Kiernan Shipka as the eldest sister. The source is V. C. Andrews's bestselling 1979 novel. The book had been filmed before, in 1987; this version chooses to stay closer to it and does not remove the most contentious element, the relationship between the siblings. Deborah Chow directed. Heather Graham plays the mother and Ellen Burstyn the grandmother. Who it is for: readers of the novel and viewers who like gothic family melodrama. Who it is not for: anyone avoiding the discomfort of the subject, and the production stays at television scale and never quite builds the book's atmosphere.