'Sweet River', like the best ghost stories, is suffused with grief and mystery.

A woman moves to a small Australian riverfront sugarcane town to seek answers about the disappearance of her small son, only to find a community of grieving parents who, having lost their children to a number of tragedies, believe they are still with them. At the same time a mystery haunts the town, echoing across the canefields at night - particularly a field that stands as a memorial for the children lost and has never been harvested.

'Sweet River' is first and foremost a human drama about an outsider probing the secrets of a town - when the townsfolk don't want her to - so that she can find her son and finally allow him, and herself, to rest. The cane towers and shifts as both a backdrop and a character. It is foreboding and visceral - both the town's lifeblood and the keeper of its secrets. A river and a forest full of omens.

Beautifully acted and photographed, this film weaves a tightly knotted plot that it unravels in expertly measured beats as midway, the ghost story hinted in its opening sequence begins to take hold while the frustrations begin to mount upon Hannah as she gets closer to the truth.

Perhaps the resolution is just ever so slightly too neat (this is being very picky) and the emotional wrap-up a touch too swift to be as satisfying as the rest of the story demands. The opening sequence, like the exaggerated trailer, is also a little at odds with the tone of the rest of the film. Nevertheless, this is an accomplished, subtle, slow burn, adult ghost story that should have had the chance to find a bigger audience than it has.

One for viewers looking for something along the lines of 'The Orphanage', 'The Others', 'February (The Balckcoat's Daughter)' and 'The Devil's Backbone' rather than J-Horror and 'Children of the Corn', as the trailer would have you expect.

The movie follows a great idea, and could have been great for Australian cinema, however poor scripting and editing leaves the viewer totally baffled at times as to what is going on and how each scene adds to the story attempting to be told.

Lisa Kay is "Hanna", a woman who has beens searching for the body of her lost young son. Her quest takes her to the rural farming community of Billing where she begins to discover a town with secrets - and lots of corn fields. Add the two together and we are presented with a rather poorly paced horror film that is very wordy, pretty poorly lit and isn't in the remotest scary. I suspect that if this is anything at all, it is a film about grief - the huge difficulties that the mother experiences whilst having to come to terms with an hideous trauma; but that doesn't make this story any more entertaining or interesting...