I'm a huge fan of Robert Sheehan, and this is truly one of his very best moments of acting. I'm really puzzled as to why this movie has some really bad reviews - it is a hauntingly beautiful story of what might happen to someone who has been tormented by ghosts from the time they were just a young boy. I thought the cinematography was very well done, the shots of Jack speaking while walking "alone" through various vast, empty places was an interesting choice that I think paid off. The music was perfectly suited to the morose and at times painful mood of the story. And the acting... wow, just wow. Robert Sheehan was truly amazing as such a tortured, tragic soul. This is a story that will stick with me for a few days at least. Well worth the watch. I did not find it to be boring at all, in fact I was absolutely riveted. That said, it is definitely the kind of movie that you watch for the acting, rather than the action.

THE MESSENGER is an entirely boring indie production from Britain, telling the story of a down-on-his-luck guy who has the ability to see ghosts. Don't go in expecting some kind of supernatural extravaganza, though, because this is one of those low key movies that goes for grimy realism over anything more cinematic. The film is drawn out to the extreme and entirely boring, too; one scene has the protagonist standing on the same spot for ten minutes reminiscing, and I was struggling not to fall asleep from the boredom. Robert Sheehan delivers a one-note performance as boring as the script, and giving non-performers like Lily Cole major roles was a massive mistake too.

Jack is a troubled adult, who's had a troubled life. In fact, everything about him is troubled, and trouble.

After a major life event affected him as a child, he has since had the ability to be pestered by troubled souls, dead people, and because of this he is stamped as a mental health problem (but talking to souls in a pub looking very dishevelled and unkempt doesn't help).

After a journalist is found dead, and it looking like suicide, Jack is hounded by the soul, because something wasn't quite right about his death, and he's trying to get a message to his loved one......hence the title.....

If you take Randall & Hopkirk (deceased),then add elements of The Sixth Sense and Ghost, you get this quite gritty, suburban Gothic horror.

Sheehan excels as our protagonist, not doing his character any favours by playing Jack as a very dis-likable person, but because of his back-story, you can forgive his shortcomings, as the narrative depicts his childhood to be less than pleasurable.

The film focuses on grieving, forgiveness and guilt, as the immediate characters to Jack perceive his 'gift' as a result of his fathers death, and how the family unit changed when he and his sister became fatherless.

It's a shame that the gift stemmed from sudden loss, because this just seems like a cheap excuse from the makers to make him seem like a 'weirdo' to others, and the on,y one who believes him is involved in a minor sub-plot that becomes a major twist come the end.

It's not a bad film by any means, it's just disjointed and doesn't know what to do with all the sub-plots going on, and in turn, it never really wraps itself up for a satisfactory conclusion.

But the cast are great, the cinematography is wonderfully bleak and cold, but I fear many will miss the grieving/loss/guilt element of the narrative and see it as a straight up horror.

Worth watching though.