Sergio G Sánchez has lofty ambitions, involving guilt, coming of age and a whisper of the supernatural - but without the emergency brake he is usually offered by whichever director he is working with to rein him in.
Scary enough to please most genre buffs, it would also play well in art houses: If you were to go through and remove every hint of ghosts, you'd still have a drama well worth seeing.
Powerfully frustrating, undone by an ornate storytelling style in which twists only beget more twists, all in service of some fairly obvious observations about guilt, self-deception and devotion.
Despite the fine performancse of his cast of young stars... [director Sergio G.] Sanchez forgets the essence of his film, the same that made us empathize with the fables of Bayona and Amenabar: fear of the loss of loved ones. [Full review in Spanish]
In the end, all the creaky floorboards and crackly old-vinyl recordings of 1940s ballads in the world, can't obscure the fact that the most haunting things about "Marrowbone" are the ghosts of all the better movies it fleetingly resembles.