Good visuals. Rupert Grint did his best. That's all the good things I can say about this episode that audaciously claims to be based on the story of the same name by H. P. Lovecraft and with which it shares truly, next to nothing.
Was it at least a good ghost story that just isn't faithful to the source material? No. It is a rather poor (not terrible but poor) ghost story in its own right, but the complete disregard of Lovecraft is flabbergasting. It looks like whoever adapted this thought 'witch, check, rat with dude's face, check, good to go'. I can maaaaybe accept that the character has a completely different background and motivation even though that adds absolutely nothing to the story. I could begrudgingly stomach the absence of any discussion about non-Euclidean geometry. But for the love of god, there is exactly one dream in this witch house, and the other dimensions are not the alien cities of unfathomable beings but...afterlife! Have you EVER read anything by Lovecraft? If whoever wrote this had, they would know Lovecraft's horror is cosmic, it is the void, it is the realisation of human nothingness before the enormity of the universe. And here, you have someone entering a 'forest of lost souls' trying to bring back his sister? No Azathoth, no Nyarlathotep, just a generic, pseudo-indigenous spirit world. I expected better from Guillermo Del Toro than accepting this. How utterly, utterly insulting.
Was it at least a good ghost story that just isn't faithful to the source material? No. It is a rather poor (not terrible but poor) ghost story in its own right, but the complete disregard of Lovecraft is flabbergasting. It looks like whoever adapted this thought 'witch, check, rat with dude's face, check, good to go'. I can maaaaybe accept that the character has a completely different background and motivation even though that adds absolutely nothing to the story. I could begrudgingly stomach the absence of any discussion about non-Euclidean geometry. But for the love of god, there is exactly one dream in this witch house, and the other dimensions are not the alien cities of unfathomable beings but...afterlife! Have you EVER read anything by Lovecraft? If whoever wrote this had, they would know Lovecraft's horror is cosmic, it is the void, it is the realisation of human nothingness before the enormity of the universe. And here, you have someone entering a 'forest of lost souls' trying to bring back his sister? No Azathoth, no Nyarlathotep, just a generic, pseudo-indigenous spirit world. I expected better from Guillermo Del Toro than accepting this. How utterly, utterly insulting.