On October 31, first-time director Mickey Liddell’s thriller “The Haunting of Molly Hartley” opened in United States theaters, starring Haley Bennett as a teenage girl striving to recover from the psychological trauma caused by her mother’s attempt to stab her with a pair of scissors.

The girl, Molly Hartley, is moved by her father to another high school, in order to help heal the deep scars within her troubled soul and mind, while the mentally disturbed mother is institutionalized in a psychiatric facility.

As an aftermath of the stabbing incident, Molly begins to have frightful visions and nightmares and also to hear voices, which eventually leads to her dreading an onset of the mental illness her mother suffers from.

Moreover, being the new girl at school further adds to her distress, although Alexis, one of her classmates (portrayed by Shanna Collins), tries to free her from the grasp of psychosis and Joseph Young (Chace Crawford) seems to have taken a liking to her.

Nevertheless, everybody fails to see the truth behind her hallucinations, which turns out to be that Molly Hartley’s mother, along with others, had actually been trying to save her from a pre-established destiny of being a slave to the Devil.

Unfortunately, the movie’s director appears to have not been able to envisage the turmoil that ravishes Molly’s soul as she desperately tries to escape her fate, since the production concentrates more on making every sound seem creepier and goosebumps-worthy, in an attempt to emphasize the thriller spin of the story.

“The Haunting of Molly Hartley” was written by John Travis and Rebecca Sonnenshine, while the cast also features Jake Weber as Molly’s father Robert Hartley and Marin Hinkle as her mentally disturbed mother Jane.