HBO brought me some free time, including this chronologically challenged thriller spins its wheels with creepy effect, slowly crawling through the plot.

The effects, characters, and acting were all well and good. The story was a bit confusing, taking a Pulp Fiction time trip to a new level.

Set in Japan, the movie opens with a speechless Bill Pullman (President in Independence Day) tossing himself off a balcony. Thinking about it now, I think he was speechless throughout. No, just a bit about some mail he received, but otherwise, mum's the word.

Unbeknownst to us, the movie jumps into the future where we meet Yoko, a Japanese housekeeper, it would seem, who is cleaning up after an elderly woman apparently afflicted with dementia. Strewn throughout the house is a mess of wrappers and newspaper shreds. Yoko follows the mess up the house's stairs, and is intrigued by a noise from the attic. It sounds a bit like a large animal scratching. She peeks trough the trap door in the closet, and is pulled to her demise.

A slight step to the next day and we meet an American exchange student Sarah Michelle Gellar, who's much friskier than she was as Buffy the Vampire Slayer on television. She's evidently working at a care center, and is asked to replace Yoko, who failed to show up for work today (the tip that we've jumped ahead in time).

As Gellar is searching for answers, she queries the police captain who found and rescued her when she was caught in the house's grip. We're briefly treated to a story about how the Japanese believe that horrible acts of rage can curse a place. Not really revealing the act in question, but at least we know there's a reason now.

The movie has some excellent creepy effects. You certainly saw the creepy Japanese kid with the sprawling maw, screaming like a kitten. Even though shown in previews and on commercials, the sudden appearance of the evil brat occasionally startled me, even when I thought I was expecting it.

It probably wouldn't have been any less suspensful if some of the events took place chronologically, or if, like Pulp Fiction the time-jumping made more sense more quickly; in that movie, it was easier to see when timelines changed because the characters changed, or at least changed clothes.

In the end, we're treated to a fairly comfortable bit of closure.

As Gellar races to the haunted house to fetch her boyfriend who believes she'd gone there after finding some of her papers at their apartment (yes, it was as twisty as that in the movie, too), we're treated to a flashback where Gellar watches Pullman as he finds the nasty dead bodies in the house, which has its own flashback where he sees the rage that puts the curse on the house. Pullman, a professor at the university that Gellar is attending, had a secret admirer, who wrote obsessive entries in a journal. Her man finds her journal and beats her to death, and drowns their son. They linger to seek revenge on anyone visiting the house.

In the end, Gellar tries to finish the police captain's plan of torching the house. See, he'd come to the conclusion that the house had to be destroyed, so he showed up with some gas cans. Stupidly, he hears a noise in the house he knows to be haunted, but goes to investigate, never to return. (See the twisty time thing going on?) Gellar succeeds in starting a fire, but we're comforted that the house was saved by some hallway banter in the hospital where she's going to identify her torched boyfriend (remember, he went there to find her, only she found him already spooked by the house). At the last minute, just when she thinks she's gotten clear, the spooky woman of the haunted house is standing right behind her.

Roll credits.