The makeup and blood look great. The music is good. We get atmosphere; moments that are alternately acutely jarring and unsettling, heartwarming, or heartbreaking; emotional heft; and strong thematic content. Characters have varying personalities - alive or dead, they may tend toward kindness, cruelty, or something in between. It's solidly written all-around, with fine performances, carefully considered scenes and shots, and good use of lighting.
However well done it is - as suitable as every component part may be - a great deal of it also feels very ordinary, common, to the point that I'm altogether indifferent. For every great shot, there's an instance of tawdry camerawork. For every jolting chill, there's convention bordering on pablum. Some expression of feelings are duly sentimental, others are maudlin. So it is with the music, performances, scene writing, and so on.
Please don't misunderstand: I don't dislike this movie - not at all. I just find it to overall be very average. The strong themes and emotional gravity underlying the film would seem to elevate it ever so slightly above its countless brethren. To my great pleasure, the climax is also surprisingly well written and executed. On the other hand - are these things not also true of similar titles? Moreover, I freely admit that maybe I just missed something, but there are a few points that seem to me to lack clarity, and it's uncertain who someone is, or how they entered the story.
'Mourning grave' is a ghost movie, and a reasonably well made one. It's not bad - it's pretty good, generally - but it's not in any way special. There's nothing about it that leaps out at me as a great highlight, something marking the feature as an essential must-see, or as a bottom-dwelling clunker. If you like ghost movies, you'll like this one, too. If you don't like ghost movies, this one won't change your mind. C'est la vie.
