Film review: Beautiful Creatures (12A)

A teenager in love: Alice Englert in the po-faced drama ‘Beautiful Creatures’ (Alcon Film Fund, LLC)

Here is what they're hoping will fill the void for teens mourning the end of the Twilight saga.

Alden Ehrenreich and Alice Englert play the star-crossed pair Ethan and Lena; he's a high-schooler in the Southern bible-belt who has been dreaming of death and a maiden on a Civil War battlefield, she's the enigmatic niece of local aristo Ravenwood (Jeremy Irons) whose family are all "spell-casters" – telekinesis, body-swapping, etc.

Lena, approaching 16, must deal with a curse that will turn her to the light or the dark – at the moment she throws wobblies that can turn a house upside down. At times it plays almost like a parody of Southern-fried Gothic fantasy, with a lot of Burtonesque CGI thrown in to give us the shivers.

It's neither scary nor sexy, though it might just do for all the yearning Twi-hards out there. Listen out for one very good joke about Nancy Reagan; otherwise it's po-faced teen trauma with knobs on.