eff (Olds) and Pam Mason (Gill) are a hardworking Kansas couple with a baby who are struggling to make ends meet as they renovate their old Victorian house. Jeff begins to have strange dreams, and unexplained things start to happen in the house. When a toy duck levitates and candles light by themselves, Pam decides to contact someone about the phenomena.
On to the scene comes Derek Mulroy (Bridges) and his Sightings crew to investigate. Sightings is a show that checks into unexplained phenomena, and Derek is the cynical producer of the show. He believes any mystery has a rational explanation. However, their psychic, Allen (Ferrer), immediately feels the presence of a haunting by several entities, including a little girl named Sally. The Sightings crew soon discovers that Jeff is the center of the activity, and he suffers a mysterious scratch that appears to have ghostly origins.
While Derek doesn't buy any of it, his field director (Nia Long) and Allen begin to research the house. Meanwhile, Pam and Jeff quickly find that the people of the small town in which they live don't appreciate the attention or talk of ghosts. Worse yet, the unexplained phenomena begin to intensify, as Jeff sees Sally and powerful dreams lead him to render pencil drawings of people from the 1800s who may have once lived and died in the house.
As pieces of the mystery begin to fall in place, Jeff becomes the key to learning what happened so long ago in the house. For the Sightings crew, it becomes anything other than a normal investigation, as each member of the team becomes convinced that what they are seeing is true—all except Derek, who may be shaken by the events but refuses to admit that he might believe in ghosts. While the crew can walk away, for Pam and Jeff it's a different story. The house that's being haunted is their house, and if they lose it, they'll lose everything. But the closer Pam and Jeff get to the answers, the more dangerous it gets, and they soon discover they have far more to lose than just the house.
A spooky story with heart—and a twist
Sightings: Heartland Ghost is a surprisingly effective ghost story that is well acted, has just the right amount of suspense and has some nifty point-of-view shots from the ghost's perspective. While the ending doesn't quite pull the story together into a satisfying conclusion, there's still a lot to like about Sightings.
While the actors playing the Sightings crew are given top billing (Bridges, Long, Ferrer), it's Gill as the open and accepting Pam and Olds as the skeptical and concerned Jeff who shine. Their characterizations as the young couple give the film its heart and make the viewer care about what happens to them.
The other fascinating part of Sightings is that it spends time in the ghost's point of view, using special effects and camera distortions to give the viewer a ghost's-eye view of the characters as it moves toward them without their knowledge that they are being watched. It's spooky and adds tension, making the ghostly scenes more powerful.
According to Showtime, Sightings is "based on a true story," and, for the most part, the story structure works as the film gives equal time to both the couple's and the crew's stories. The characters are unique and interesting, and the tale itself about a skeptical film crew finding a story that proves to be all too real is an intriguing take on the old ghost story, especially in this age of reality television. It's only at the very end, where the producer's story takes over that of the couple's, that Sightings loses some of its punch.
