Dragonfly is an uneven supernatural thriller starring Kevin Costner who plays a bereaved husband Dr Joe Darrow whose pregnant wife Emily was killed in a bus accident while working for the Red Cross in Venezuela.

Joe becomes convinced that somehow his wife is trying to contact him from the other side. This includes a dragonfly paperweight that suddenly rolls off a table and his wife's patients in hospital who are kids being treated for cancer claiming to have been contacted by her.

Joe's friends become concerned that he is going mad and his hospital bosses want him to go on extended leave.

Director Tom Shadyac resorts to horror film style jolts and suspense. However as Joe's behaviour becomes erratic we just end up thinking much early on why does he just not go to Venezuela to find closure especially as his wife's body was never recovered.

Of course eventually that is what Joe does leading to a sentimental and a not very surprising ending.

Costner is in his element by putting another maudlin performance but the film becomes too corny and mawkish too often.

Dragonfly aims to be a spooky, supernatural thriller in the same mould as THE SIXTH SENSE, WHITE NOISE and THE MOTHMAN PROPHECY, but the sad truth is that the film's structure can't retain the right atmosphere to last an entire running time. So what we have is a film that starts off pleasantly chilly but ends up as an ultimately routine and predictable storyline with the usual heartwarming Hollywood ending.

Kevin Costner, who doesn't seem to have been around much since the the dual-disaster of WATERWORLD and THE POSTMAN, puts in a decent turn as Joe Darrow, a grieving doctor who becomes convinced that his dead wife is attempting to contact him from beyond the grave. It's a performance that gets gradually more frantic and desperate as the story progresses, with friends and colleagues disbelieving as they seem wont to do in these movies. The central character arc is fairly predictable in these kinds of films, but I thought that Costner did a good job with the material. He reminds you why he was once an A-list actor, even if ever so briefly.

The scare scenes are fairly predictable and despite a few elements of fun with a talking parrot there's little here that hasn't been done before. Some good turns are elicited from the child actors in the cast and there are some familiar faces giving solid turns – Joe Morton, Ron Rifkin, Kathy Bates – so it's a real shame that this ends up as one of those films that seems to write itself into a corner, leading to a third act which goes for the safe and routine rather than the challenging. It had the potential to be so much more than just pleasantly spooky on occasion.

Joe Darrow (Kevin Costner) loses his doctor wife Emily (Susanna Thompson) while working charity in Central America. He's haunted and her body is not found. Then he receives a Dragonfly Mobile in the mail ordered by Emily. He had conflicted with her about going. While working at the hospital, Joe encounters Jeffrey who comes back from the dead. He was Emily's patient from before and claims to have had afterlife visions. Then another kid Ben claims to have visions of the lady doctor. There are drawings of a wiggly cross. Sister Madeline had worked with the kids about their after-death experiences.

It's a good ghost story but it does lack tension. There isn't anything scary in this. This is strictly a mystery and not a very mysterious one at that. There are no big twists and turns. Costner does a little too much overacting but there isn't much else that he could do with the material.