Seen The Sixth Sense? The Others? SPOILERS…
Finding horror movies that are original and new can be a tricky proposition, which is what makes The Awakening especially disappointing. The film is handsomely-made, well-cast and often lovely to look at - after the fantastic opening scene, you’d be forgiven for thinking the movie was going to be something special. But this is sadly a modern horror film, and thus cannot be simply a haunted house story: it has to have a twist at the end. By going the route of other, more popular ghost movies of the last decade-and-a-half, The Awakening quickly turns from a promising horror film into absolute nonsense - virtually demolishing all the goodwill it builds over its runtime with a few boneheaded decisions at the end.
The story revolves around Florence Cathcart, a woman in post-WWI Great Britain who makes a living disproving haunting and apparitions and other paranormal phenomena - such as the fantastic opening scene, where Cathcart sabotages an eerie séance and proves its falsehood. She’s then visited by the proprietor of a boy’s boarding school, where a recent death has the children all scared, and other strange occurrences lead everyone at the school to believe it’s haunted. Cathcart obliges, thinking schoolboy pranksters must be the true cause, but soon finds herself caught up in a real-life nightmare.
Rebecca Hall takes the leading role, and gets straight to the human core of Cathcart. It would be very easy to make such a role dour and not much fun, but there is a general warmth to Hall’s performance that makes the character endearing. The actress sadly falls into a sort of schizo-melodrama at the end, but that’s more a fault of the film’s script than anything Hall does. Dominic West plays the boarding school proprietor, a WWI veteran suffering from ghosts of a wholly different kind. West has been criminally underrated as an actor in film, relegated to genre films, but here gets a nice dramatic role to play, giving him ample opportunity to show off. Imelda Staunton also lends a creepy, ambiguous role as the housekeeper of the school, though like Hall, her character suffers from the inane turns of the plot. Rounding out the main cast is Game of Thrones’ Isaac Hempstead-Wright as the lonely boy Tom, who has to stay at the school over the holidays due to his parents traveling about India.
The film builds slowly over its runtime, crafting a sort of postwar, supernatural CSI when Cathcart is at work disproving the paranormal. It’s all very well-directed by Nick Murphy - who provides a nice, murky visual ambiance hanging over the whole picture. The film’s considerable achievements from both a technical and acting standpoint should be no surprise, considering it’s a co-production between the BBC and Studio Canal, but those elements can’t save the muddled and disappointing conclusion, wherein we learn that Cathcart has not only visited the boarding school before, but she in fact used to live there. Her blocked memories slowly return, and she discovers that this was the house where she witnessed her father kill her mother and younger half-brother (bonus points if you can figure out who that is). It’s a stupid, wrong-headed decision, and only serves to frustrate what up until then had been a pleasant ghost story. I’m reminded of Guillermo Del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone, which used a similar storyline in the service of exploring the ramifications of the Spanish Civil War. The Awakening seems to be interested in doing the same with a postwar Britain, and even goes so far as to set it up with an early detail - we learn that Cathcart lost her lover in WWI, and in effect is basically destroying the possibility of ever seeing him again by disproving ghosts and the afterlife and so on. It’s a great trait to have, and makes for a fascinating character… But it’s virtually thrown out the window (like every other interesting element of the film) in favor of the twisteroo at the end.
The Awakening is an easy movie to recommend due to its mostly-excellent first half; just know going in that it all falls apart by the end.
No comments:
Post a Comment