I don't know who should take the blame for this semi-coherent disaster, but if "missed opportunity" every becomes a crime, then this movie might make it a capital offence.
I don't like being totally negative, even when movies are terrible, they still usually have something about them that is positive, so given that let me review this turd.
Hic sunt spoilers.
Trigger Warning!!!1! :
The film starts with two statements that someone somewhere thought might be related.
"Between 1914 and 1919 A million people in Britain died of the influenza"
"Conclusion: There is a lot of ghosts."
The film starts with a seance, which is radical for a movie about a Ghost Hunter, I'm sure you'll agree. The usual scene occurs, it gets all "spooky" and then our protagonist "Florence Cathcart" (Rebecca Hall) reveals it all to be a fraud and the police raid the place only to drag the spiritualists out onto the street. A word here about Hall's performance. This is a movie set in England in 1921 and yet her performance is that of a contemporary woman in old clothing, not a young woman from 1921. I say this because I am currently working on a project which treads similar grounds, the idea of the supernatural in England amongst a society suffering from the PTSD of that pointless murder festival and have done an unhealthy amount of research on the post Great War generation and while it is true that women at that time were beginning to emancipate themselves from traditional roles, this chick turns out to be a famous paranormal debunker who went to Cambridge and is the way these days "takes no shit" but has "issues" (i.e starts off strong so they can break the character apart).
Mallory (Dominic West) turns up to ask her to help him with some supernatural shenanigans that lead to a murdered child and after pointless refusals (would have made a better and shorter movie if she had stuck to her principles) off she goes to spooky english Stately Home cum Boarding school where she is introduced to Maud, the Matron, a coward who pretended he was short sighted and lame to get out of being torn to pieces by artillery in a muddy ditch in another country for no good reason and then to the kids who tell her their spooky tale (I say they do, but it's more like. "Yeah there was a noise and I saw a ghost and then that kid died *shrugs*") Amongst the gorgeous surroundings of Cumbia and the School grounds (made dull by poor cinematography) Cathcart begins her ghostbusting and casual inexplicable voyeurism (as she uses a peep hole to watch Mallory have a bath and self harm).
Anyway her traps get set off and bingo, it was the kids after all. Case Closed. OR is it? Well of course not, though having that compressed would have made a better introduction to the character and her increasingly bewildering actions. The kids rumbled leads to a confession of sorts from a teacher that he was responsible. The teacher is kicked out and school dismissed. However something happens to make her stay. I saw this movie an hour and a half ago and for the life of me I could not tell you what makes her go back to the ghost hunt. It might have been an "eerie" dolls house or something, I don't know, but it hardly matters. Resolved to find out whats going on, she then appears to try and commit suicide.
The film attempts and fails to produce a few scares. Mallory and Cathcart get it on, Matron Maud becomes slightly unhinged and the Coward guy for no good reason seems to either try to strangle her or rape her. He fails, she clubs him with a shotgun and then Mallory goes to stash the stiff while she has a memory which attempts to reveal what the fuck has been happening for the last hour and in doing so makes it even more incoherent.
By the end I did not know who was alive, or dead, or a ghost or a real person, because it makes very little sense and the "revelation" which is clearly an attempt to go into the same territory as "The Others" doesn't work, given that there is little suggestion prior to it that make it come as a shock. Its like expecting a bowl of chocolate Ice-Cream and instead getting Vanilla Ice fucking around on roller skates while he tears pages out of a copy of Swann's way, bunches them up and throws them at you. Sure it's odd but its not relevant.
In short poorly drawn characters, uninspired performances, lacklustre direction, perfunctory cinematography and a plot which makes that of Pirates of the Carribean 2 seem tight. Three million quid and £8.50 down the drain. Seriously, don't waste your cash or more valuable, your time on this.
Still it would not be fair criticism if I didn't find something positive to say about it. There's a rabbit doll which is the only genuinely creepy thing in the movie, the costumes and sets were pretty authentic and the score was as unintrusive as the story.
"What started as a legitimate effort by the townspeople of Salem to identify, capture and kill those who did Satan's bidding quickly deteriorated into a witch hunt" Army Man
