The Awakening is full of chills and ghostly pleasures
Starring: Rebecca Hall, Dominic West and Imelda
Staunton Playing at: Forum cinema
Parents’ guide: some violence and sexuality/nudity I’ve learned to accept that when it comes to horror movies, my tastes do not run with the pack. I don’t really like being scared, but I’ll submit to it (reluctantly) in the service of a good story. And The Awakening is better than most.
To begin with, this ghost tale is set in 1921 Britain. The nation of 45 million had lost almost a million people in the Great War, and a further quarter-million to the flu pandemic that followed. “This is a time for ghosts,” says the introductory title card.
Not for Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall), however.
As the story opens, we find this Georgian-era ghostbuster busting a séance, helpfully demonstrating how dim lighting, special effects and audience expectations help the con artists ply their trade. (This also explains the popularity of Adam Sandler.)
Florence is approached by Robert Mallory (Dominic West), who calls her a ghost hunter. “You can’t hunt what doesn’t exist,” she informs him sharply, but he replies that the boys’ school where he teaches may have a ghost that does. At the very least, it has a gruesome mystery: A student has died. Florence agrees to pay them a visit.
There’s a squinty, limping groundskeeper who dodged conscription but now carries a shotgun; a consumptive professor of languages; and a still, gloomy pond that Shakespeare would have declared an Ophelia magnet. Throw in the school uniforms, and the general effect is Harry Pot- ter’s Hogwarts with twice the chills and half the fun.
Florence is also introduced to Maud (Imelda Staunton), the starchy housekeeper; and Tom (Game of Thrones’ Isaac Hempstead Wright), a preternaturally serious student. Then she gets to work setting up tripwires, cameras and other detection equipment, although her stated aim is to detect not a ghostly presence but the human one that is trying to deceive people.
There’s a suggestion of romance with a London-based colleague before she heads to Cumbria, where the strapping war veteran Mallory proves a major distraction.
And yes, there are scares; both the sudden-noise variety and a more cerebral fright.
Yet as the story chugs along and the spookiness piles up, more seems to become less. Do we really need a marble rolling slowly down a flight of stairs — and what’s so disturbing about that?
And isn’t Ladybird Ladybird a scary enough nursery rhyme without it being sung in a garbled voice by a windup stuffed rabbit?
Even so, committed performances and a lingering, hair-raising, what-the-heckis-going-on vibe carry us through the movie’s more clichéd moments, to a deliciously near-ambiguous conclusion. I’ve been waiting a year, since The Awakening premiered at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival, to sample it again. Neither its chills nor its pleasures have grown stale.