Chilling ghost story has a human heart
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 a better story than most.
To begin with, this ghost tale is set in 1921 Britain. The country of 45 million had lost close to a million people in the Great War, and a further quartermillion to the flu pandemic that followed. “This is a time for ghosts,” says the introductory title card.
Not for Florence Cathcart ( Rebecca Hall), however. Though quietly nursing her loss of a lover in the conflict, Florence has written a book debunking supernatural claims and the charlatans who perpetrate them.
As the story opens, we find this Georgian- era ghostbuster busting a seance, helpfully demonstrating how the con artists ply their trade. After the bad guys have been hauled away, 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, but he replies that the boys’ school where he teaches may have a ghost. At the very least, it has a gruesome mystery: A student has died. Florence pays them a visit.
The school seems a creepy enough place whether haunted or not. There’s a limping groundskeeper; a consumptive professor; and a still, gloomy pond. The general effect is Harry Potter’s Hogwarts with twice the chills and half the fun.
Florence is introduced to Maud ( Imelda Staunton), the starchy housekeeper; and Tom ( Isaac Hempstead Wright), a preternaturally serious student. Then she gets to work setting up detection equipment, although her stated aim is to detect not a ghost but the human who is trying to deceive people.
Hall plays Florence with a kind of stoic, British brittleness, hinting at hidden emotional depths beneath her scientific demeanour.
And yes, there are scares as well; both the sudden- noise variety and a more cerebral type of fright. The best of these has to be the bizarre dollhouse that Florence comes across, and which eerily mimics events going on in the real world. Florence even spots miniature ghost- hunting equipment set up in its tiny rooms; creep- tastic.
Yet as the spookiness piles up, more seems to become less. Do we need a marble rolling down a flight of stairs — and what’s so disturbing about that, unless you slip on it?
Even so, committed performances and a hair- raising vibe carry us through the movie’s 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.