Summary:
After a doctor is called to a crumbling home, strange things begin to happen.
My Thoughts:
Lenny Abrahamson’s last project, Room, earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Director, and before that he directed Frank, a delightful indie film about finding your place in the world. I really enjoyed both of the films I’d seen by Abrahamson, so when I heard he was directing a horror film I grew quite excited. Add to that a decent cast and a mid-century setting and I was sold! I thought we had a chance at another really good horror movie! But, alas, the reviews started to pour in, and as they were quite middling, my desire to see the film waned… When I found this film for free, my curiosity got the better of me and I ended up checking it out anyways.
“This house works on people.”
After Dr. Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson, Star Wars: The Last Jedi) is called to a manor to inspect a maid named Betty (Liv Hill, Jellyfish), he becomes enamored with the three remaining members of the Ayres family, the elder Mrs. Ayres (Charlotte Rampling, 45 Years), the attractive Caroline (Ruth Wilson, How to Talk to Girls at Parties), and her war-disfigured brother Roderick (Will Poulter, Midsommar). As Faraday spends more time at the manor, he finds himself falling in love with Caroline, but also compelled by the home’s strange history.
There were only a few things that really worked amazingly in this movie; one of them was Ruth Wilson. I first became aware of Wilson from her work on Showtime’s series The Affair, for which she won a Golden Globe. She is absolutely marvelous in that show (though I’ve only watched the first season), and this film proves that was no fluke. She has far more presence than Domhnall does in this movie, and she’s far more interesting of a character. Will Poulter also did a really good job. His role in this film required a great deal of physicality and he really gave his all to it. Charlotte Rampling, whom I normally love, seemed like she was sort of just going through the motions in this film.
Our lead, Domnhall Gleeson, is an actor I sometimes love (Ex Machina) and other times I think he’s borderline bad (Star Wars: The Last Jedi). This film he kind of split the difference for me- about half the scenes I thought he was conveying what he needed to convey, and the other half I thought something was just off about his performance. There were scenes when his facial expressions didn’t quite match what was happening on screen, and other times when he looked as if he was trying desperately to remember his lines… he didn’t have the presence to carry this film through to the end, that’s for sure. I feel like Domnhall is a great supporting actor, but he needs a good script and other great actors to build him up. This just felt forced.
When I started the movie, I was unaware it was based on anything, but after a few scenes I found myself wondering if it was. It is; a novel of the same name by Sarah Waters. I was not at all surprised when I found this out because this script, I’m sorry to say, feels like a hack-job adaptation. There are scenes that are thrust into this film that are almost without purpose; they do nothing to really advance the plot, but they feel as if, with the right context, they might have added another layer to the story. There were quite a few scenes in this movie that felt like that, as if I was missing a few bits of information that would really give the scenes the bite they needed. I grew more disenfranchised as more of these scenes seemed to happen. There were also scenes where it was rather obvious that there was something else that was shot had been removed from the final edit.
I feel as if the way that this was advertised was very misleading, and that might’ve had something to do with my overall feelings of ambiguity towards this film. The trailer makes this look almost like a straight ghost story, but in reality it’s more of a melodrama with a hint of something darker. The tale is also a lot slower than I would’ve expected, and the ending’s payoff is rather subtle and open… I could tell the ending was supposed to be a big moment, but it didn’t hit me. The actual twist of the ending was kind of cool, but the way that it was handled just didn’t do anything for me at all.
Verdict:
There were certainly a few scenes that worked in this movie, and Ruth Wilson did a great job, but that doesn’t make it good enough for me to recommend. This is sort of boring at times, and it felt almost as if we were missing bits of the whole story, as if one were reading a novel that was missing a few pages here and there. It’s not a terrible movie- there are some parts I really liked- but there are plenty of other similarly themed films of far superior quality.
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