#16 - The Awakening (2011)
(dir. Nick Murphy)
Set in England after World War I, this is a pretty
traditional ghost story that is very well made but not exactly doing
anything new with the genre. An old and mostly empty mansion? Check. A
creepy child ghost? Check. A séance? Check. Lots of high-tech
ghost hunting equipment? Check - although being set in like 1920, the
equipment is actually kind of cool and old-timey. Also, did I
mentio-BOO LOTS OF LOUD SCARY NOISES? Well, I can't
really blame a movie about a haunted house for having a lot of jump
scares, and most of them here are earned, although there is one
towards the end that I thought was particularly lame.
This
is a really solid ghost story with great acting, atmosphere, and
cinematography, but I thought that it fell apart a little towards the
end. The first 90% of the movie does a great job of quietly building up
the mystery and tension, but then all subtlety is thrown out the window
and we get a couple of "twists" thrown at us right in a row. Now,
there isn't necessarily anything wrong with a twist/surprise ending in
this type of film - after all, most ghost stories are really about
solving a mystery, and the "solution" almost always ends up making some
sense of the inexplicable hauntings that happened up to that point (for
some films that do this well, see: The Others,
The Orphanage, or The Sixth
Sense). Here, I just felt like the movie tried too hard.
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