Everything about this classic ghost story is assured, from the shell-shocked performances to the period detail.
"This is a time for ghosts," states the text that opens Nick Murphy’s The Awakening. The time is 1921. War and influenza have killed many millions, and left survivors haunted. Yet the text is a citation (complete with authenticating bibliographical reference) from the book 'Seeing Through Ghosts' by one Florence Cathcart, who will turn out to be the film’s protagonist.
And so the film has already begun the strange dance of fact and fiction that will later continue at an isolated boarding school (motto: 'Semper Veritas') where, amidst boyish pranks and staged frights, eternal truths – about trauma, guilt and loss – are allowed to peek through.
When we first meet her, Florence (Rebecca Hall) is engaged in her own masquerade, sneaking into a London séance to debunk the proceedings. Yet as she exposes the fraudulent spiritualists’ bag of tricks with all the forensic acumen of a ghost-busting Sherlock Holmes, the sequence also reveals a truth about the human need to believe.
A woman who imagined she had seen her dead son seems angrier at Florence for disillusioning her than at the charlatans for cheating her – and even Florence herself, who had come bearing a photograph of her recently deceased beloved, seems as upset as she is triumphant at having proved once again that the dead really are dead.
Florence takes on a new case at a Cumbrian school, Rockwood, said to be haunted by the ghost of a boy murdered there decades earlier, and more recently the scene of another boy’s death. Armed with scientific apparatus and her own deductive powers, Florence quickly sees through the ghosts to a more rational explanation of what went on there.
But then, after the schoolboys have headed home for Christmas, she stays on, alone but for war-scarred schoolmaster Robert Mallory (Dominic West), matron Maud (Imelda Staunton), vacation boarder Tom (Isaac Hamsptead-Wright), and war-shirking caretaker Judd (Joseph Mawle). Except that there are others, too, lurking these corridors, if only Florence could see – and recognise – what is before her very eyes.
Everything about this classic ghost story is assured, from the shell-shocked performances to the period detail, from the time-layered locations to the bleached-out palette – all held together by an exquisitely crafted screenplay from Murphy and Stephen Volk that carefully sets up satisfying twists while retaining a haunting ambiguity to the end.
These days (non-Spanish) ghost stories invite scepticism.
"Don’t look away. You mustn’t look away."
An elegantly constructed masquerade, but its haunting sadness rings true.
View 17 comments
Mr-X
• 1 year agoPaulW
• 1 year agoEric
• 1 year agoJon
• 1 year agoI think she saw her dead daughter? The little boy was wearing a long blonde wig.
Anton Bitel
• 1 year agoSo, just to clarify: the woman imagines (incorrectly) that she has seen her dead daughter (in fact just a boy in ghostly disguise), and then resents Florence for disillusioning her ...
Mr-X
• 1 year agoBTW, I'm pretty sure Hitchcock used to shoot chronologically, and to very strict storyboards, so the studios could never re-cut his films.
Anton Bitel
• 1 year agoThe actors' supposedly increasing lack of conviction in fact makes sense at the level of character, as Florence's entire belief system is gradually shaken to its foundations, and Robert slowly relinquishes his grip on reality, surrendering to a shell-shocked existence somewhere between the living and the dead. Confusion, incredulity, stunned resignation - these do not strike me as unnatural responses to what happens in the later sections of the film.
Rache
• 1 year agoSaM
• 1 year agoAnton Bitel
• 1 year agoI think the studied ambiguity of the end (is she alive? is she dead?) is also its point. It plays both ways, neatly. A part of the dead always remains with the living, as the film has shown throughout.
Martyn Conterio
• 1 year agoAnton Bitel
• 1 year agoSeriously, they may have had a particualr reading of the ending in mind, but I'm glad they had enough grace to leave the door *wide* open for different readings. Indeed, so wide that I find their surprise at such readings difficult to credit. DISambiguating the ending to make it 'happy' (and to make the heroine clearly still alive) would have been easy, I'd have thought - just have the headmaster (or *anyone* besides the ghost-seeing Mallory and a sensitive schoolboy) notice and acknowledge her presence in the final scene. That said, regarding her character as dead at the end is not what I would call an UNhappy ending.
Martyn Conterio
• 1 year agoThomas Schak
• 9 months ago1. Judd. I can't understand why he is there and what anything he does or stands for means for the film.
2. Robert goes up to his room and says "She is downstairs" to someone in his room we don't see. What? Who? Why??
Thanks for some ideas!
Anton Bitel
• 9 months ago2. Like Florence, the shell-shocked Robert has his own personal ghosts who appear to him in the school (even if we never see them). He discusses this later with Florence (who may well herself become another of his personal ghosts).
Thomas Schak
• 9 months agoAfter sleeping on it Judd became a little bit like her father. Not the look, but the gun, how he stands in front of her, etc. Still not too fond of the endong but the film kept me thinking and wanted me to revisit a few scenes; doesn't happen very often in that genre for me. Will definitely recommend it.
Anton Bitel
• 9 months agoThis is irrelevant, but for what it's worth, I reckon the scene where Florence looks into the doll's house is one of the most memorably creepy that I have seen in a while.