Review: The Awakening
After checking out the glut of dreadful reviews for Dream House, but still in the mood for a spooker, I jumped tracks to investigate The Awakening instead.
Wise move. With the smart PR money being pumped into getting you to cough up for Dream House and The Woman in Black still some time away, there’s no better way to see a scary movie than when it’s not been shoved down your throat.
What we find is a typically British premise: skeptical ghost hunter, very large house (in this case one that is now a boarding school), a little love interest and of course, a ghost. That makes it sound like a cheap knock-off of every ghost story movie you can shake a stick at, but it’s far from it. The Awakening is in fact a class act with more than liberal doses of originality and more than its fair share of the frighteners – it’s been a long time since more than a single set-piece
made me jump.
Rebecca Hall in The Awakening
There are some beautiful pieces and themes running through the movie and, for the absolute majority of the movie, it pulls off the near impossible task of having you believe that the story isn’t going to end well at all.
Whether it does or not would be to lift the spoiler curtain and The Awakening deserves more respect than that. With fine performances all round – particularly from Rebecca Hall – and a pretty flawless production, this will be the finest ghost story you’ve seen in a long, long time.
I consider The Orphanage and The Haunting (the original thank you for asking) the greatest ghost story movies of all time. The Awakening sits very, very comfortably at number three, but if I were to suggest you could squeeze a bus through that gap and you are able to read between the lines, you’ll know what I’m saying here.
Go see it. You won’t regret it at all. The Woman in Black will need to be playing at the top of its game to knock The Awakening from its perch.
Related Posts
Review: Art
Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury Nigel Havers is Serge. He has bought a painting. It’s a large canvas of ostensibly pure white. It cost him £200,000. It’s a bit pretentious. He’s very proud of it. Denis Lawson is his friend Marc. Marc thinks the painting is ridiculous and a waste of money, but he doesn’t immediately tell Serge. […]
Top 5 poker films
Poker has given us almost as many thrills on film as it has at the playing tables, so here’s a list of our five favourite movies where poker plays a central role. 1. The Cincinnati Kid (1965) Set in the grim and dark alleys of Depression-era New Orleans, The Cincinnati Kid tells the tale of […]
Review: Bone Tomahawk
Western/horror mash-ups don’t come along very often, but when they are as high calibre as this one, you kind of wish they would. Written and directed by S. Craig Zahler, Bone Tomahawk is a film where unnecessary dialogue is cut right back to the bone and the little conversation there is, is laced with humour […]
I found it a good, chilling ghost story at the beginning then went a little bit over the top with its melodrama later on. Still enjoyed it, though, especially the fine performance by Rebecca Hall.