I don’t know how December is treating you, but here, it has been grey and dark and cold and misty. Plus, the air quality is bad enough that the government is sending everyone text messages that they should just stay home and watch ghost stories. Ok, well, the first part of that was true. But yeah, nothing suits a grey December quite like a somber story of ghosts and loss and buried trauma. This is one of those.
The Awakening (2012)
In no ways revolutionary, but capably constructed and carried out, Nick Murphy’s classic ghost story (which he wrote and directed) makes good use of its post war Britain setting, a small, likable cast, and a few good, creepy set pieces. It may not hold up as a masterpiece for the ages and was not terribly well received upon release, but watched in a dark room on a rainy day, it offers a few chills, some charm, and a tidy, affecting payoff.
Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall) is a paranormal investigator in 1921 London, specializing in disproving occult mumbo jumbo but, racked by her own losses (her parents when she was quite young, a lover during the war), apparently desperate to be proved wrong. She’s approached by Robert Mallory (Dominic West), a teacher at a boarding school in the country where a boy has just died, possibly due to the ghost long said to roam the halls, a private home until 20 years prior. After some convincing, she ventures off to the old house to put this haunting to the test.
After unpacking a prodigious amount of scientific equipment, laying traps for any troublemakers attempting to simulate a spirit, and actually undergoing a few eerie encounters, she makes quick work of it, both identifying some children that had been bullying the dead boy and trying to scare her and the teacher who, shattered by his time in battle and desperate to toughen his charges to survive the horror he has witnessed, had left the boy out in the cold where it seems he died of an asthma attack. No ghosts—just boys being boys and men being incapable of processing emotion in an ethical fashion.
The supernatural disproven just in time for half-term, all the boys but one, who seems to be an orphan, go home, no longer terrified to return after the break. Florence makes ready to leave as well when she sees the apparition of a young boy and decides to stay on to determine what exactly is afoot. This leaves only her, the head housekeeper, Maud (Imelda Staunton), the orphan boy, Tom (Isaac Hempstead Wright—Bran of Game of Thrones), Mallory, and a bitter groundskeeper, Edward Judd (Joseph Mawle) on the grounds of the ominous manor.
Florence redoubles her efforts, shaken by what she has seen but somehow drawn in personally. She strikes up a friendship with Tom and Maud, a romance with Mallory, is assaulted by Judd, and is beset upon by creepy, musical rabbit headed dolls, spooky doll houses tailor made to unsettle, ghostly hands rising from the pond in front of the house, and the vision of an angry man shooting at her with a rifle.
This is not to mention the fact that some other characters just seem off. Before becoming violent, Judd already strikes one as a danger, and the otherwise gentle Mallory is heard shouting at someone unseen whenever he is alone. This house is not a happy place.
There are twists and turns aplenty and a final revelation which might be predictable if you went in looking for it, but which I must admit, took me pleasantly by surprise. And all of it presents a fairly poignant account of people haunted by loss, incapable of letting go of their mourning, their guilt, unable to see through the myths of their own memories to view the past directly and find a way to live. Whether a former soldier with survivor’s guilt, one who had avoided battle, brimming with shame and hate, the mother of a murdered child, or one who has all but entirely blocked out the extremities of a childhood trauma (and hence, must awaken), everyone here must come to terms with some truth and either succumb to misery or find some way forward.
These themes are certainly not new to the ghost story, but are handled competently with a degree of poise. We do not have here an implacable specter, vengefully assailing the living, but rather, an absence, a loneliness, a pain that cannot heal, that will not be forgotten, reflecting the ache at the core of all the characters we come to know who are still drawing breath.
The cinematography is attractive enough and, along with Daniel Pemberton’s lilting and rather pretty score, contributes to maintaining an effectively elegiac and uncanny climate, agreeable to inhabit. While the affordable 2012 digital filming, with its grainy blacks and somewhat oppressive over-reliance on muted old-timey green filters has dated poorly, it does get the job done, and allowances can be made for working within budget limitations with the technology available at the time.
Plus, there are some solid little scares along the way, the centerpiece of which may be the sequence in which Florence finds a doll house representing the school building, in which she finds tableaus of scenes she has recently witnessed, culminating in a miniature of the room she is currently in, where her doll is looking into an even smaller version of the house and a figure approaches from behind. Of course, it’s gone when she turns around. By the time the story has revealed its secrets, one might wonder exactly why the spirit felt driven to unnerve her thus, but the pleasures of the moment perhaps justify a possible lapse in internal logic.
In the end, Murphy has crafted an affable little spooker, grounded enough in character and feeling to warm the viewer to its cast of variously broken individuals, with sufficiently suspenseful filmmaking technique to provide some atmosphere and chills, and tightly enough plotted to offer a couple of gratifying surprises.