Rating: 3/5
Hooptober 8.0 | 18/34 | Haunted House 1/2
Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting — Virginia Woolf, A Haunted House
A car wreck. C’s bleeding head against the steering wheel. A sheet is pulled back in a hospital room for M to identify the body. M says her goodbyes, covers C’s body, and leaves.
A minute later, C sits up. He leaves the room, the sheet still covering him, with eyeholes cut out like a child’s costume or a klan robe. No one sees him.
A door appears made of pure light.
C walks back to his and M’s house, where he lingers.
The filmmakers shot the film in what looks like a rounded Instagram filter and frame. Aesthetics and atmosphere are the movie’s principal story mechanisms. If you’ve seen The Green Knight, you’re partway there.
Similar to The Green Knight, the film feels like more of a formal exercise than a movie. The exercise seems to be to strip down the haunted house story to determine what the essentials are.
In this way, it no longer retains the fear or unease of a horror film. By watching from predominantly the ghost’s POV, we are not in M’s headspace and don’t experience her fear.
But we do experience the manifestations of her grief — eating a pie alone on the kitchen floor, freezing in the middle of removing the sheets from the bed — extended takes that let the pain and sadness linger and fill the frame.
Time for C expands and contracts — days pass in seconds, and seconds feel like an eternity. Waiting for…
I hate Casey Affleck, so I’m glad he was under a sheet for most of the movie. He’s probably my biggest hinderance from liking this more.