Haunted (1995)

               The concept of the movie ‘twist’ has gotten devalued through both the overuse and misapplication of the term. What is a twist: a late game revelation that radically recontextualizes the events of the movie thus far. What is not a twist: revealing previously unknown information to the audience. What is a twist: Bruce Willis has been a ghost the whole time. What isn’t a twist: Rosebud is the name of his sled. Twist: Norman Bates has been acting as his mother during the entire movie. Not a twist: Darth Vader is Luke’s father. As much as it annoys everyone, a lot of M. Night Shyamalan’s movies do have actual twists. The village being in the present day explains everything up to that point, Mr. Glass causing the train crash that proved David’s powers flips everything we thought we knew about their relationship, that kind of thing. Water being deadly to the aliens or the trees attacking humanity? Not so much. A twist can be either clever or stupid. In ‘The Sixth Sense’ it was clever, in ‘The Village’ it was stupid, but they were both actual twists.

Not exactly ambitious with their title.

              ‘Haunted’ has a decent twist in it, one that I ruined for myself by skimming a plot summary. Normally the spoilers I inflict on myself involve who lives and who dies, what the ghost is mad about, plot points that don’t really matter overall, but here we have a mystery movie where now I don’t know whether or not I would have figured it out on my own before the reveal. I’d like to think I would have, but then I’m the one saying that. So I decided to make lemonade out of spoiled lemons and see if the movie still makes sense when you know the big reveal from the beginning. I’m of two minds about whether or not this is fair: on the one hand I’m not experiencing the movie as intended, I won’t get that “ah-ha!” moment that the creators wanted and it seems mean-spirited to complain when that’s my fault. On the other hand movies are presumably made to be watched more than once and handwaving away genuine plot holes because you weren’t supposed to notice them the first time through just doesn’t cut it. Fair or not this is what’s happening, and it gives me no joy to report that when you know the twist this movie is mostly confusing and annoying.

              Confusing is usually fine in this kind of supernatural mystery, you’re supposed to not put the pieces together until near the end, but this is confusing in the sense that the actions of the characters on screen don’t make sense when you understand what’s really going on. Motivations are out of whack, dialogue contradicts later revelations, and being able to ignore the various misdirects frees up a lot of time to start wondering about unimportant things like the mechanics of hauntings and how the various levels of reality going on may or may not intersect. It’s annoying because while I’m doing all of the above I’m also trying to figure out what the movie is intending me to believe is going on. I’m trying to think about what it thinks I should be thinking. For most of the middle of this movie I’d pause the film every once in a while to try to put myself in the shoes of someone who didn’t know the twist and try to suss out what fake mystery I was supposed to believe was going on. I was never really able to, and thinking back on the movie everyone watching it in theaters must have been so frustrated.

              The movie is loosely based on the 1988 novel of the same name by James Herbert. It was adapted by Bob Kellett and Timothy Prager. Kellett was mostly a director, best known for bawdy 70’s comedies such as ‘Up Pompeii’ and ‘The Chastity Belt.’ Prager went on to be a fairly prominent writer for British tv, including “Two Thousand Acres of Sky” and a bunch of “Prime Suspect.” He also wrote 2003’s ‘Hear the Silence,’ a dramatization of Andrew Wakefield’s supposedly righteous crusade against vaccinations, so, you know, fuck him. Direction was by Lewis Gilbert, who I should be more familiar with. He directed three Bond films including ‘Moonraker’ as well as the original ‘Alfie.’ His work here is perfectly fine. It’s partially produced by Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope company, which is how I found out it still existed after the failure of ‘One from the Heart.’ Now I get the connection with the ‘Jeepers Creepers’ guy.

              The cast is pretty good for 1995. It stars Aidan Quinn as Professor David Ash. This was before his years as a police captain forced to wrangle with those clever scoundrels Holmes and Watson. He plays mostly opposite Kate Beckinsale in a very early role as Christine Mariell, only three years after appearing in Branaugh’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing.’ Sir John Gielgud has a small role as Dr. Doyle and Anthony Andrews plays Christine’s brother Robert. Andrews is one of those actors I know I’ve seen before, I just can’t remember from where. I’ll just mention here that Andrews is a full twenty-five years older than Beckinsale. Alex Lowe plays Christine’s other brother Simon, and he’s apparently well known in the UK as the comic character Barry from Watford. Geraldine Somerville has a small part as Ash’s secretary Kate McCarrick, and the whoop I let out when I realized I knew her from “Cracker” startled my cat.

              The movie opens with the childhood trauma of Quinn’s Ash, something that’s going to run through the rest of the movie. It’s 1905 in Sussex and he accidentally kills his sister. They’re playing by a river and he pushes her in. She doesn’t resurface and so he dives in after her but can’t find her among the weeds. Hard cut to 1928 where Ash in now a professor of psychology at some upscale British university in 1928 (the Wiki says Oxford but who cares). Luckily his family (minus his sister) moved to America during those intervening years so Quinn doesn’t have to try to put on an accent. We get an exposition dump masquerading as a classroom scene where we learn that he’s just published a very successful book on parapsychology detailing how ghosts are complete nonsense. After he lays out his lack of belief to his students and previews exactly how the movie is going to prove him wrong we cut to another scene that evening where he attends a séance. After a few minutes he pulls a Houdini and demonstrates that she’s a charlatan. He on the lights, showing various contraptions behind a screen, and hauls out the woman dressed as a ghost from her hiding spot behind a curtain. After everyone harrumphs and leaves, he moves to do so as well, all smug. Then the medium starts calling out with his sister’s voice, which he disregards. Think she’ll show up later?

              The next day his secretary tells him about yet another letter he’s received from a woman named Miss Webb, who continues to beg him to come help her with her ghost problem. She claims to be held captive in her house by spirits. Ash has blown her off before but this time his secretary mentions that she lives in Sussex in Edbrook Hall, which for some reason convinces him to go. We then cut to a steam train arriving at a station and after he disembarks he beholds a very young Kate Beckinsale as Christine Mariell stepping out of the steam to greet him. Spoiler warning, it’s going to be revealed in about an hour and a half that Christine and her two brothers are ghosts who died in a massive fire at Edbrook Hall back in 1923. Miss Webb wrote the letter begging for help because they’re the ghosts keeping her trapped since they blame her for their deaths. Also because they’re massive assholes. This is the information I spoiled myself with.

It is a well-shot film.

              They get into Christine’s car and make their way back to the estate. If you’re already wondering how a ghost is able to drive what’s going to turn out to be a nonexistent car to pick up someone from the train station I can only tell you it gets worse from here. When they arrive at the house the first person they see is Miss Webb, who I will remind you is not a ghost. Her reaction on seeing the man she’s written to for help already being chummy with one of her ghost tormenters should be to scream in horror and instantly tell him he’s flirting with a dead woman, but instead she just walks back inside. After the ghost introduces them to each other she offers to show Ash to his room, perhaps to have a talk, but is easily put off by Christine. At no point in the movie, until near the very end after he’s figured it out for himself, does she ever explain that the house they’re standing in is actually in ruins from a fire and the people he’s been talking to are ghosts. Personally I would’ve opened with that, but it is England in 1928, perhaps she was too polite. It’s made clear later in the movie that she’s being tormented by the ghosts even when he can’t see them so you could explain her actions by saying she’s frightened of what they might do, but she never even makes an effort.

              Here’s where I get into my frustration with the movie and start wondering if it’s my fault, because nothing in the next hour or so is exactly bad, but when you know that the three siblings are ghosts nothing on screen is particularly engaging. Some of it works all right, like the hints of the messed-up relationship of the siblings that escalate over the course of the movie. There are nude paintings of Christine all over the house done by her brother Robert. Ash runs across her one morning out by a pond and is taken aback when she strips off her robe in front of him and dives in, soon followed by an equally naked Simon. The siblings are always a little too intimate with each other, descending into familiar shorthand, constantly referring to shared anecdotes, and always being just a bit too physically familiar. Of course Ash starts falling in love with Christine because she’s attractive and gets naked a lot, and eventually Robert expresses disapproval. This makes very little sense considering the eventual climax.

              In between all of this Ash starts to poke around the place to see if anyone is pretending to be a ghost in order to mess with Miss Webb. He takes measurements, sets little dust-bomb traps, and after some late-night noises at his door demands to know who’s been pranking him. This is when I grew most frustrated, because I knew that any supernatural stuff was real and being done by the new friends he’d just made. Ash’s suspicions and investigations are red herrings, but I never could figure what false conclusion we’re supposed to draw from them. Ash also starts seeing glimpses of his little sister, and when you know what’s going on it’s instantly clear that her ghost is real as well and trying to help him escape from these other mean ghosts. Were audiences supposed to think that Ash brought a real ghost to the mansion where there wasn’t one before? Think he’s hallucinating them? We get presented with all of these clues and weird events, like gas lanterns suddenly exploding into fireballs or doors mysteriously opening and closing, and I’m not sure who or what we’re supposed to think is responsible. They don’t lay a false trail towards the sibling’s dead parents, or an ancestor who died there, they never hint at some other set of ghosts being responsible. The whole ghost business kind of retreats into the background as Ash’s courtship of Christine becomes the main focus.

              This is where I start muttering to myself and drawing diagrams trying to figure out how this movie thinks ghosts work. I already mentioned how Christine drove a car to pick up Ash from the train station, there’s also a section where they go horseback riding across the nearby fields. Are those horses also ghosts? They run across a fortune teller who reads their palms. She’s got Ash pegged but refuses to read Christine’s fortune, merely saying there’s nothing she could tell her that she doesn’t already know. So the fortune teller was a real person who saw Christine, so they have some agency away from the house. Are they drawn back to the house after a certain period of time, is there some kind of geographical limit? Why didn’t the fortune teller mention that the lady’s a ghost? At one point Ash uses the phone at the house to call his secretary, so is he using a ghost phone? At the very end we see Christine turn up at Oxford, so apparently nothing was keeping her at the house? They really were still tormenting Miss Webb only because they’re petty assholes?

              Then there’s the matter of Dr. Doyle. I’m not going to use the term plot hole because it’s technically not, it’s just a huge whopping discrepancy that never gets explained. At a certain point the other ghosts introduce him to Ash as Miss Webb’s physician, which is strictly speaking true. Ash even travels to visit him at his little cottage nearby at one point. Turns out he’s a ghost too, except he didn’t die in the fire. It’s never explained how he died, or when, or why he turned into a ghost and is happy to torment Miss Webb along with the three asshole siblings. His presence is clearly another misdirect to make us think the ghosts are alive and the movie is clearly hoping we don’t think too hard about why he’s around at all after the movie’s over.

              Eventually Ash and Christine bone down while Robert secretly watches and Ash wakes up the next morning in an abandoned house. The furniture is mostly covered in black cloth, leaves are scattered all over the floors, and wind from broken windows whistles throughout. It’s still partially an illusion, though, as the mansion is revealed to be only a shell slightly later, so I don’t know what’s going on here. After running around all confused his little sister’s ghost gets completely fed up and leads him to a cemetery where she literally points at the sibling’s shared gravestone. After he runs to the doctor’s house and finds it abandoned as well she sits down in front of him and in very small words explains that the three siblings are ghosts who mean him harm and he should go home.

              Just then Christine shows up and his little sister is no match for her charms so he agrees to let her drive him back to the house. On the way the ghost sister appears in the middle of the road, causing Ash to grab the steering wheel and swerve the car into a tree. He’s ejected by the crash but Christine supposedly dies in the resulting fire. He continues on to the house where he finally has the conversation with Miss Webb that should’ve taken place fifteen minutes in. She explains that the sibling’s mother discovered Christine and Robert having sex in her bed while a drunken Simon watched. The shock caused her to drown herself in the pond out back. The ghosts show back up and explain what happened next: Miss Webb locked them in a room and set fire to the house, murdering them. They’ve been tormenting her ever since, but since Ash is now here they don’t need her anymore. They spin around really fast which somehow kills her, then they start menacing him. He runs upstairs and a fire breaks out. He barricades himself in a room as the ghosts laugh. Then his little sister is suddenly there, and the moment he takes her hand whatever ghost illusion was going on is broken. The house is no longer on fire and in fact is no longer a house, just the crumbled remains of one. He takes the train back home and as he and his secretary walk off we see Christine emerge from the steam again, roll credits.

              I feel slightly bad that I didn’t watch this movie the right way. It’s not incompetent or badly made, the story makes sense, and if you were paying attention to the clues I feel pretty certain the average audience member would guess that the siblings are ghosts at some point before the big reveal. That being said, I’ve seen movies before after knowing the twist and those have held up just fine whereas this one didn’t. Everyone’s acting is completely competent, the filmmaking is perfectly acceptable, the house is gorgeous, nothing is actively wrong with the movie. It just wasn’t particularly good. If you’re a fan of between-the-wars British period pieces I can see this one being enjoyable. It could’ve played more with aristocratic insanity, the incest thing is revealed well before the ghost thing, but in the end it’s saying that these three specifically are wrong ‘uns and not the upper class as a whole. This is going to make me more careful in the future about how far down the plot summaries I read because I’d like to think I would’ve enjoyed this more if I’d gone in blind.