The Awakening

Though handsomely made and well acted, The Awakening, for the most part, comes off as an egregiously familiar ghost story that simply isn’t able to wholeheartedly justify its existence (ie we’ve seen this type of thing countless times before). The narrative follows Rebecca Hall’s Florence Cathcart, a famed debunker of ghost-related happenings, as she agrees to prove that a remote boys school is not, in fact, haunted, with the film primarily following Florence as she and a handful of staff members (including Dominic West’s Robert Mallory) attempt to explain the spooky occurrences. It’s a creepy setup that’s unfortunately employed to pervasively tedious effect by filmmaker Nick Murphy, as the director’s decision to infuse the proceedings with as deliberate a pace as one could possibly envision serves only to highlight the less-than-fresh nature of the storyline. And although Murphy has certainly peppered the proceedings with a number of suspenseful interludes, there’s virtually nothing here that doesn’t smack of excessive familiarity (eg a scene in which Florence skulks the enormous grounds armed with only a lamp). The presence of a few genuinely stirring moments (eg Florence’s encounter with a creepy dollhouse) prevents the viewer from tuning out completely, while Hall does a decent job of stepping into the shoes of her almost eye-rollingly hackneyed character. There’s finally little doubt that one’s efforts at overlooking the conventional atmosphere are consistently stymied by the needlessly slow-moving atmosphere, which ensures that by the time the expectedly unexpected twist ending rolls around, The Awakening has confirmed its place as a hopelessly superfluous bit of horror filmmaking.

*1/2 out of ****