The Awakening at London Film Festival

The Awakening at London Film Festival

05 October, 2011
by: Naima Khan

Not even the combined efforts of Dominic West, Imelda Staunton and Rebecca Hall can lift this dull ghost story.

Director Nick Murphy’s The Awakening is alluringly classic and boasts a supremely good cast; but you can’t help feeling they could do so much more. Imelda Staunton plays a predictable creepy but kind matron in a boys’ boarding school, and Dominic West the chivalrous war hero and teacher. It’s 1921 and England still suffers the grief of all the soldiers lost in the trenches. With so many dead, “now is a time for ghosts” writes Rebecca Hall, playing an academic who makes it her business to expose hoax mediums.

And it’s Hall’s character Florence Cathcart that has the meatiest role. With cocksure certainty and a belief in evidence, the facts and science she sets about calibrating her various thermometers and cameras to prove that there’s nothing to be afraid of. Her work is met with mixed reception. While many see her as a guardian of the vulnerable, there are those whose emotions rely so heavily on a connection with the dead that they need to believe in their existence.

From the first ghostly pale face we see, Murphy presents us with classic chilling images of England at its most superstitious. There are creepy little children, dolls houses, wandering eyeballs darting about through peepholes and eerie lakes and apparitions. While this time-honoured vision of haunted houses is beautiful to watch, it’s not that scary. There a few really frightening moments and like most English ghost stories, The Awakening is a little overly convoluted, and the action is all anticipated. Hall’s performance however, is exceptional. Steely cold at first, she slowly unravels and her emerging fragility is brilliant, but it's not enough to make this drab ghost story as compelling as it should be. 

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Naima Khan