A samey and derivative haunted house horror, Nick Murphy's feature debut The Awakening is scary and all the while gritty, enough to keep the audience's interest awakened in the one-hundred minute run time. Bolstered by impressive actors with Rebecca Hall (The Town) on the lead, Awakening is the type of horror whose rarity is exceedingly high you're happy to have come across with.
Rebecca Hall is playing a supernatural skeptic and author to a book that claims "spirits" are non-existent. She's Florence Cathcart and is placed in a boys boarding school (or not) to investigate on an alleged "haunting" of a boy named Walter, who talks reveals was shot in the same land. (The land held an old mansion house before the boarding school was built).
Cathcart installs her 1920 version of EMF readers that felt rather Holmes-like. Her prior notion is held firmly until she sees a ghost herself.
Now, she seeks help of boarding school proprietors, a troubled history teacher Robert Mallory (Dominic West, 300) and a worried matron Maud Hill (Imelda Staunton, Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix), only to find out something that is ultimately shocking of all the mysteries she have uncovered all her life.
Effective Anglophillic set pieces helped set out a mood of authenticity. The film is set post-World War I. But the real credit must be given to the three leads. Hall is required to do less than what she can do, but she digs the job professionally, so in turn people dug back. West is a transparent sheet to the troubled fate that the setting had faced, and Staunton is an embodiment of sorrow and worry.
An intricate, may somewhat over-complex plot is presented impressively with scares which serves the purpose of giving small partitions of a bigger mystery rather than the nature purpose of a "scare" itself. Despite this, Awakening boasts a decent amount of fidgeting scares wholly exposing the ghost boy's features, face blurred and the rest of the body fuzzed.
A rare find is The Awakening, a well-casted, strongly photographed and meticulously directed horror that may appear as one of the by-the-number Brit movies.
GRADE: A-
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