The Awakening

The Awakening

After my childhood hero became Harry Houdini, I have loved stories in which brave ghost hunters expose fraudulent mediums. Few scams are more despicable than convincing mourners that you are communicating with their dead relatives. So I love the beginning of “The Awakening,” when a family gathers to speak with a son they lost in World War I. They’ve brought his photograph, a lock of his hair and so on, and the poor boy seems almost present until the famous Florence Cathcart draws back the curtains and reveals trick ropes and a little boy under the table. London bobbies pour into the room, and the game is up.

But that’s about all I liked. Florence (Rebecca Hall), an author famous for debunking ghosts, gets a letter from shellshocked war veteran Robert Mallory (Dominic West), who wants her to come to the spectral English country boarding school where he teaches. A boy has recently died there, and other students have reported seeing his ghost.

Rockford School is one of those remote piles that seem to contain too much space altogether. Stark against the skyline, it appears stuck in Dickensian times. Especially during summer holidays, when it’s nearly empty except for the skeleton staff of characters mandated by haunted house stories: stammering Mallory himself, tormented by memories of dead comrades; colleague Malcolm McNair (Shaun Dooley), a textbook sadist who seizes every opportunity to thrash a boy; kindly matron Maud Hill (Imelda Staunton); sinister groundskeeper Edward Judd (Joseph Mawle), who skulks about the woods with a rifle for no apparent reason; and young Tom (Isaac Hempstead-Wright), whose parents live in faraway India hence he’s Rockford’s only year-round student.

Maud informs Florence that she takes no truck with ghosts or any such malarkey and has read her book many times. Malcolm cheerfully flogs Tom for some unspecified infraction. Edward lurks. Robert helps Florence set up ghost traps cameras rigged to fire automatically, powders to capture footprints, delicate instruments to measure God knows what all within the gloomy manse’s myriad corridors and doors leading to doors leading to doors. The film’s greatest achievement is its art direction, and the shadowy cinematography that keeps glimpsing young ghost boys who then dissolve into mist.

A staunch atheist, Rebecca does not believe in the afterlife, but nevertheless she soon becomes petrified by such happenings as a dollhouse modeled on Rockford School, through whose windows she catches sight of dolls that seem to represent all the characters on the premises. These events are never clearly explained by Stephen Volk and Nick Murphy’s screenplay (the latter also directed), which may or may not want them to be.

At this point I am putting money on brutal teacher Malcolm McNair, who I suspect beat a child to death and is now trying to frame it on a ghost; with an Agatha Christie cast like this, you can never entirely rule out the kindly matron; only groundskeeper Judd is likely uninvolved, because he looks way too guilty; or perhaps Florence Cathcart is going mad.

Yeah right. “The Awakening” is fine I guess, but it lacks a plot that can grip us, and the mystery’s solution is disappointingly ordinary. What I want to know is why did the British erect these haunted mansions-farms in the first place? They should’ve built homes in some safe neighborhood like Hampstead Village.

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