Directed by Nick Murphy
Written by Nick Murphy and Stephen Volk
Starring Rebecca Hall, Dominic West, Imelda Staunton
Runtime: 1 hour 42 minutes
Rated R
Released by Kino Lorber October 5

by Gary M. Kramer, Staff Writer

The classy thriller The Awakening, from 2011, is set in 1921 London. The First World War may be over, but there are still deep scars. This film probes these wounds in a slow-burn manner that provides a mostly satisfying mix of character study and jump scares. Unfortunately, the “twists” in this period ghost story are nothing that haven’t been seen before. 

The film opens with a séance, which are almost always cinematic. Director Nick Murphy imbues this one with style, shooting it with almost all the color drained out to highlight the dark blacks, bright whites, and reflections in glass. It is more eerie than spooky, but it is effective. One of the attendees is Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall), who holds a photo of a late loved one she hopes to contact. But as the spiritualism begins—its popularity a reaction to the death toll of the war for grieving people—Florence quickly puts an end to the proceedings, revealing the séance to be a hoax. Florence, is, in fact, a debunker of ghosts. She authored a book entitled, “Seeing Through Ghosts.”

This prologue establishes the film’s theme that “things are not what they seem.” The Awakening soon shifts into color and its central plot. Robert Mallory (Dominic West) pays a call on Florence requesting her services. At the boys’ school where he works, there seems to be a ghost that does exist and he provides photographs to indicate this. Florence resists at first, but soon relents. An educated woman (a fact more than one person acknowledges), Florence insists on evidence, creating an elaborate series of traps to find the human posing as a ghost in the school. 

Her observations of the students (and adults) inform her investigation. She picks up on the bullying at the school, and spies on Mallory in the bath through a peephole, watching him self-harm. When the tripwire Florence sets up goes off, she ferrets out some harsh truth.

But the real intrigue in The Awakening begins after this episode. Florence soon experiences a series of supernatural encounters. First, when she is lying on a dock and loses her cigarette case, she senses something otherworldly in the water, and later, when she takes a bath, she sees something uncanny through the peephole. Florence is further weirded out when she spies a dollhouse of the school with staged scenes that she has recently witnessed. Murphy plays up these frightening moments with jump scares and closeups to maximize tension, but they never quite get viewers’ blood rushing. This is a coolly made film that is more psychological horror than nail-biting suspense. One notable feature of the film is that most of the action unfolds during the daytime.

What becomes clear is that Florence is damaged—she shows a scar she received as a child to Tom (Isaac Hempstead-Wright), the sole student who remained during term break—and bonds with him. Florence also starts a sexual relationship with Mallory (there is a great shot of Tom throwing a dart that cuts to Mallory reaching climax). But as noted earlier, things are not what they seem. The truths about Tom and Mallory and Florence are interesting, but The Awakening doesn’t allow viewers to puzzle them out for themselves; Murphy (and co-writer Stephen Volk) just show and tell. Suffice it to say, the explanations reinforce the theme of the past influencing the present. The characters are haunted, but Hall and West are best when they project confidence, not fear.

At times, when the film builds s-l-o-w-l-y to the “big” reveal, it borders on soporific, but Murphy includes a few jolts, such as a scene where Florence sees something protruding from her pillow. However, this moment soon becomes risible when she tears the object apart, with feathers flying everywhere.

Ultimately, The Awakening would have been more chilling if Murphy had resisted the need to explain and just kept things mysterious and unsettling.