The Awakening is a haunted house film told from the perspective of a skeptic. Florence Cathcart is England's leading paranormal investigator, debunking the schemes of spiritualists and delusions of regular people alike. In 1921, she is invited to a boarding school where the boys claim to see a ghost. A death happened on school grounds during the fall session and Cathcart is believed to be the last hope to ensure any students return for the spring.
Writer/director Nick Murphy and screenwriter Stephen Volk hit on a pleasing combination of Gothic storytelling and 1970s/80s Hammer pictures. Everything in The Awakening doesn't quite make sense but it doesn't have to because it sells you on the merits of Florence Cathcart and the principle conflict before it loses meaning. The sprawling school, formerly a mansion, is filled with Victorian decadence long-forgotten by the contemporary cast members. This alone justifies the moments that don't have logical explanations. If the characters don't even understand where they are, why should the audience understand everything that happens?
Rebecca Hall gives an excellent performance as Florence Cathcart. It is a very slight role, driven entirely by skepticism and grief that Hall fills out well. Nearly every other major player has a more intriguing backstory or purpose to the plot. Hall makes you focus on Cathcart with confident body language and compassionate reactions to other characters. You want to follow someone that genuine and strong onscreen. She draw focus so much that the little details floating in and out of frame to scare you almost permeate on a subconscious level.
One of the more intriguing elements of the film is the shift in focus. It's literal and figurative. Whenever Cathcart is perplexed by the haunting and unable to find a natural, rational explanation, the field of focus onscreen shifts. Everything might be blurry except for her eyes refracted through a ghost hunting device of her own invention. The background could be the only sharp thing onscreen while Cathcart and everyone else begins to run like a watercolor. It's a clever touch of cinematography to reflect on the main evidence of the haunting--a boy with a distorted face appearing in every class photo since the school opened.
The figurative shift is a clever turn in the actual narrative of the story. We know from the second scene that Cathcart has all but abandoned ghost hunting after an upsetting investigation into a spiritualist. She is manipulated into investigating the boarding school through her own background espoused in her own book debunking ghosts and the afterlife. Her primary job is to make the school a place without fear for the students, but the only evidence the school could provide (the photographs) is debunked on sight in her own home. What causes Florence Cathcart to agree to take on a job she already knows the answer to? What is the actual story of The Awakening and why are so many people so determined to pronounce the school haunted to a scientist who has never found proof of actual paranormal activity?
The Awakening is a slow-building horror that, quite honestly, doesn't really try to scare you until halfway through. The real draw is quite a novel approach to a haunted house/paranormal investigation story. When you take the perspective of an actual skeptic, one who won't even budge when she's harassed by the very people she's trying to help, you create a horror story at odds with itself. It creates a terrifying atmosphere of a haunted house while fighting against the very core of the genre. The tension between the diametrically opposed perspectives is what makes this such a scary story.
By the time a possible haunting does take over the story, The Awakening has cleverly upset audience expectations. We want something to happen from all the build but we no longer know what to expect. It's a brilliant act of misdirection that could have blown up in everyone's faces. By some minor miracle, it comes together in a pleasantly creepy form. It's a novelty among modern horrors that gets enough right to make up for the heavy-handed homage to the throw everything at the screen Hammer horrors that only work if you don't think them through. The mood and style so outweigh the narrative that nothing shy of total catastrophic failure during the shoots of the final scenes could have ruined the effect.
Rating: 7/10
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