'The Final Haunting'

Out now!

Let me just start by saying that this film is okay, not great but okay. I realised as I was writing what you are about to read below that I was getting hung up on one element and one character that I think I dislike so much it has tainted every element of the film for me. As a positive thought crept up all I could think about was this glaring fault and even though it is not the main focus of the movie I kept coming back to it. In fact if that problem alone was solved it’s probable that I’d be giving this film a higher rating. Anyway, I’ll explain further in the review proper, I just wanted to make this point here as my review was feeling a little judgemental.

'The Final Haunting' introduces us to Lily (Pearl Chanda), an emotionally disturbed young woman plagued by nightmares that appear to depict some traumatic past experience. She seemingly has no family and her only friend is an elderly blind lady who used to work as a psychic and as we meet her she is advising Lily on how to keep out the evil spirits (dare I say demons?) that plague her dreams.

We’re then dragged into a bizarrely needless plot thread about her meeting Chris (Paris Wharton), a charmingly awkward young man who stumbles around trying to ask her out in the park. The two of them then proceed to clumsily dance around each other and eventually become a couple, but feel free to forget that as it’s basically pointless despite taking forever. I’ll come back to that.

More importantly, Lily is on a job hunt that is not going well until she spots an advert in an agency window for a babysitting job and she jumps at the chance. The job, it transpires, is in a big house in the middle of nowhere where a creepily overly attached mother, Samantha (Bella Heesom), and her frustrated husband, Tom (Josh Burdett), live their bleak unhappy lives. Tom practically drags Samantha out of the house but not before setting out the rules of the job, such as don’t go into the cellar and don’t touch the creepy painting hanging over the stairs, because he seems to be one of the few characters aware that they are in a horror film.

Not long after Lily is left alone in the house the proverbial starts to hit the fan and she is tormented by something playing on her personal fears whilst trying to steal the child she has been tasked with taking care of. Or are they? I won’t go into spoiler territory other than to say that the mystery of what’s really happening is quite intriguing, interesting and inventive, and whilst it’s perhaps not as clever as it thinks it is the movie at least has more to offer us than a few bumps in the night.

First up I’m reluctant to get hung up on technical issues, abundant though they are here, when it comes to indie films they can feel like an easy target and perhaps it’s unfair to judge these kinds of films on the same level as the latest blockbuster. But to ignore it feels like a cop out and plenty of low budget movies manage to transcend their humble production values. Unfortunately this isn’t one of them and I found the glitches distracting, from the usual sound balance issues to pull focuses that last too long and a surprising number of background reveals that don’t actually reveal anything and yet linger anyway. And don’t try to pass these off as artistic choices, it’s a fine line between artistic and messy and this film leans closer to the latter. However you can get past these if you are less obsessive than I am so don’t take these as a damning of the film, it’s just the surprisingly frequent feel of a film feeling not quite finished.

As previously mentioned the movie begins with Lily going about her daily life and meeting Chris, and as you may have inferred I think I hate Chris. I honestly do not see the point of this opening, it has a curious quality of a poorly constructed storyline that feels as if it moves both too quickly and too slowly, with each scene dragging well beyond it’s welcome and new developments happening suddenly and without provocation, sometimes seeming to be contradictory to the characters motivations in the previous scene. More egregiously it’s painfully unnecessary. Chris returns in the finale but he serves no real purpose during the main storyline and for what little involvement he has there’s no reason we couldn’t have had him established at the start, which actually would have helped round out Lilly, adding to the mystery and giving us more time for the haunting, as the shift in tone when we move from the almost rom-com like setup of the uninteresting boyfriend to the intenseness of the haunted house is extremely jarring and it is clear that the haunting is where the strengths of the film lie.

All negativity aside the story of the haunting is very well constructed, the atmosphere is thick, the pacing is tense, the mystery is interesting and the scares are scary, which feels like the bare minimum requirement in a horror film but you’d be surprised how many horrors fall at this first hurdle. Unfortunately I’m still hung up on the sloppy opening and as I write this I feel it is a big problem because almost all of my negative points can be drawn back to this relatively minor area of the film. I could comfortably cut out half of Chris’s appearance in the film without losing anything and it would have been nice to have seen a little more of the couple who owned the house, as they add a nice level to the puzzle of what’s really happening.

As a side note I’m actually not clear what exactly was happening. I mean I understood the “truth” of the haunting but as to the details I can certainly make assumptions but whilst I know there definitely was a scene at the end where two characters sat down and one explained the plot to the other (the other was Chris, who we’ve established I hate) I struggled to follow what they were talking about and whatever the explanation was didn’t sink in. Maybe I’m an idiot but I’d have preferred no explanation at all as opposed to one I didn’t understand. All in all this film seemed unaware of what it’s strengths were, the spooky stuff works great but the bigger character building and deeper meanings all fell a little flat despite Pearl Chanda doing an excellent job of adding real vulnerable depth to the character of Lily. I might be being generous in my rating of this film but the parts I enjoyed I enjoyed and a second viewing would probably hold up favourably.

Review by Kristian Mitchell-Dolby.
See this review on The Fan Carpet.

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