Cultural Dessert

'The Awakening'

20 January 2012

We made a rare trip to The Castle in Wellingborough last Saturday to see ‘The Awakening’, a British film that came out last November but had passed me by. It’s a ghost story, set just after the First World War at a boarding school in Cumbria where professional hoax exposer Florence Cathcart is called in to investigate the death of a boy who has apparently been scared to death. It’s a spooky tale, atmospherically filmed in a constantly gloomy light with muted colours, allowing half-seen images to lurk in the shadows. The most scary ghost films are those that don’t show too much but play upon the audience’s imagination. ‘The Awakening’ pulls off that classic trick of showing you a scene in which the heroine walks through a room without noticing anything unusual, while a ghostly figure appears very briefly in the background in a way that ensures all the audience see something but no-one is quite sure whether they really did. Rebecca Hall is great as Florence Cathcart, her rational determination gradually unwinding in the face of increasingly unexplainable happenings. And there is good support from Dominic West and Imelda Staunton. It’s a nicely made film that doesn’t outstay its welcome and confirms that there is nothing so scary as children!

Labels: Film

posted by Robin Simpson @ 10:25 am