Supernatural thriller starring Rebecca Hall and Dominic West. England, 1921: Florence Cathcart has made a name for herself by debunking ghostly phenomena and exposing mediums as con artists. But when invited to a supposedly haunted boarding school in Cumbria, where one of the pupils has recently died, Florence is faced with her greatest challenge.
Writer/director Nick Murphy and co-writer Stephen Volk (the veteran ghost-story genius behind the controversial 1992 TV classic Ghostwatch) deliver a mostly effective and unnerving 1920s-set tale here. Rebecca Hall plays Florence Cathcart, a debunker of alleged hauntings, who finds herself summoned to a remote boys' boarding school by teacher Robert Mallory (Dominic West), who tells her that his charges are being menaced by a mysterious spectre. Florence finds that the sinister atmosphere of the school and the influence of its creepy housekeeper (a pleasantly hammy Imelda Staunton) refuse to dissipate, despite her attempts to discover a rational explanation of events. Sadly, things go a little haywire in the third act and much of the carefully wrought tension and ambiguity is lost in an orgy of melodrama and implausibility. This is no classic of a notoriously difficult genre, but if you can forgive the silly conclusion, it's still satisfyingly scary.
| role | name |
|---|---|
| Florence Cathcart | Rebecca Hall |
| Robert Mallory | Dominic West |
| Maud Hill | Imelda Staunton |
| Tom | Isaac Hempstead-Wright |
| Edward Judd | Joseph Mawle |
| Reverend Hugh Purslow | John Shrapnel |
| Freddie Strickland | Cal MacAninch |
| Constance Strickland | Lucy Cohu |
| Malcolm McNair | Shaun Dooley |
| Harriet Cathcart | Diana Kent |
| Alexander Cathcart | Richard Durden |
| role | name |
|---|---|
| Director | Nick Murphy |
