“Why do bad things happen to good people?” durable Christian matriarch Sarah Campbell asks during the baffling, pointless and ultimately shelved faux-documentary framing device of The Haunting in Connecticut. A better question might have been why good actors wind up in bad movies. Why, for the love of god, is Virginia Madsen playing Sarah, a one-note protagonist required above all to cough up countless variations on hysterical worry? Why is Martin Donovan, so deft with deadpan comedy in Hal Hartley films, playing Peter Campbell, a dopey workin’ dad in baggy plaid shirts whose one big, very silly scene finds him smashing his guitar in melodramatic despair? Above all, why the hell is the woefully underused Elias Koteas playing an overly reverential reverend in this mostly limpid, paralyzingly generic haunted house horror (see Amityville, Poltergeist et al)? Perhaps the scariest thing in The Haunting in Connecticut is the implications it poses to any non-megastar yet talented actor over the age of 40.
To be sure, there are sources of potential freshness, or at least variation on cliché, in this “based on true story” creeper written by Adam Simon and Tim Metcalfe and largely dictated by the mechanical escalation of numbingly telegraphed boo moments. The tormented son of Sarah and Peter is receiving excruciating treatments for his cancer and has been warned that he may experience hallucinations. Are the many shadowy figures lurking in the mirrors and his peripheral vision actually ghosts or merely figments of the afflicted imagination of a tragically ill and sheltered teen? There is a cocktail of religiosity, mental illness and youthful vulnerability here that draws a certain kinship with the often laughable but not uninteresting The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Of course the ambiguity lasts about five minutes, and it’s a shame, because it might have held your interest a bit longer had the film kept us in a state of uncertainty and unease.
There is also the film’s attempt at referencing the ectoplasmic imagery of 19th century spirit photography, something I can’t recall ever seeing addressed so explicitly in any other ghosty movie. But the digital renderings of weird stuff flowing up and out of mediums’ mouths under Peter Cornwell’s direction only remind us why those images from the past still fascinate us. They possess an enigmatic, tactile quality that can only translate pitifully into the visual lexicon of painstakingly overworked modern special effects.
In one of the film’s many sepia-toned flashbacks we see a mortician slicing the eyelid off of a corpse. It’s one of the more effective moments, at least on a purely guttural, squirm-inducing level. And it’s a nudge to the audience, a way of saying You Must Watch, invoking the naïve appeal of haunted houses of old, playing with our desire to witness something awful while placing our fingers over our eyes as a pretence of disgust, dismay or dismissal. If only The Haunting in Connecticut could come anywhere near such basic slithery delights. On the contrary, it is precisely the sort of contemporary wrote horror movie that makes you wonder if nearly everyone in the field has simply forgotten how.
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