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Review: The Awakening (First 10 Minutes of the Film Included!)

The past will always haunt you.

Post WW1, London was a bleak place full of devastation and despair over the loss of loved ones.  It was only natural to believe in the supernatural and that loved ones were still around in spirit even though their physical forms were not. In The Awakening, Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall), self proclaimed ghost hunter and superstition debunker, made it her duty to make sure the dead remained just that: dead.

Using her Sherlockian sleuthing skills and resourcefulness, Cathcart has been able to disprove the existence of any supernatural beings. She is locally renowned and called upon by Robert Mallory (Dominic West) to investigate a death in an all-boys boarding school with mysterious circumstances. While at the boarding school, all of her beliefs are brought into question when the strange occurrences hit a little too close to home.

The aesthetic of the film helps successfully set up the dreary gloom and bleak ambiance of post World War London. Every mist can carry a veiled horror, every shadow can be cast by an unknown terror, and every thing you were sure of could change in an instant. This is the premise that was promised, but was lost somewhere along the way.

Horror movies, at least most of the bad ones, are guilty of either plot-holes, a lack of plot, or even introducing a plot twist so unexplainable and ridiculous that  the film loses any credibility it had earned. This film, at least after the first half, is guilty of those before mentioned horror film faux pas.

Imagine you’re going down a corridor you’ve been done hundreds of times before. You know what’s there and what to expect. Nothing ever seems to change. Now imagine you’re going down the same corridor in the dead of night and with a dimly lit candle in hand. You see shadows of shapes you don’t recognize, glimpses of movement in the corner of your eye, and then you suddenly reach a crossroad. You can either turn right and go in to the familiar and predictable territory, or you can turn left and brave the unknown. This film turned left. It ended up falling down some stairs and dying. Whether it became a ghost or not is up to you to decide.

The film began by teasing us and giving a glimpse of possible redemption for bad ghost films everywhere, and through the actor’s great performances and best efforts, it seemed like it was just over the horizon. Then, the mess of fog called the plot rolled in obscuring whatever semblance of a coherent story was there.

 Now, check out the first 10 minutes of the film!

Mitchell Wells

Founder and Editor in Chief of Horror Society. Self proclaimed Horror Movie Freak, Tech Geek, love indie films and all around nice kinda guy!!

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