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We're only ever our true selves when we are alone, are we not?
So much of The Banishing (2020) makes for a fine haunted house film, I am all the more frustrated by the parts that don't. It has a crystalline core of horror which it muddles with extraneous spookiness. It cheapens its historical acuteness with schlock pulp. It's not as bad as the movies that feel like the second draft got filmed by mistake, but it had all the ingredients for a first-rate Gothic and I am a little miffed that it whiffed it. The girl meets the house all right, but things get a little wobbly after that.
In the fall of 1938, as the late-bleaching light plays through the bones of branches and crumpled leaves, Marianne Forster (Jessica Brown Findlay) arrives at the mellow limestone gables of Morley Rectory in Essex. She has brought her ten-year-old daughter Adelaide (Anya McKenna-Bruce); they are joining her husband the Reverend Linus Forster (John Heffernan) in his new parish, their first posting as a family. It takes no time at all for the disturbances to begin. Voices echo peculiarly, suggesting at once furtive familial activities and the intercourse of nothing human. Mirrors have a habit of holding reflections out of time with the people who cast them or perhaps not reflecting the right people to begin with. A tableau of oddly damaged, roughly dressed dolls can't be a good sign, but frankly our characters would have problems in a household with only the normal levels of haunting. Linus and Marianne have not yet consummated their marriage; there are strong hints that he is a virgin, uncertain how to reconcile his sexuality with his faith or his feelings toward his wife who bore another man's child out of wedlock before him. It's admirable that he does not think of himself as having saved a fallen woman, but it's not just the ventriloquism of the house when she hisses at him, "It's a shame—only jealousy fuels your passion." They are a painfully obvious misalliance of flesh and spirit, this dark, glowing woman who has learned to face the world with a cocked hip and a lifted chin regardless of her shyness or her pain and this papery man of pinched angles, so dark-eyed and pale-lashed, he looks naked just from meeting her gaze; they hardly seem to need the assistance of the supernatural for Linus to catechize his wife about her comings and goings in town or Marianne to be assailed with intrusive flashbacks of the asylum where she was confined for her disgraceful pregnancy, certainly not for Addie to retreat from the mother who passed her off as a fictitious sister's child for years. It's edging in all the same, shearing the barely formed family apart like the planes of history within the rectory's deceitful walls. It attracts the concern of Harry Reed (Sean Harris), a raffish, half-sane, self-taught occultist whose acknowledged case of Great War PTSD may have shocked him supernaturally as well. "The graves of ten thousand men was my bed and my toilet for two years," he recalls almost absently as he stands before the altar, dousing candles with his fingers. "Might you have also lived through that hell, you would not be so quick to judge." He's older than he looks with his ginger-dyed hair and moustache and the queer hint of eyeliner, deliberately flamboyant in his red suede jacket and his shirts of block-blue; he dances an expert tango in his garret to the scratch of a gramophone, throws a conversation-stopping accusation of Sieg Heil! across the pub, receives Marianne with his face still running blood from a beating, half-dressed and sprawling drunk. He may be something of the charlatan he's called; it's never clear where his power begins and his damage leaves off, hag-ridden by the lives he couldn't save in his fight against evil, which he defines not in terms of Christian diabolism but the stains left on the world by human cruelty and folly and failure, the lies we tell others and ourselves. Slouched in a cheap silk kimono on a settee that has seen better mildew, he is utterly credible as he warns Marianne, "The house you live in feeds upon the charade that you show to others . . . If you don't leave that house, the shame will kill you." We have seen it happen already, literally. The Forsters are playing out the first moves whose endgame left the last vicar and his wife hanged and lying in their blood. Linus may be a lost cause with his self-denial and submission to the genially implacable Bishop Malachi (John Lynch), but we want to see Marianne—so outspoken in the defense of others, flouting her husband's passive pacifism to hold a scrap drive for the war in Spain—fight back. The stakes are more than her marriage or even her life, they are her dignity and her daughter. The two have always, of course, been thornily intertwined.
For two acts, The Banishing builds its mysteries through echoes and parallels, setting the personal travails of the Forsters against the strictures of the Church and the oncoming politics of World War II to questioning and non-anvilious effect. The third act doesn't drop all the anvils in the process of explanation so much as render all its suggestiveness concrete, which lands just as heavily and with even more of a thud. The idea of a house that feeds on shame and secrecy is a potent one. It is the kind of haunting that reflects externally and amplifies the internal tensions of its characters; it weaponizes their vulnerabilities, twists their emotions and their senses until they are lost in memory or delusion or the ghost-regions in between and all funneling toward the pit of history that lies under the rectory like a rotten sore; I am not at all convinced it needs to have been engendered by the sadistic misogyny of a heretic order of Christian monks obsessed with torture and control. It's not a problem of giallo, it's a problem of literalism. I have the same reservations about the figure of the blinded mother-ghost with whom Marianne must bargain for her own daughter, descending into the underworld on the other side of the mirror like Demeter through the looking glass: vengefully maternal, cycling forever through the moment of her violation and loss, she makes a vivid refraction of the heroine's anxieties and ambivalence, but the particularity of this one self-willed specter out of so many centuries of insentient destruction blunts the force a little. It is cathartic to hear Marianne finally declare that she feels neither shame nor regret over the night she spent with her child's father—"In fact, I cherish it"—and it is exorcistically clanging that she does so to the menacing shades of the monks themselves. Once the film has established that their rituals of excess and mutilation scarred the ground on which their monastery stood, over which the rectory was built so that its atmosphere would always act as a burning-glass on thoughts of sin and punishment, it adds nothing to meet them in the ghostly, gnashing flesh. Then again, I am far less disturbed by the prologue which spells out the gruesome fates of the prior tenants of Morley Rectory than by the slow erosion of Linus' certainty that Beatrice and Stanley Hall really "emigrated to Australia very happily." The slander of a louche vagrant like Harry Reed is one thing, his own discovery of an obscenely defaced Bible another. The world uncovered in its unsafety is frightening: the rise of fascism, the faltering of love, the knowledge that home is the least sheltered place you could be. The film seems to understand it doesn't need to amp the scares when it's playing for such bone-deep stakes, until it forgets.
The Nazi occultism is both nonsensical and distasteful. At the moment I am objecting to it more on grounds of narrative redundancy, since it comes out of nowhere in the stinger and nothing that occurs at Morley Rectory makes more rather than less sense as part of a sinister plot by Bishop Malachi to retrieve the monk-murdered bones of mother and daughter for his Nazi allies at Stuttgart. For a scene that lasts seventy seconds tops, I don't know where to begin. Are the bones meant as occult fuel of the Third Reich? We are given no grounds to understand them as such, but if so the gesture is as historically icky as every other fictionalization of genocide as a supernatural phenomenon when it is really just a dreadfully human thing to do. In terms of the harm done by institutions, it is actually more effective if Malachi is not a string-pulling villain but merely the sort of blandly callous functionary who will go on sacrificing families to the event horizon of the rectory so long as it doesn't rock the boat of a scandal, exactly as he might have kept a predatory priest circulating in his community. He can still be a Nazi sympathizer; it's just one step beyond the willfully naive, piety-cloaked trust in the rightness of appeasement displayed by Linus and despised by Marianne. He can even still lean on the Forsters to stay, deeming the husband insufficiently grateful for a plummier post than his pastoral talents deserve and the wife insufficiently penitent for her discreditable past. It's fair of the film to nod to the historical collaboration of religious authorities and fascists; it does an insightful job connecting the scapegoating violence of Nazism to the same impulses of inadequacy and blame that have riven the Forsters' marriage. The last-minute trip to Stuttgart does nothing for the plot except steal time from the rest of it. Even a minute could have been used to give satisfying closure on the future of the Forsters, our emotional hook into this story in the first place. After spending most of his screen time swinging between a liability and a secondary antagonist, it is unironically nice that Linus pulls himself together to assist with the Tenebrae-poppet ritual that permits Marianne to access the deepest layer of the haunting into which her—their—daughter has disappeared; he concludes the film delivering the first decent sermon we have heard from him, coming out against fascism and all its works and apologizing in the same line to Marianne. Considering that the first symptom of their troubles was their absent sex life, it is impossible for me to tell if it is narratively significant that while we see them rejoined as a family, we do not see them so much as kiss. I should like to know that Linus had overcome his side of the shame the house was greedy to magnify and batten on until yet another round of sin-spiked deaths was added to its store—or perhaps they separate affectionately, but either way it would be reasonable for the audience to know. I might even trade a hallucination or two for more of Harry and Marianne, who form one of those complicated nonsexual alliances I love so much in films. He's such an unapologetically outré figure with his parrot-bright self-presentation and his rough, staccato, exhausted voice that seems to rise only in challenge or camp, which can be the same thing; he enters the rectory carefully, but he can do it without fear because he is shameless, he hangs himself out like a flag for all to see. Perhaps he, too, had to leave a house before it killed him, somewhat less hauntologically. No one else in this movie is going to put over lines like "Denial is the teat on which the Beast will suckle," that's for sure.
The Banishing was directed by Christopher Smith, none of whose previous films I have seen; its screenplay is the combined work of David Beton, Ray Bogdanovich, and Dean Lines and it is probably facile to call it a case of too many cooks, but it is overstuffed. It has good bones, though, and good performances on them, and they seem to stick with me longer than the extraneous schlock. I appreciate that the film is interested in scratching underneath the newsreel surface of its period; I haven't seen its haunted house before. I might wish that it were less committed to the jump scare, but since most of its spatiotemporal weirdness appears to be the consequences of the cinematography by Sarah Cunningham and the editing by Richard Smither, as a fan of practical effects I approve. Technically the story is a fictionalization of the haunting of Borley Rectory, but it has been taken so far from the facts of the real-life investigation that it doesn't even ping my meter of historical irresponsibility. Skipton, North Yorkshire stands in for Colchester. I suspect the chances are nil to fanfiction, but I would cheerfully watch the further adventures of Harry Reed, queer disaster occultist. This charade brought to you by my cherished backers at Patreon.
In the fall of 1938, as the late-bleaching light plays through the bones of branches and crumpled leaves, Marianne Forster (Jessica Brown Findlay) arrives at the mellow limestone gables of Morley Rectory in Essex. She has brought her ten-year-old daughter Adelaide (Anya McKenna-Bruce); they are joining her husband the Reverend Linus Forster (John Heffernan) in his new parish, their first posting as a family. It takes no time at all for the disturbances to begin. Voices echo peculiarly, suggesting at once furtive familial activities and the intercourse of nothing human. Mirrors have a habit of holding reflections out of time with the people who cast them or perhaps not reflecting the right people to begin with. A tableau of oddly damaged, roughly dressed dolls can't be a good sign, but frankly our characters would have problems in a household with only the normal levels of haunting. Linus and Marianne have not yet consummated their marriage; there are strong hints that he is a virgin, uncertain how to reconcile his sexuality with his faith or his feelings toward his wife who bore another man's child out of wedlock before him. It's admirable that he does not think of himself as having saved a fallen woman, but it's not just the ventriloquism of the house when she hisses at him, "It's a shame—only jealousy fuels your passion." They are a painfully obvious misalliance of flesh and spirit, this dark, glowing woman who has learned to face the world with a cocked hip and a lifted chin regardless of her shyness or her pain and this papery man of pinched angles, so dark-eyed and pale-lashed, he looks naked just from meeting her gaze; they hardly seem to need the assistance of the supernatural for Linus to catechize his wife about her comings and goings in town or Marianne to be assailed with intrusive flashbacks of the asylum where she was confined for her disgraceful pregnancy, certainly not for Addie to retreat from the mother who passed her off as a fictitious sister's child for years. It's edging in all the same, shearing the barely formed family apart like the planes of history within the rectory's deceitful walls. It attracts the concern of Harry Reed (Sean Harris), a raffish, half-sane, self-taught occultist whose acknowledged case of Great War PTSD may have shocked him supernaturally as well. "The graves of ten thousand men was my bed and my toilet for two years," he recalls almost absently as he stands before the altar, dousing candles with his fingers. "Might you have also lived through that hell, you would not be so quick to judge." He's older than he looks with his ginger-dyed hair and moustache and the queer hint of eyeliner, deliberately flamboyant in his red suede jacket and his shirts of block-blue; he dances an expert tango in his garret to the scratch of a gramophone, throws a conversation-stopping accusation of Sieg Heil! across the pub, receives Marianne with his face still running blood from a beating, half-dressed and sprawling drunk. He may be something of the charlatan he's called; it's never clear where his power begins and his damage leaves off, hag-ridden by the lives he couldn't save in his fight against evil, which he defines not in terms of Christian diabolism but the stains left on the world by human cruelty and folly and failure, the lies we tell others and ourselves. Slouched in a cheap silk kimono on a settee that has seen better mildew, he is utterly credible as he warns Marianne, "The house you live in feeds upon the charade that you show to others . . . If you don't leave that house, the shame will kill you." We have seen it happen already, literally. The Forsters are playing out the first moves whose endgame left the last vicar and his wife hanged and lying in their blood. Linus may be a lost cause with his self-denial and submission to the genially implacable Bishop Malachi (John Lynch), but we want to see Marianne—so outspoken in the defense of others, flouting her husband's passive pacifism to hold a scrap drive for the war in Spain—fight back. The stakes are more than her marriage or even her life, they are her dignity and her daughter. The two have always, of course, been thornily intertwined.
For two acts, The Banishing builds its mysteries through echoes and parallels, setting the personal travails of the Forsters against the strictures of the Church and the oncoming politics of World War II to questioning and non-anvilious effect. The third act doesn't drop all the anvils in the process of explanation so much as render all its suggestiveness concrete, which lands just as heavily and with even more of a thud. The idea of a house that feeds on shame and secrecy is a potent one. It is the kind of haunting that reflects externally and amplifies the internal tensions of its characters; it weaponizes their vulnerabilities, twists their emotions and their senses until they are lost in memory or delusion or the ghost-regions in between and all funneling toward the pit of history that lies under the rectory like a rotten sore; I am not at all convinced it needs to have been engendered by the sadistic misogyny of a heretic order of Christian monks obsessed with torture and control. It's not a problem of giallo, it's a problem of literalism. I have the same reservations about the figure of the blinded mother-ghost with whom Marianne must bargain for her own daughter, descending into the underworld on the other side of the mirror like Demeter through the looking glass: vengefully maternal, cycling forever through the moment of her violation and loss, she makes a vivid refraction of the heroine's anxieties and ambivalence, but the particularity of this one self-willed specter out of so many centuries of insentient destruction blunts the force a little. It is cathartic to hear Marianne finally declare that she feels neither shame nor regret over the night she spent with her child's father—"In fact, I cherish it"—and it is exorcistically clanging that she does so to the menacing shades of the monks themselves. Once the film has established that their rituals of excess and mutilation scarred the ground on which their monastery stood, over which the rectory was built so that its atmosphere would always act as a burning-glass on thoughts of sin and punishment, it adds nothing to meet them in the ghostly, gnashing flesh. Then again, I am far less disturbed by the prologue which spells out the gruesome fates of the prior tenants of Morley Rectory than by the slow erosion of Linus' certainty that Beatrice and Stanley Hall really "emigrated to Australia very happily." The slander of a louche vagrant like Harry Reed is one thing, his own discovery of an obscenely defaced Bible another. The world uncovered in its unsafety is frightening: the rise of fascism, the faltering of love, the knowledge that home is the least sheltered place you could be. The film seems to understand it doesn't need to amp the scares when it's playing for such bone-deep stakes, until it forgets.
The Nazi occultism is both nonsensical and distasteful. At the moment I am objecting to it more on grounds of narrative redundancy, since it comes out of nowhere in the stinger and nothing that occurs at Morley Rectory makes more rather than less sense as part of a sinister plot by Bishop Malachi to retrieve the monk-murdered bones of mother and daughter for his Nazi allies at Stuttgart. For a scene that lasts seventy seconds tops, I don't know where to begin. Are the bones meant as occult fuel of the Third Reich? We are given no grounds to understand them as such, but if so the gesture is as historically icky as every other fictionalization of genocide as a supernatural phenomenon when it is really just a dreadfully human thing to do. In terms of the harm done by institutions, it is actually more effective if Malachi is not a string-pulling villain but merely the sort of blandly callous functionary who will go on sacrificing families to the event horizon of the rectory so long as it doesn't rock the boat of a scandal, exactly as he might have kept a predatory priest circulating in his community. He can still be a Nazi sympathizer; it's just one step beyond the willfully naive, piety-cloaked trust in the rightness of appeasement displayed by Linus and despised by Marianne. He can even still lean on the Forsters to stay, deeming the husband insufficiently grateful for a plummier post than his pastoral talents deserve and the wife insufficiently penitent for her discreditable past. It's fair of the film to nod to the historical collaboration of religious authorities and fascists; it does an insightful job connecting the scapegoating violence of Nazism to the same impulses of inadequacy and blame that have riven the Forsters' marriage. The last-minute trip to Stuttgart does nothing for the plot except steal time from the rest of it. Even a minute could have been used to give satisfying closure on the future of the Forsters, our emotional hook into this story in the first place. After spending most of his screen time swinging between a liability and a secondary antagonist, it is unironically nice that Linus pulls himself together to assist with the Tenebrae-poppet ritual that permits Marianne to access the deepest layer of the haunting into which her—their—daughter has disappeared; he concludes the film delivering the first decent sermon we have heard from him, coming out against fascism and all its works and apologizing in the same line to Marianne. Considering that the first symptom of their troubles was their absent sex life, it is impossible for me to tell if it is narratively significant that while we see them rejoined as a family, we do not see them so much as kiss. I should like to know that Linus had overcome his side of the shame the house was greedy to magnify and batten on until yet another round of sin-spiked deaths was added to its store—or perhaps they separate affectionately, but either way it would be reasonable for the audience to know. I might even trade a hallucination or two for more of Harry and Marianne, who form one of those complicated nonsexual alliances I love so much in films. He's such an unapologetically outré figure with his parrot-bright self-presentation and his rough, staccato, exhausted voice that seems to rise only in challenge or camp, which can be the same thing; he enters the rectory carefully, but he can do it without fear because he is shameless, he hangs himself out like a flag for all to see. Perhaps he, too, had to leave a house before it killed him, somewhat less hauntologically. No one else in this movie is going to put over lines like "Denial is the teat on which the Beast will suckle," that's for sure.
The Banishing was directed by Christopher Smith, none of whose previous films I have seen; its screenplay is the combined work of David Beton, Ray Bogdanovich, and Dean Lines and it is probably facile to call it a case of too many cooks, but it is overstuffed. It has good bones, though, and good performances on them, and they seem to stick with me longer than the extraneous schlock. I appreciate that the film is interested in scratching underneath the newsreel surface of its period; I haven't seen its haunted house before. I might wish that it were less committed to the jump scare, but since most of its spatiotemporal weirdness appears to be the consequences of the cinematography by Sarah Cunningham and the editing by Richard Smither, as a fan of practical effects I approve. Technically the story is a fictionalization of the haunting of Borley Rectory, but it has been taken so far from the facts of the real-life investigation that it doesn't even ping my meter of historical irresponsibility. Skipton, North Yorkshire stands in for Colchester. I suspect the chances are nil to fanfiction, but I would cheerfully watch the further adventures of Harry Reed, queer disaster occultist. This charade brought to you by my cherished backers at Patreon.
no subject
This is a very good and thorough review that as usual picks out the good bits even for those not squinting through the… Morlification. Thank you.
no subject
As many as I can get! And no. I did not. I liked that one, too.
This is a very good and thorough review that as usual picks out the good bits even for those not squinting through the… Morlification. Thank you.
Thank you. It really does all right until the home stretch and then just . . . splat. Also could have used a sensitivity reader from the C of E, I am gathering from comments.
no subject
I mean, quite apart from anything else, it would not be that difficult for a Bishop to arrange for their retrieval during the interregnum between vicars; classic time to do building works. It would be easier still if he was the Archdeacon, not the Bishop, but still.
... I may be interrogating the text from the wrong perspective, of course ;)
no subject
As a former Cof E vicar it always annoys me when media people fail to understand how that rackety old institution works.
no subject
I wondered occasionally if the film had forgotten that it is different from the Catholic Church, but it's not as though I spend much time personally around either.
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That part I know! There's a conversation between Marianne and Bishop Malachi in which it is established that she was discharged from the mental hospital and reunited with Addie—who had been taken from her at birth—only through the good offices of Malachi, who had been contacted by the Catholic priest to whom Marianne supposedly made confession during her pregnancy and I'm not saying that interdenominational outreach isn't a thing, but what? Beyond complicating the issue of how everyone in this film is connected to everyone else, I couldn't place the relevance of Catholicism to the anecdote; it is flagged as unusual for Marianne for have spoken to the priest, but not for the priest to have called Bishop Malachi. Hence feeling like the script had suddenly and briefly spliced two churches.
no subject
* But possibly they didn't know this, and that's why they think it has to be a Catholic...
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Hee.
... I may be interrogating the text from the wrong perspective, of course
I am delighted to have you do so!
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All the things I'd have deleted are things the screenplay was doing just fine without! Sean Harris was wonderful, though.
no subject
What you say about the suddenly-occult-Nazis intrusion makes me think of a dissertation that a second reader declares needs another chapter. The poor grad student says "... okay" and goes back and adds some anvilicious Nazi occultism. Oh second reader, WHY.
no subject
I'm sorry! I have been watching a significantly higher number of contemporary-ish movies in recent weeks than I have since it stopped being possible for me to watch new releases in theaters and this was one of them. I am not entirely sure what the impetus is, but it is yielding consistently interesting results, even when they spin out in the last act.
What you say about the suddenly-occult-Nazis intrusion makes me think of a dissertation that a second reader declares needs another chapter. The poor grad student says "... okay" and goes back and adds some anvilicious Nazi occultism. Oh second reader, WHY.
It really does feel inexplicably grafted on to me. A more integrated movie might conceivably have foreshadowed its inclusion, but I don't know that I wouldn't still have hated it—as