Conclusion: This is a time for ghosts

The Awakening (2011) is exactly the sort of movie handful_ofdust would have written if she hadn't been the person who recommended it to me in the first place. It is a classic ghost story; it has a mystery and a revelation and any number of tense, ambiguous moments in between. It is also a poignant and very fine exploration of what it means to be haunted in the more figurative, Henry Jamesian sense. If there are no ghosts, Rebecca Hall's Florence Cathcart remains as haunted by the loss of her lover in World War I as Dominic West's Robert Malory by his survival of those same trenches: his slight stammer and shuddering fits, the grief that cores through her with every phenomenon debunked; the skin-hunger that flashes between them in a mix of trust and trauma, as if they can prove on one another's bodies that they still have a right to the living world. (It is not at all the romance expected of their initial pairing, the shell-shocked Latin master and the professional skeptic called to investigate at his school; there are ways in which it is barely a romance, meaning I approve. Florence's sexuality is not the repressed force behind the hauntings, not a symbol of her mental unraveling, not the consequence of her Cambridge-educated, sharply compartmentalized life as a woman who lives by cool, efficient intellect when the loss of a cigarette case is enough to open an abyss of suicidal grief beneath her. Her work at the school is raking up private terrors faster than she can lay them with tripwire cameras and dusting for prints. Gazing covertly at Malory in his bath, touching herself as she lies pensively in the same tub, kissing him for the first time as the impossibly screaming face of a child blurs up from a tray of developer, she is trying to use her body to drown out her brain. I have rarely seen movies with contemporary settings, let alone a softly speaking ghost story set in 1921, acknowledge that this is a thing women also do.) At times the story plays almost like a remix of The Turn of the Screw, housekeeper, groundskeeper, and eerily self-possessed boy all present, Florence in danger of falling into the governess' role. There are eches of The Waste Land: a famous clairvoyant, a line from the Morte d'Arthur, Malory's unhealing wound like the Fisher King's in his thigh. Mostly there is Florence, sharp-edged and wounded, striding in her soldier's greatcoat and her restless intelligence, refusing to live in fear even if the exorcizing of it destroys her. Yes, it is probably unnecessary to have her threatened with rape at any point in the story (although I would note that Malory is explicitly not her rescuer: a painting the camera keeps returning to is Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith Beheading Holofernes), but I spent so much of the film wondering when it would toss aside her agency in favor of the aesthetic potential of a frightened woman, it was a pleasure to find the denouement her decision, too. Online research suggests that some viewers find the ending ambiguous, but I don't see it. The confusion of living and dead is almost inescapable. Florence walks like a revenant through her own memories, wryly admitting that "a life haunted . . . isn't a life at all." When Malory says he can always see his ghosts, it doesn't matter whether he is speaking literally or metaphorically: their weight on his shoulders is the same.

That was a textbrick. I'm going to bed. I meant to three hours ago, but I was writing this.