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.
( History will be rewritten. )
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.
( History will be rewritten. )
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.
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