HAUNTER (2013)

Genre: Horror/Thriller
Director: Vincenzo Natali
Cast: Abigail Breslin, Stephen McHattie, Peter Outerbridge, Michelle Nolden, David Hewlett
RunTime: 1 hr 37 mins
Rating: PG13 (Horror)
Released By: Cathay-Keris Films
Official Website: http://www.ifcfilms.com/films/haunter

Opening Day: 27 February 2014

Synopsis: Lisa Johnson is one day shy of her sixteenth birthday. And she will be forever. She and her family are dead and doomed to repeat that fateful last day before they were all killed in 1985. Only Lisa has “woken up” and realizes what is going on. She starts to feel as if she is being haunted, but the “ghost” turns out to be Olivia, a very much alive girl who lives in the house in the present day with her own family. With her help, Lisa discovers that the house once belonged to a serial killer who kidnapped teenage girls and burned their remains in a hidden furnace room. When he died, he became a Haunter - a powerful, evil spirit able to possess the living.

Movie Review: 

The conventional ‘haunted house’ setup gets an unusual twist in ‘Haunter’, a low-key but always intriguing indie horror thriller that unfolds largely from the perspective of 15-year-old Lisa (played by ‘Little Miss Sunshine’s’ Abigail Breslin) who is forced, like the rest of her family, to relive the events of the day before her sixteenth birthday. The only difference? Her dad (Peter Outerbridge), mom (Michelle Nolden) and kid brother are blissfully unaware of their ‘Groundhog Day’ circumstance, going about their routine as if it were just another day in family banality.

There’s a good reason for it. Lisa and her entire family are ghosts, trapped in their 1985 Reagan-era suburban home after being murdered by the spirit of a serial killer who collects the souls of his victims like butterflies in a jar. They ain’t alone in fact; Lisa soon discovers that there are many other families like hers who have suffered the same fate at the hands of a creepy Edgar Mullen (Stephen McHattie). What’s worse, Edgar’s next target is a similar family of four living in the house in present-day, his modus operandi exactly the same as that of Lisa’s and the other families who came and went before hers.

To his credit, debut screenwriter Brian King’s high-concept premise is inventive and intriguing, teasing its viewer to guess just how Lisa and the rest of her family met their deadly fate at the hands of Edgar. Unfortunately, there isn’t quite enough to sustain your attention for the entire duration, particularly because it becomes too plainly clear just why and what Lisa has to get away from halfway through the movie. In particular, the introduction of Lisa’s real-life equivalent named Olivia (Eleanor Zichy) only serves to confirm the viewer’s suspicion that the once-promising conceit is headed for much more conventional territory.

On his part, cult director Vincenzo Natali (of ‘Cube’ and ‘Splice’) pulls out all the stops to make sure that his picture looks cool. With his cinematographer Jon Joffin, Natali conjures up a moody atmospheric attitude that cleverly contrasts the world of the living and the world of the dead. The collision of these two parallel worlds within the same setting makes for some interesting visual ‘electricity’; ditto the transition through time as Lisa makes contact with the other girls who have also died in the same house. There is also much artistic finesse in the way Natali presents the redundancy of Lisa’s days at the start, which quickly and surely draws his viewers into the peculiarity of Lisa’s circumstance.

That credit also has to go to Breslin, who has played her fair share of surly teens since graduating with age out of ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ and ‘Kit Kittredge: An American Dream’ type roles. Her greatest accomplishment is in bringing a grounded sense of realism to her role, avoiding the overacting and false hysterics that many unfamiliar with the horror genre tend to lapse into. McHattie might not appear familiar, but he makes for a perfectly veral villain who conveys sinister menace with just a turn of the lips.

Viewers who are looking for big scary moments will probably find ‘Haunter’ outright disappointing, for there are no such setpieces to be found here. Instead, there are decent scares now and then to give you a jolt in the seat, though the suspense here works more as a mystery than anything else. Still, there is novelty to be found in this ghost story, even if it does work better as an interesting experiment of genre conventions than a fully-fleshed thriller in its own right. Haunted you may not be, but we guarantee you that you’ll at least be piqued. 

Movie Rating:

(Low-key but intriguing twist on the ‘haunted house’ setup that unfolds a mystery thriller from the perspective of a dead protagonist)

Review by Gabriel Chong