Movie review: The Haunting in Connecticut

Bad dreams in the house on the borderland.

by John P. Meyer

The Campbell family - who are the subjects of Peter Cornwell's film, The Haunting in Connecticut ("based on the true story") - are beset by a range of terrors, only some of which are supernatural.

Teenage son Matt (Kyle Gallner, looking a lot like a young, neurotic version of Nic Cage) is suffering from cancer, as well as the treatment regimen his doctor has put him on to allay that ailment's advance. During the long commutes back and forth from the hospital, Matt's mom, Sara (Virginia Madsen) has to pull over frequently to let him throw up on the side of the road.

Meanwhile, Matt's dad Peter (Martin Donovan) is struggling to hold the family together financially, while at the same time battling an alcohol addiction. When Sara suggests they rent a place closer to the hospital to remove the long drive to the hospital from their agenda of problems, Peter can't imagine how they can swing the additional expense - but, hey, his son may be not long for the world, so they decide to bust the budget and go for it.

The house that Sara finds and rents at the end of a difficult day at the hospital is both cheap and spacious, with two above-ground floors and a spacious basement. Only one thing causes her to hesitate: as the real estate agent says, "it does have a history."

Which is this: the place used to be a funeral home. Not only that, but - as we incrementally discover over the course of the film's exposition - the mortician in charge had a rather nasty necromancy habit, which he tended to indulge unchecked in various unsavory ways that I won't go into here. Suffice it to say that the dead who passed through his hands have not gone quietly into their good nights.

One shade in particular troubles the psychically-sensitized Matt - a young man who appears to him in nightly evil dreams, serving as an assistant of some sort to the mortician. This spook appears to be trying to tell Matt something, but of course nothing like straightforward communication is ever possible when we're dealing with the dead (couldn't we just issue them iPhones?) and so confusion remains the order of the day. Or night.

During one of his chemos, Matt makes the acquaintance of a scholarly looking fellow named Popescu (Elias Koteas, last seen as a butch-dressing police lieutenant in the oddball indie Dark Streets) and finds out that his ability to interface (confusingly) with the dead comes to many on the verge of death themselves - including the Reverend Popescu, who gives Matt his card and tells him to call if he (the reverend) can be of any help.

Well, this doesn't take long, and soon Popescu is out at the mortuary (er, I mean, house) waving a pair of bar magnets around in an attempt to locate the cranny where the ghostly boy passed.

Meanwhile, Matt's sister Wendy (Amanda Crew), along with younger brother Billy (Ty Wood) and niece Mary (Sophi Knight) have literally stumbled upon a secret stash of photographs and a tin box full of - um - potato crisps or something. Once the younger kids are shooed from the room, Matt and Wendy have a gander at the bundled photos, to find that they are death portraits of people who have passed through the one-time funeral home. As for the potato crisps - well, never mind about those.

What's most effective about Haunting is its unrelenting darkness: when the evil dead aren't leaping out at you, the grim reality of deadly disease, disastrous finances or debilitating addiction comes forward from its also-running backstory position to lead the pack. By the time one finishes watching the movie, whatever reality a person returns to is bound to look downright rosy by comparison.

Director Cornwell (whose previous work includes an animated horror short called Ward 13) makes the ghostly happenings sufficiently creepy and - occasionally - startling (as evidenced by the periodic screams coming from members of the preview audience). There's not a lot innovative going on in that respect, with considerable use of the old reflectaphobia ploy (scary things appearing in mirrored surfaces), but one supposes there's only so much that can be done in the realm of cinematically-imagined supernatural events, and probably most of it has already been. We get a more-than-the-doctor-ordered dose of evil-looking ectoplasm emitting from one of our (dead) characters (see the rather nauseating promos playing on TV and intermittently on the IMDB front page), and there's a bit involving the carving of runes into the skin of corpses that gets carried into the present via the agency of Matt's near-death, borderland reality perceptiveness.

Given the constraints of the medium (you'll excuse the expression), a good creepshow such as this must rely on the performances of its actors to carry the shiver-inducing day - and this crew succeed in that regard, with Ms. Masden standing out among the crowd as a convincingly distraught mom. For his part, young Mr. Gallner does a good job portraying a young man who's come to uncomfortable terms with the fact that he's not likely to get much older - his occasional sullen, siblings-directed outbursts lend his character a healthy dose of reality.