By Keri O’Shea
When I saw that The Haunting of Radcliffe House (formerly titled Altar) was set in Yorkshire, I asked for it purely on that basis. Having lived in Yorkshire for around half my life, I think it’s fair to feel a little pride in the place, and although the city I live in is rammed to the gunnels with allegedly haunted pubs and other buildings, ‘ghost walks’ and a wide range of books all proudly discussing just how ghostly the county is, there aren’t many horror films based here. Well, no longer, and interestingly, this one is directed by Nick Willing, whose 1997 film Photographing Fairies badly needs and deserves a decent DVD release. So far, so promising. I notice, though, that Willing hasn’t directed for a while, and certainly hasn’t made anything with this theme before. This may have an overall impact on the film, as he is also the writer here…
Kicking off with a beautiful array of long shots of God’s own acre, it certainly seems as though The Haunting of Radcliffe House is going to deliver. It does feel grounded in Yorkshire – but unfortunately, a lot of the promise of the setting is squandered pretty early on. That’s not to say it’s a dreadful film; it’s just that it’s rather unpolished, and it suffers from a problem lots of supernatural-themed films suffer from. Its script is essentially a re-write of many previously-done scripts. This is a shame, but it seems to be a common obstacle.
Anyway. A pan-Atlantic family – dad Alec (Matthew Mod…Matthew Modine?!) mum Meg (Olivia Williams) and two children that they’ve pulled out of school for several months are heading to the Radcliffe House of the title; Meg is a renovator and she’s been charged by a wealthy client with the task of getting the hall back to how it was in its prime; Alec, meanwhile, can do whatever it is that he does all day – drawing and sculpting, mainly. The house is ramshackle, but that’s not its main issue, as before any time at all has passed we can see that it’s a weird place with unexplained phenomena: rattling pipes, ghostly images on photos, and a constantly rumbling musical score. It has the obligatory secret rooms and doors, but that’s not all: the family is soon warned of the house’s dark history, during which the original owner of the house apparently killed his wife Isabella during a magical ritual. Can Meg overcome her skepticism in time to prevent the house and its ghosts exerting an unholy influence over her family, she asked rhetorically?
Let’s start with what’s good, aside from the attractive shots I mentioned earlier. Firstly, I’d say that Olivia Williams’ performance is a real highlight: she is believable as the wife and mother of the piece, and manages to balance her character’s clear rational thinking with a burgeoning sense of unease, right up until the point where she has to act. On a similar note, the two children (who I assumed were going to pale into the background or else become cliche feckless kids who can’t do anything for themselves) grow into characters in their own right, who have some bearing on how the story plays out. That’s undoubtedly a good thing, and in particular I hope the work continues to arrive for actress Antonia Clarke, as she seems worthy of it. But perhaps the biggest plaudit I can award the film is to say – thank you, thank you for not feeling the need to throw jump scares at us every five minutes, as if the hallmark of a good scary story is being made to leap out of your skin. Far better to opt for the raising-hairs-on-back-of-neck approach, a thing which The Haunting of Radcliffe House achieves during its best moments (people crawling at top speed through background shots? That is creepy – and the darker, more understated scenes shot in the house are the film’s stand-out best).
It’s not all plain sailing though, and somehow in playing this role in a modest-budget, British-set feature, Matthew Modine comes across as having been ripped out of his comfort zone. Perhaps just used to flashier, bigger things, he can’t match Olivia Williams’ performance like for like and often seems to be returning lines of dialogue with an aplomb which just doesn’t suit the context. He also spends a lot of the film off-camera, a fact which is perhaps intended to make the viewer believe he is being influenced by all sorts of malign forces where we can’t see him, but for me it just made him feel less part of the film full stop, and made subsequent developments feel a little thin. His ‘breakdown’ beneath the occult forces of the house, such as it is, feels rather unconvincing – it’s so abrupt and underexplored that it lacks weight.
Add to this a number of characters who seem to have little to actually contribute to the story, and that sense of the plot as rather thinly-spread worsens – with a near-miss on a comic interlude (whether he was trying for it or not) when Steve ‘Erotic Odyssey’ Oram rocks up for a cameo as a paranormal detective. Having opted for a tried-and-tested formula – considering the press release and the blurb I don’t think I’m spoilering if I say ‘possession’ comes to the fore – the film badly needed to focus. At times, however, it felt like it had tried to do more than it realistically could, even given the fairly obvious storyline it decided to follow (which may explain why the more interesting occult plot lines were abandoned!)
So, not a bad film per se, but not a good one either, this is just imbued with too much baggage – including a sizeable case of deja-vu. The Haunting of Radcliffe House has its good elements, but these get lost in the mix. Nick Willing can really bloody direct, though, so fingers crossed this will give him enough impetus to get something else off the ground, get to writing with someone fresh and develop something with much more bite.
The Haunting of Radcliffe House will be released by Image Entertainment on 11th May 2015.