Joyce Glasser reviews The Haunted Mansion (August 11, 2023) Cert 12A, 123 mins.
Call it hard times, but 2023 has seen product placement in major cinema releases elevated to unabashed merchandising with films like Air, Barbie, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and now The Haunted Mansion. This is the second film (Eddie Murphy starred in the disappointing 2003 film) made to promote Disney’s theme park attraction, The Haunted Mansion, (available in Orlando and Tokyo). The terrific cast is up to the challenge, but director Justin Simien (despite the success of his dark, satirical Dear White People) and Katie Dippold (Snatched) underuse or abuse the talent in an ambitious story that will leave kids bemused and parents unamused.
The talented, charismatic LaKeith Standfield (the best part of Judas and the Black Messiah) plays Ben, an astrophysicist – from the CERN Project no less – who has dropped out of his promising career after the death of his wife (cue romantic flashbacks), who happens to have conducted ghost tours. When she dies, Ben, who is developing a camera that takes pictures of dark matter, takes over her tours. Later, we meet another tour guide, a cameo from Winona Ryder. If you get the impression Disney wants to promote the job for youngsters in the audience who might want to work at Disney World you could be right.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in New Orleans another formerly ambitious, now grieving widow, Gabbie (Rosario Dawson), has moved with her lonely 11-year-old son, Travis (Chase Dillon), from New York, where she was a doctor, to Gracey Manor, an isolated, enormous gothic pile. Just how that is going to help her friendless son to socialise is another matter. Travis is grieving, too, and part of the plot involves the poor kid courting danger by following what he believes is the ghost of his father.
Simien and Dippold want to introduce big themes for families, including loss and grief, and then distract us from the maudlin with comedy and fright. But when Owen Wilson’s Father Kent, a fake priest, is an embarrassment, and when one of the funniest men on earth, Danny DeVito as history professor Bruce Davis, has two funny lines, comedy is in short supply.
As for fright, this is pantomime scary. The six-year-old next to me in the cinema clutched at her mother a few times, especially when the ghosts trapped in Gabbie’s house gang up on Father Kent and start chasing him. She loved the atmospheric sets, with the long corridors, the talking/moving pictures on the wall and moving furniture and statues: the typical gothic pile that bears a close resemblance to the theme park house.
The premise explains why Gabbie stays in the house to begin with. After realising the house is haunted, naturally Gabbie and Travis leave, but only to find they are haunted on the outside by ghosts who force them back to the house.
Gabbie’s only hope is to get to the root of the problem and find out what the ghost(s) want. The task requires a blend of history (Bruce) science (Ben), religion (Father Kent) and spiritualism (the medium Harriet, played by Tiffany Haddish) and Madame Leota (Jamie Lee Curtis), to exorcise the ghosts. Leota comes in late, a head trapped in a glass ball by the Hatbox Ghost.
Gabbie calls on the local priest, not realising he’s not an exorcist, but a fraud happy to take Gabbie’s money. He recruits a reluctant Ben because of his camera. Ben protests that he doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he believes he can take photographs of ghosts (assuming ghosts are like dark matter in space). The camera might help Ben pass himself off as a ghost buster, but it plays no role in the film.
After a lot of sleuthing, and big reveals, some of which you might follow, we learn that William Gracey bought the mansion, and he, too, was stricken by grief. He made some desperate choices while mourning for his beloved wife, Eleanor. He hired Leota to try and contact the spirit of Eleanor every night for a full year, which had the undesired effect of releasing hundreds of ghosts into the mansion. An evil spirit then persuaded Gracey to take his own life, and it’s he (The Hatbox Ghost) who put Leota in her glass ball.
In a whirl of activity Professor Bruce has the brilliant idea of getting a sketch artist to provide a portrait of the Hatbox Ghost so they can identify him and dig up his history. He turns out to be Alistair Crump (voiced by a heavily disguised Jared Leto) of Crump Manor.
Crump’s gruesome childhood of abuse and subsequent revenge is not yet over. He is searching for the one-thousandth victim in order for him to unlock the mansion. Ben, Kent and Travis manage to escape from the mansion and rush to Crump Manor – now a tourist site, complete with, you guessed it, tour guides.
You can’t guess what transpires after this visit, as only happy endings are predictable. It’s a shame the film is not as funny as it should be, nor as convincingly sad, as there is a very real connection between grief, spiritualism and ghosts which is historic. Great minds like Arthur Conan Doyle was a spiritualist and JB Yeats attended seances.
What is concerning, though, is what the filmmakers are saying about work. We have a youngish doctor who has worked for a decade to qualify and a highly trained astrophysicist who are both dropping out of their professions, to open a B & B and to give ghost tours respectively. And they are rewarded for their choices as they never would have met – yes, a love interest is inevitable – had they been earning the big bucks in stressful, though rewarding jobs. A priest is not a priest but a crook, although he inadvertently helps his victim, and Professor Davis leaves his research and students to go off ghost busting. Therapists are replaced by mediums who really do communicate with the dead. They, at least, are good value for money.
