Flak Magazine: Review of The Haunting, 7-26-99

Trade secret: Because readers are smart enough to know that a review represents an opinion, it is recommended that reviewers state their opinions as facts. Not “I think that talentless hack Joel Schumacher's direction of Batman & Robin is a hanging offense,” but “Talentless hack Joel Schumacher's direction of Batman & Robin is a hanging offense.” The reason for this, clearly, is that the second sentence is more forceful, and you don't doubt that either statement is an opinion. That's why subjective comments are written in reviews as if they were objective.

I mention it because I need to distinguish the following statement: Nobody will get any pleasure out of The Haunting.

At first, that reads like a statement of fact, but you temper that with your understanding of how criticism works and so you're inclined to believe it's merely an opinion. It's not. It's the objective truth. The only people who will enjoy life more for having seen this bathwater adaptation of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House are people who need fodder for their arguments about the inadequacies of its makers.

This is painful for me, because of all those makers who will rightfully be assigned blame — from Hollywood itself to haven't-quite-got-it-yet Dreamworks SKG (whose sole films of distinction to date are Saving Private Ryan and, like, Antz) on down — the most obvious target is director Jan De Bont. While, as far as killing time (brutally) goes, watching The Haunting again would be preferable to watching De Bont's insufferable Speed 2: Cruise Control again, never seeing them is the far better option. How these movies came from the man behind of one of the decade's most rewatchable action films as well as one of its great directorial debuts — the legitimately brilliant Speed — is a mystery on order with that of Hill House...in other words, it's neither compelling nor particularly mysterious.

Tragically, after Speed, studios started giving De Bont a budget, and that's all it took for his films to begin to spiral out of control. The crackerjack, uncluttered thrills of his debut gave way to the diminishing-returns parade of the spectacle-engorged Twister, Speed 2 and now The Haunting. He's willing to garble the language of film that he speaks so well for the sake of some computer-generated glitz. And while he has phenomenal glitz here, it's all for naught.

Compounding this is the fact that this could have been his best movie, as well as the summer's best blockbuster. It has all the right ingredients, but it just has too, too many of them. Liam Neeson is a psychologist whose “insomnia” study is a front for observing fear in a suggestive environment; namely, Hill House, less a manor than a New England castle. His subjects — played by Lili Taylor, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Owen Wilson — each come pre-bundled with crowd-pleasing personality tics that actually do please crowds. When the mood is light, the interplay of these three carry the movie along.

The actors bring life to better-than-average summer flick archetypes, most successfully in the casting coup of putting indie vet Taylor in the central role. She's indescribably perfect as Nell, the character whose discoveries about Hill House's secrets are dismissed as delusions by the others. It was a bold move on Dreamworks' part to hang this movie on her performance, and it will be a double shame if the movie's inevitable floptitude is blamed on this nontraditional casting.

Because — sigh — the fault lies with De Bont. There are two main problems here, both of which are exacerbated by the effects-happy production — in fact, it can be traced back to the first really stunning effect: A spirit sneaking up on a sleeping Nell by way of drifting through a curtain onto her bed.

First, the pacing of the movie is way off and the revelatory nature of the plotting is complete dross. To guess why, I'd say it's because the psychodynamics of these admittedly engaging characters don't fly. They doubt Nell, but we can't; we see these spirits move even when Nell doesn't, and so we never buy the idea that maybe she really is delusional. As a result, by the time she starts evangelizing about freeing the spirits, we can't believe these otherwise sharp characters don't catch on.

And when events finally cause them to, like when the ceiling transforms into a giganatic face with a mouthful of hands straining to catch them, they have a serious case of the Tape-Mark Blues — they don't show the appropriate terror on their faces because they were just staring at a tape mark on a blue screen when they were being filmed. They look bored and unable to comprehend these terrible monsters; if you see this film, you'll feel exactly the same way.

The misguided pacing, it should be said, is a double-bad because for suspense to work, you have to have some idea what might happen if the heroes don't succeed before time (however it's defined) runs out. For instance, the movie's staircase scene works because Neeson's character could very possibly die if the staircase collapses; you believe the movie just might do that to him, and so there's something to overcome. But most of the movie conveys only the vaguest sense of those elements. It's so tension-free that you won't realize you're watching the film's unsatisfying climax until you're 15 minutes into it.

Second, this ghost-in-the-sheets is an incredible bit of CGI business, and nothing later in the movie is really any more impressive. While there are oodles of variations on this effect throughout the film, as well as the seamless animation of statues and other architectual features, we've gotten the money shot, as it were. Every later permutation of this is either repetition or bluster, culminating in the not-scary final confrontation. De Bont, in watching the film, must have seen that the movie's scariest moments were its smallest — an errant reflection, a possessed photo album that becomes a flip book — and so his choice to let the film be overrun by effects we tire of after 45 minutes is his own fault. This has to be the least frightening haunted house movie ever.

De Bont drops numerous homages to Welles and Kubrick and Raimi whenever the mood hits him. You wonder if his cavalier disregard for making this movie succeed is because he expects others to have done all of the hard, emotional work for him, and because it's in the zeitgeist, he just gets to play. After this monster failure, however, the money men might well force him to relearn the craft by taking all of his toys away.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)