Director Christopher Smith has a great track record when it comes to horror. His London Underground terror-fest CREEP perfectly homaged and updated the seminal 1972 classic DEATH LINE, and his lost-at-sea opus TRIANGLE is still one of the cleverest and greatest horror films I think I’ve ever seen. So I was expecting great things from THE BANISHING. Especially as we’ve seen the Haunted House genre recently revitalised to some extent with the series THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE and THE HAUNTING OF BLY MANOR …
Unfortunately, THE BANISHING is a different beast altogether, and while it plays with the tropes of a haunted house, the actual plot gets lost somewhere in the folds of atmosphere, and an attempt to introduce some sort of a parallel with the rise of the Nazis in Germany (the whole World War II element of the film is, ultimately, unnecessary, and acts to detract from the other ideas that the film is playing with). This is the first film that Smith has not written himself, that credit goes to three co-authors: Dave Beton, Dean Lines & Ray Bogdanovich; and perhaps this is where the issue ultimately lies.
Marianne (Jessica Brown Findlay) returns to a crumbling pile of a house with her daughter Adelaide (Anya McKenna-Bruce) to live with her husband, the local vicar, Linus (John Heffernan). But the house seems haunted: Adelaide plays and talks to creepy dolls, and sees things in the mirrors, and Marianne herself sees a creepy Monk attack and kill their deaf housekeeper Betsy (Jean St Clair). But then these events don’t seem to have happened … but then they have … and Marianne starts to doubt her own sanity. She is helped by Harry Price (Sean Harris), a local occult spiritualist who advises her to get away from the house … but will the ghosts that haunt it let her go!
There are several undercurrents of strangeness at play. Marianne also sees things in the mirrors, and it transpires that Adelaide might not be her daughter at all, but the offspring of her sister, and she sees herself in the past, presumably, being tortured by the creepy Monks, but then we also see multiple occurrences of herself at different points in the house (there’s a magnificent shot where we see multiple occurrences of her watch her daughter step through the mirror into whatever lies beyond) … I did wonder at one point if this was all going to be a clever TRIANGLE-like time travel mystery where time beyond the mirrors ran differently to here, or even something like THE SHINING’s ending where all times became compacted into one … but ultimately I was just left confused.
By the end of the film, you’re just left wondering what on earth has been going on … which is a shame as the scenic and sound design is truly excellent, and the creepiness is ramped up to 11. What it needed was a solid plot to underpin it all, and an ending which explained and satisfied, rather than just leaving you hanging. Maybe Smith needed to be more ruthless in his interpretation of the script, and in the process delivering a magnificent, time-bending, haunted house horror tale, rather than something which is just okay.
THE BANISHING will be released in cinemas and on digital platforms on March 26th 2021
Christopher Smith's Supernatural Horror
Movie title: The Banishing
Movie description: The Banishing tells the story of the most haunted house in England. In the 1930s, a young reverend, his wife and daughter move into a manor with a horrifying secret.
Date published: March 26, 2021
Country: UK
Duration: 1h 37min
Director(s): Christopher Smith
Actor(s): Jessica Brown Findlay, John Lynch, Sean Harris
Genre: Drama, Horror, Thriller
David J Howe, is the author and co-author of numerous books about the TV Show “Doctor Who”, as well as being a freelance writer and Editorial Director of Telos Publishing Ltd.
