The Awakening Review

Set in England in 1921, when the country was still coming to terms with the monumental loss suffered during WWI, The Awakening is a deeply moving story about ghosts from the past apparently haunting those grieving in the present.

Rebecca Hall plays Florence Cathcart, a very modern woman who spends her days hunting for non-existent ghosts, in the process debunking the spiritual charlatans of the time who preyed upon the weak and bereaved.

An atheist who lost her faith the day she lost her fiancé during the Great War, she reluctantly takes a meeting with schoolmaster Robert Mallory, a former soldier dealing with both the mental and physical effects of battle.

A history teacher working at countryside boarding school Rockwood, Mallory describes a ghostly boy haunting the pupils at his school, and seeks answers to the many questions that the mysterious sightings have stirred.

Mallory endeavours to convince Florence to pay the school a visit to investigate further, and while her head says no, something in her heart compels her to accept the job.

Once there, it seems like an open-and-shut case, Florence quickly solving the mystery of a missing child and the strange spirit haunting the boys' nightmares. But just as she prepares to return to London, Florence experiences a terrifying apparition of her own.

With the pupils heading home for Christmas, she decides to stay on with Mallory, joining forces with school matron Maud and lonely youngster Tom to further investigate the haunting. But what she discovers causes Florence to question everything she has previously believed, and forces her to finally face up to her own dark demons.

It's chilling stuff, sending a tingle up the spine for the duration, though the horror is tinged more with sadness than out-and-out scares. Indeed, The Awakening follows in the footsteps of The Innocents and The Orphanage, wherein the horror is psychological, driven by loneliness, despair, and in this instance the collective grief of a nation.

Rebecca Hall brilliantly conveys this sadness as Florence, her tough, composed exterior concealing a well of tears beneath. Dominic West is her equal as Mallory, a man suffering from post-traumatic stress, and finding a kindred spirit in this damaged girl.

But just as important to The Awakening is the work of Imelda Staunton as Maud and Isaac Hempstead-Wright as Tom, the former lending pathos to proceedings as a complex character with a complicated past, and the latter - so good as Bran Stark in Game of Thrones - delivering a powerful performance as an isolated boy with his own dark secret.

Making his directorial debut, Nick Murphy oversees proceedings with sensitivity and care, striking just the right balance between drama and scares, the aforementioned performances consistently ringing true; the 'blurry child' ghost effect the stuff of genuine nightmares.

Unfortunately, he drops the ball during the film's finale, the script that he co-wrote with Stephen Volk unnecessarily dragging out the climax and over-explaining proceedings when some ambiguity would have better served the story.

But that minor quibble aside, Murphy has crafted a classic ghost story in the grand tradition of the genre, and one that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the aforementioned classics.

Hitting screens at a time when gore seems to be more, it's refreshing to watch a fright-fest with this amount of emotional and psychological depth, and that mature approach to the material, combined with four grandstanding performances, makes The Awakening a horror to truly savour.

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