Reviews

The spiritualist begins powerfully with some prowling shots of a very striking Gothic location and kicks off a plot about a strange but real illness. Top notch acting from Ian Reddington and Jasmyn Banks and a whiff of "The innocents" as they discuss her mother's condition as a figure stands on the balcony behind them. As the daughter reacts to events in the house and other cast members gather, you aren't quite sure where things are going, but a truly creepy seance scene gets the chills going again. There are some really nice back story touches here that raise some real and intelligent scares. The last third of the film is then hell for leather to a twist ending I hadn't seen coming. It's rare to find a horror film these days that makes you think and it's nice to see a terror film that isn't about teens being waylaid by inbred hillbillies on a country road . Julie T Wallace is good too and makes her presence felt throughout.

I found this quite creepy in places and i quite liked the final twist .Although the set design was good enough, this could have been shot on a real location probably more cheaply which would have added to its atmosphere, which i think is what was missing. more could also be made of the aggressors.

the performances are OK, but the film does illustrate how difficult it is to keep our attention for 70 plus minutes without a more intriguing premise and more satisfying twists as it progresses.

i think if the stalking creatures were more like the ones in "The Descent" or "Creep" there wouldn't be so many bad reviews, but of course the story (without wishing to add a spoiler) precludes this.

i have watched big budget movies that have wasted my time far more than this does

I would agree with many of the other posts that all the performances in this film are uniformly superb, also that as a subtle drama, dealing with complex themes the film works very well. In some superficial ways the film deals with obsession, not unlike that shown in Fatal Attraction, but in a much more morally complex way.

However, the portrait of an elderly embittered lesbian is not unlike that contained in The Killing of Sister George back in the sixties, an although not wishing to criticise the film, it makes me wonder how far we have moved on from that decade. Jennie Olson's excellent "The Queer Movie poster Book" charts the way in which films about homosexuality, forever showed portraits of lonely gay men and women, in agony over a love that wasn't accepted, and the posters for these films often have a vivid crack down the middle to suggest mental illness. Maybe there is a wiff of this in this film, although I would accept it is not just a film about homosexual desire.

To me the film is about three relationships, only two of which are really deliniated in any detail. The first is the relationship between the young schoolteacher and the underage schoolboy. To me, and I may be misreading, the relationship comes over as quite natural in the way that it is shot. They boy...a few months off sixteen isn't exploited and seems to know what he is doing. When the press descend on Blanchett like a pack, it comes as a bit of a shock. In contrast the feelings Dench's character has for Blanchett seem very unatuaral because she is so vinigarry and because of course Blanchette doesn't welcome them and isn't remotely so inclined.

Thankfully at the end of the film the "bunny boiling" doesn't reach the heights it does in Fatal Attraction, and without giving anything away, the film has a fairly muted and even handed ending.

As a gay man who is I suppose youngish (44) I have friends in their seventies who had particular problems coming out...although not in admitting their homosexuality to themselves. A key scene in this film is perhaps the one where Dench's character's sister talks to her about her previous close relationship with a woman, almost encouraging her to come out, but Dench's character can't.