HAUNTER (Vincenzo Natali). 97 minutes. Now playing. See listings. Rating: NN
It’s the day before Lisa Johnson’s 16th birthday, and she’s sulky and temperamental about being cooped up at home with her family. This would be an entirely understandable response for a teenage girl, even without the supernatural circumstances established at the beginning of Haunter.
See, in Lisa Johnson’s world it’s always the day before her 16th birthday. She’s always stuck at home, enduring the same events over and over – pancakes for breakfast, macaroni and cheese for lunch, meatloaf for dinner. When she goes to bed at night, she hears weird noises… and then wakes up to start the day again.
There’s a reason for Lisa’s looping existence, beyond the fact that screenwriter Brian King took it upon himself to mash up Groundhog Day, The Others and two or three older haunted-house pictures. As Haunter slowly lays out its parameters, that reason becomes clear – and Abigail Breslin’s performance as Lisa gets a lot more interesting.
Haunter is Vincenzo Natali’s first film since the criminally underrated Splice, and it’s an intriguing choice for the director.
On the one hand, the whole thing takes place in a single location, a challenge Natali has encountered and surmounted before in Cube and Nothing. On the other, it’s a narrative that functions on the level of a young-adult novel, and Natali’s sensibility is decidedly more adult.
Natali (who, full disclosure, I’ve known casually since university) is a filmmaker who wasn’t made for Goosebumps, and you can feel him bristling at the restrictions of an expected PG-13 rating. Haunter is a story with real darkness in it, and Natali is drawn to that darkness the result is a movie that generates real intensity and suspense before pulling back from a real payoff, over and over again.
There’s also a slight problem with the script, which is that it’s not based on any original ideas – and the film’s first movement stumbles while setting up the basic concept. We join Lisa’s story already in progress, so she’s ahead of us for the first 20 minutes. But once we realize what’s going on, we’re ahead of her for the next 40.
The second act introduces some new elements, briefly flirting with a sort of time travel, which is ingenious. But the movie retreats from that, too, settling for empty jolts rather than further upping the stakes of the story. (That said, there’s one great, horrible image that hints at where full engagement with the material might have taken it.)
I wanted to like Haunter more. Breslin’s a sympathetic lead, and the supporting cast – including Peter Outerbridge, Stephen McHattie, Michelle Nolden and Natali regular David Hewlett – do a lot to flesh out the material. But the whole thing never comes together the way it should instead of landing with a bang, it just sort of fades into its own fog.
I have been asked by Haunter’s distributors to point out that in addition to its theatrical engagement at the Carlton, it’s also available on demand. So, okay.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @wilnervision
