The Banishing (2020)

Directed by: Christopher Smith | 97 minutes | horror, thriller | Actors: Jessica Brown Findlay, John Heffernan, Anya McKenna-Bruce, Sean Harris, Adam Hugill, John Lynch, Jean St. Clair, Jason Thorpe, Amy Trigg, Nigel Travis, Seamus O’Neill, Cokey Falkow, Sara Apostolaki, Matthew Clarke Keith Dunphy, James Swanton, Danny Shayler, Francesca Fowler

We are writing the 1930s. The young Reverend Linus moves into an old British country house with his wife Marianne and daughter Adelaide. Of course, it isn’t long before Adelaide makes contact with an imaginary friend and starts hearing strange noises in the middle of the night. The family’s new home appears to have had an eventful history. Soon, Marianne must battle the demons of the past that reside in her new home.

‘The Banishing’ opens with a startling and promising prologue. Based on that overture, you think that this film may follow a slightly different path in terms of atmosphere, approach and tone than the well-trodden haunted house pattern that you see in the many mediocre horror films that have seen the light of day over the years. However, it eventually fails. While some scenes and characters (particularly the eccentric Harry Price played by Sean Harris) hint at the work of Italian horror master Dario Argento, director Christopher Smith is ultimately too conservative to take that line consistently and the eccentric nature of many of Argento’s really embrace work.

Despite evocative and potentially exciting elements such as ghosts, ghostly hooded creeps, mirrors showing alternate realities and other dimensions, and creepy puppets, The Banishing rarely succeeds in creating the momentum needed to draw the viewer into the story. suck. This is partly due to the (too) slow pace, but also due to the lack of development of the main characters. They lack character and a clear history, so as a viewer you don’t really sympathize with their trials and hardships. And that is quite a problem for a film that mainly focuses on psychological rather than visceral horror elements. The supporting characters (the aforementioned Harry Price and the hard-hearted Bishop Malachi) are a lot more interesting than the people the story primarily revolves around. Moreover, some scenes are filmed in such a way that they ultimately strip the moment supreme of the sequence of a good dose of tension.

‘The Banishing’ starts as a promising haunted house story, but eventually degenerates into a perfunctory exercise. The much-needed tension and suspense are sparse, while the climax (though not terribly bad) isn’t good enough either to make up for the slow pace of narration and lack of ‘on-the-edge-of-your-seat moments’. There have been worse, but also much better ghost films than this somewhat flat and uninspired-looking movie.