DRAMA; 1hr 25min
STARRING: Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Eddy Maday, Callina Liang, West Mulholland
Falls the shadow: Liang
Panning through streamlined scenes, director Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich, Traffic) sets up screenwriter David Koepp’s crawly story of a house with a hidden agenda. With its polished wooden floors, antique touches and supersized kitchen, the vibe is all grace and space — plus, Julia Fox cameos as its realtor. Matriarch Rebekah (Liu) is keen to pull the trigger, overruling her ineffectual husband, Chris (Sullivan).
The family settles in (Maday and Liang are teenagers Tyler and Chloe), and as its bristling dynamic takes shape, it becomes evident that the prowling lens — operated by Soderbergh — is the gaze of a spook. Everyone but a freaked-out Chloe is oblivious at first, preoccupied with their own pressing woes: Rebekah is a workaholic who cruelly favours prize jerk Tyler over her isolated daughter, which Chris is as powerless to prevent as the antipathy between his kids and his floundering marriage.
At first the poltergeist is relatively passive, keeping a protective watch over Chloe. (Could it be the spirit of her dead best friend, the victim of a drug overdose?) It later gathers steam, trashing Tyler’s bedroom after he regales his parents and sister with a dreadful dude-bro bullying story.
While more forbidding than chilling, these antics do carry a certain What-Next quality, confirmed by the medium (Natalie Woolams-Torres) a now-concerned Chris brings in. “You have a presence here,” she informs the dysfunctional clan. “There’s something that it needs to do. But it doesn’t know what.”
It’s about to get a serious heads-up when Chloe gets involved with one of Tyler’s friends (Mulholland), who makes Tyler look like a choirboy. If spirits are the arbiters of unfinished business, the one haunting this house is a damning reflection of the people inside it.
