Malevolent: When Ghost Hunting Turns Real
A family of con artists in the spiritualist business offers “tourist” services for restless spirits who haunt homes with nightly wails, hidden presences, and slamming doors. Armed with a minimal set of equipment, the ghost hunters, siblings Jackson (Ben Lloyd-Hughes) and Angela (Florence Pugh), and their small team consisting of Jackson’s girlfriend Beth (Georgina Bevan) and cameraman Elliot (Scott Chambers), stage farewell performances in basements and attics using radios, cassette recordings, and other charming relics of the 80s. From the very first frames, the film attempts to charm with the nostalgic aesthetics of the late last century, occasionally switching to grainy VHS footage. The charlatans’ work is thriving: it seems every house in Scotland is haunted. But, as is often the case, they are about to encounter real evil.
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Family Drama Meets Haunted House Horror
In addition to the typical genre tropes of any haunted house film, “Malevolent” (known as “The Curse: The House of Death” in some regions) plays the family drama card in the vein of James Wan: the young psychics’ mother herself heard voices from the other side and eventually couldn’t bear the cacophony. Angela, tormented by traumatic memories, has long been weary of the illegal trade and wants to focus on university studies rather than touring cursed dwellings (not to mention the moral implications of the business and exploiting others’ tragedies). However, Jackson owes money to dangerous people and is determined to capitalize on his sister’s gift and their mother’s dubious fame.
The film starts steadily and confidently, albeit not originally: squabbles within the team, an overly friendly new client Mrs. Green (Celia Imrie) and her estate, screen static, and deliberate jump scares aimed at the viewer’s reflexes. It’s immediately apparent that director Olaf de Fleur Johannesson spends most of the time creating scares in broad daylight, only occasionally peeking into dark closets, focusing on the psychological state of his protagonist, who genuinely begins to hear otherworldly whispers. These touches seem to be inherited from literature – the screenplay is based on a gothic novel by Eva Konstantopoulos.
From Haunted House to Torture Porn?
However, towards the finale, the haunted house tale (spoiler alert ahead) awkwardly transforms into torture porn, although the on-screen gore remains relatively tame, focusing more on the idea of violence than its explicit depiction.
While the original title, “Malevolent,” attempts to evoke abstract qualities, the distributors in some regions captured the film’s formulaic essence, encapsulating all the key genre clichés and main associations in a more descriptive title. Indeed, death in the form of girls with disfigured faces and ornate dresses has taken up residence at this address. Amidst the somewhat clumsy juggling of horror tropes, where the first half of the film is awkwardly married to a climax and ending that feel mismatched, Florence Pugh stands out. It’s always a pleasure to watch her, even if it’s unusual to see her in such a role (Ari Aster’s “Midsommar” exists on a completely different plane).
A Cry for Help from Distributors?
After the credits roll, the main mystery remains: “Malevolent” is a 2018 film produced by British Netflix, where it was released around Halloween. If we consider it as a run-of-the-mill horror film that one might stumble upon on a streaming platform while aimlessly browsing through tags like “scary” and “sinister,” it doesn’t pretend to be anything more, fading from memory as soon as it ends. However, releasing a less-than-stellar representative of the genre in theaters three years after its initial release, with disappointing ratings on aggregator services, feels more like a cry for help and a desperate plea from distributors. Due to constant rescheduling of releases, they seem to have no other choice but to rely on Florence Pugh’s name on the poster (in the past three years, the actress has become an Oscar nominee). All of this creates a sense of limbo or even time turning backward: Florence Pugh long before the Oscars and Marvel, a film made according to the templates of the mid-2000s but set in the 80s, cinemas borrowing films from streaming services instead of the other way around – we live in strange times, even without paranormal presences behind the wall.