I applaud Carl Medland for investing time and effort into one of my favourite genres, but The Spiritualist is just too badly acted and poorly fleshed out to be anything but a thoroughly frustrating 100 minutes.
The Good - The setting is beautiful (though far too grand for a normal middle class family to inhabit without explanation). The camera-work is proficient and the lighting and soundtrack both create the right atmosphere. I mention these basics because they're often woeful in low budget horror films of this kind.
The Bad - Quite simply, the acting is awful. Sometimes great actors make up for a lack of budget, but here the cast utterly destroys what could have been a decent film. Julie Wallace (The Mother) does fairly well despite being hamstrung by her binary, hokey dialogue. The rest of the cast is instantly forgettable. Drama school performances from an immature and over-matched group of young actors. I couldn't wait for them to be gruesomely murdered just so they'd go away. The exception is Caroline Burns Cooke (the titular Spiritualist) who delivers a performance so laughably poor that you hope it was some kind of bet. She flip-flops from mystic aloofness to annoying chattiness at random. In the big crucial 'scary' seance scene, she clearly fluffs her timing but rather than go again and waste a four minute shot, the Director must have said "screw it, that'll do, it's the best she's done all day". She either didn't understand the character she was playing, or she just didn't have the ability. The role of the wily old spiritualist / psychic / exorcist sets the tone for the scariest parts of films like this and it must be delivered well or the film falls flat.
The Spiritualist is a functional movie with a manageable plot and for that it deserves a small amount of credit. It won't get a lot of reviews, so each one counts towards it's rating. Amazingly, the first was a 9/10. The Author is either linked to the film, or this is the only horror film he has ever seen. 9/10 for this thing is completely indefensible.
Save yourself 100 minutes because this isn't worth it.
The Good - The setting is beautiful (though far too grand for a normal middle class family to inhabit without explanation). The camera-work is proficient and the lighting and soundtrack both create the right atmosphere. I mention these basics because they're often woeful in low budget horror films of this kind.
The Bad - Quite simply, the acting is awful. Sometimes great actors make up for a lack of budget, but here the cast utterly destroys what could have been a decent film. Julie Wallace (The Mother) does fairly well despite being hamstrung by her binary, hokey dialogue. The rest of the cast is instantly forgettable. Drama school performances from an immature and over-matched group of young actors. I couldn't wait for them to be gruesomely murdered just so they'd go away. The exception is Caroline Burns Cooke (the titular Spiritualist) who delivers a performance so laughably poor that you hope it was some kind of bet. She flip-flops from mystic aloofness to annoying chattiness at random. In the big crucial 'scary' seance scene, she clearly fluffs her timing but rather than go again and waste a four minute shot, the Director must have said "screw it, that'll do, it's the best she's done all day". She either didn't understand the character she was playing, or she just didn't have the ability. The role of the wily old spiritualist / psychic / exorcist sets the tone for the scariest parts of films like this and it must be delivered well or the film falls flat.
The Spiritualist is a functional movie with a manageable plot and for that it deserves a small amount of credit. It won't get a lot of reviews, so each one counts towards it's rating. Amazingly, the first was a 9/10. The Author is either linked to the film, or this is the only horror film he has ever seen. 9/10 for this thing is completely indefensible.
Save yourself 100 minutes because this isn't worth it.
