Writer: Andrew Barrer
Director: Mac Carter
Haunt is an interesting little film that takes a very standard haunted house story and gives it a couple of twists.
The film starts with Franklin Morello (Carl Hadra) using an old fashioned crystal radio set as a form of Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) device. Specifically he’s trying to talk to the spirits of his dead children. It’s a painful experience for him and one that doesn’t end happily.
Fast forward a year or so and we have the Asher family moving into the old Morello house which they’ve bought from sole surviving family member Janet (an almost unrecognisable Jacki Weaver). The main character in the story is teenage son Evan (Harrison Gilbertson). He meets up with troubled teenage neighbour Sam(antha) (Liana Liberato) and they slowly strike up a relationship.
They also discover the crystal radio set and begin to experiment with it. Unfortunately for them it still works and releases something unpleasant…
When you strip the story down there’s not much too it, despite the hardly surprising revelations near the end. Not much is made of the EVP, the crystal set could just as easily have been a Ouija Board. What makes the film worth watching is the way the light story is told… in places.
The first, pre-credit scene is simply amazing. Direction and editing combine to keep the atmosphere and tension massively high, without the need for any gore or silly tricks. It’s hair-standing fear in its purest form and probably one of the creepiest thing I’ve seen for a long while.
The ending is similarly well done and again a lot of credit must go to the editors (Tom Elkins and Ruben Sebban). It’s powerful stuff.
The problem is the rest of the movie. The middle just sags. There’s very little actually here and none of the tension from the opening scene. The two main actors are excellent – Gilbertson as too-nice-for-his-own-good Evan and Liberato as vulnerable-but-manipulative Sam both do a great job. The relationship between them is believable but way too much time is spent building it up. Much of it feels like filler; it’s classy filler but still filler.
So Haunt has superb moments at the beginning and the end but is let down by a script that is far too pedestrian in between.