The Awakening/Tabloid

Off to the Filmhouse again and, filled with nachos and gin, I had a blast with two entertaining new films.

The Awakening

This is a mystery haunted house film, happily old-fashioned. Rebecca Hall is one of my favourite actresses around and she is wonderful in her lead role as Florence Cathcart, a sceptic of the supernatural. It is 1921 and she is an educated woman (trouser-wearing and so on), exposing fraudsters and solving ghostly goings-on. She is summoned by Robert Mallory (Dominic West) to a boarding school, where a ghost has been seen and a boy has died.

Spooky stuff.

Several reviews of The Awakening have highlighted its kinship with films such as The Devil’s Backbone and The Innocents. The latter is one of my favourite films, and some of the key moments here were those which recalled it most strongly. For instance, there are night-time wanderings in the corridors, with just a candle (electric this time) and spooky sound design to keep the heroine company. The setting is also similar, with the lake of the country house playing a key role. And, most interestingly, we witness an inexorable bond with a young boy, given strange, fleeting fire with a kiss.

This relationship between Florence and the young boy, connecting through shared loneliness, is interesting. Mallory I found less exciting; his exchanges with Florence about survivors’ guilt after World War I are a little too explicative, although Dominic West does not disappoint. The ending also does not satisfy entirely, the tension having been built up nicely with plenty of beautiful shots. The best of these include a stunned Florence standing in a street by some incongruous empty chairs, and a sequence on the jetty of the lake. The scares are generally effective too. In all, The Awakening can promise a great time in the dark.

7.5

Tabloid

This is the first Errol Morris documentary I have seen. The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War have so far evaded me, despite my interest. Tabloid tells the story of Joyce McKinney who, to our delight, has much of the running time to herself. She is a former beauty queen from North Carolina, who became mired in tabloid scandal in the UK in 1977 when she was accused of abducting her former lover (a Mormon missionary), taking him to Devon, chaining him to a bed and raping him.

McKinney is a perfect documentary subject. The story (along with several bizarre diversions) is wild, and she is a hoot. Impassioned and hilarious, she keenly tells her side of the story with gusto. Whether she tells it truthfully or not, we cannot know, and although she is clearly obsessive, it is difficult to tell whether she is benign or dangerous. Her story treads the various fine lines between the terrifying, the sad and the completely ridiculous. An entirely unexpected epilogue involving her dog had me in stitches; the phrase “You couldn’t make this shit up” was invented for it.

A few others add their perspective. Most important are two tabloid reporters of the time, from The Express and The Mirror; it is a shame there are not more. The impact of the media on McKinney’s life has clearly been profound, despicably treated as she was, as fair game for a sensational story. The documentary should have more on this, examining and questioning the methods of the tabloid press (something which could not be more topical, after all). But in the end, it doesn’t matter too much. Joyce herself is so entertaining and the story itself makes a tremendous impact. Barking mad, one might say.

8