The Awakening – review

Here is a supernatural melodrama in the tradition of The Innocents, or Alejandro Amenábar's The Others. Rebecca Hall plays Florence Cathcart, a campaigning rationalist and hoax-buster in 1919, exposing phoney spiritualists who prey on credulous souls tormented with postwar grief. Then schoolmaster Robert Mallory (Dominic West) asks her to investigate a tragic case at his boarding school: a sickly boy has reportedly died of fright at seeing a ghostly child with a "twisted face". Florence accepts, suspecting some deception, or group hysteria. But naturally things are not as clear as that. I have to say I found the final, colossal revelation to be contrived, but there are some nicely creepy moments, and director and co-writer Nick Murphy interestingly dramatises some of the neuroses feeding the appetite for ghostly phenomena – repressed sexuality, guilt and self-harm.