fling93 loves fishies

Cinequest: Spectres Review

Well, the curiosity got the better of me and I saw Spectres today, and well… I didn’t particularly like this film nearly as much as Ealasaid did.

Kelly is a depressed teenager whose father has passed away and whose mother (Marina Sirtis of Star Trek: The Next Generation) is too immersed in her career to connect to her. After her mother misses yet another dinner date, Kelly slits her wrists in the bathtub. This being a ghost story, and having seen ghost stories with twists such as Sixth Sense and The Hours, my initial reaction was to wonder whether she succeeded in the suicide and was a ghost (yes, she could interact with her mom, but I figured maybe they were just both ghosts and they had merely not yet revealed the mother’s suicide). Well, yes, it turned out I was over thinking this, and Kelly did survive, but needless to say, the film didn’t do a good job squashing those possibilities early on.

Instead, the film is much more conventional, as Kelly and her mother move to a vacation home where they encounter ghosts. Lauren Birkell delivers a very good performance in her first lead role as Kelly, and so you are quickly won over and interested in seeing her life unfold. Also, the mother-daughter relationship is done pretty realistically, although sometimes the interchanges seem a bit too typical, especially given Kelly’s suicide attempt. I’d have expected the mother to be walking on eggshells a little more and less apt to be working so much.

I also liked that there wasn’t a protracted section where all the adults disbelieve what Kelly sees. The ghosts reveal themselves to everybody pretty early on. Of course, the reasons for this are never made clear, and the screenplay goes downhill from there. The story loses focus as Kelly goes on a mission to help an orphaned child, (C.J., played by Alexander Agate), and Kelly’s therapist (played by Dean Haglund of The X-Files) contacts a psychic (Tucker Smallwood) to help address the ghosts issue. The whole mother-daughter relationship seems to take a back seat to these two developments.

The helping C.J. storyline is way too easily accomplished. After a few cute but suspenseless hijinks, a short web-searching scene (apparently on a computer with the fastest Internet connection in the world) pretty much settles the matter. And the interest level just isn’t there. C.J. just isn’t given enough screentime to win the audience’s sympathies. It mostly feels like a distraction. And the audience isn’t really sure what to be rooting for in the ghost story, since it isn’t clear what the ghosts’ intentions are, and the psychic’s solution is terribly undramatic. And the mother-daughter relationship is too generic to really hold your interest (especially since I got the impression pretty early on that everything was going to work out in the end and never really felt too much suspense). So at this point, the movie began to really drag.

It was also hurt tremendously by Tucker Smallwood’s performance as the psychic. He absolutely chewed up the scenery to pieces. I thought Sirtis and Haglund were okay, but not great. I was rather surprised that Sirtis pretty much used a lighter version of her Deanna Troi accent (in real life, she has a heavy British accent — but I suppose the Troi “accent” is really just Sirtis over-enunciating just because she wouldn’t be understandable otherwise). It was also distracting that Sirtis said the word “counselor” several times and that the psychic was named Will (which was what Troi called Riker). Haglund hits a few authentic notes in the therapy sessions, but in the end tried a bit too hard. Smallwood was just dreadfully over-the-top. I rolled my eyes every time he was on screen.

And the main plot twist, when it finally comes, causes huge structural problems for the film, essentially rendering the mother-daughter relationship developments effectively meaningless and also making me completely not care about the daughter’s fate in the climactic scene (which felt tacked on and had a few unintentionally comic moments anyway). And it was a rather predictable twist, to boot. After the film, the writer mentioned that his initial idea was for a scary ghost story, and it later changed to be more about the mother-daughter relationship. Well, it seemed to me like he came up with the twist as the initial idea, and was unwilling to get rid of it as his screenplay grew away from it.

The direction was nothing special. The film appeared to be shot with a steadicam but was trying very hard to make the camera movements as smooth as possible to cover up that fact, which was also distracting to me but probably won’t bother anybody else. There were several awkwardly abrupt cuts, like when Kelly and her mom are walking to see the therapist for the first time and it cuts a bit too quickly to an interior shot. Much of the film involves dialogue, and so had a bit of a television feel, especially given the use of the ultra-clear high definition film. But on the whole, the look of the film was good, with effective uses of lighting and color.

But of course, these were not nearly enough to save the film, which is ultimately hampered by having too many storylines that are all too quickly, easily, and neatly resolved. It’s not showing again at Cinequest (it wasn’t until after I’d written much of the review already that I realized that), but don’t worry, you’re not missing much. More info on the film is available here.

Overall rating: 4 out of 10 cute smiley fishies.