‘He’s a charlatan, a storyteller, he’s dangerous…’
Well… this is it. We’ve found it, dear reader. We have found the most generic haunted house movie ever made. I mean, look at the title. The Banishing. It’s as mundane as they come. And this really is a shame. Horror streaming service Shudder have put out some decent films in recent years (Host, Random Acts of Violence and The Mortuary Collection to name but three) and British director Christopher Smith comes with good pedigree after directing the London Underground based horror Creep and the suitably weird open water fable Triangle. And yet, all of these exciting elements come together to form something very dull indeed…
When fallen woman Marianne (Jessica Brown Findlay) and her illegitimate child Adelaide (Anya McKenna-Bruce) move in with patriarch of the family Reverend Linus (John Heffernan) things quickly degenerate into all kinds of ghostly and supernatural goings on. And boy, have we seen all this shit before. Haunted mirrors. A gothic mansion with a dark history. Hooded figures. Creatures in the basement. Vengeful spirits. Sean Harris running around the place sporting a ridiculous ginger hair piece. OK, maybe not the last one but the rest of this stuff is old hat. It’s one of those massive hats old Abe Lincoln used to wear. That’s how old hat it is.
And this is a shame, because Smith is capable of producing some genuinely creepy visuals, and the cast are also mostly excellent throughout. Brown Findlay and particularly Heffernan do the absolute best with the tosh they have been given, but no amount of excellent acting can save a tedious script, and that’s certainly what we have here.
The Banishing is unoriginal, unexciting and uninspired. One of the most forgettable films I’ve ever seen. What is? You see, I already can’t remember it.