Poltergeist *** (2015, Sam Rockwell, Rosemarie DeWitt, Kennedi Clements, Jared Harris) – Movie Review

Director Gil Kenan reboots, reimagines and brings up to date Steven Spielberg’s 1982 classic tale about a family whose new suburban home is invaded by angry spirits. It’s a sign of the times that in 1982 the family were wealthy, but here they are cash-troubled, with the dad unemployed and the would-be writer mom too stressed out to write by looking after her three kids.

There are several jokes about their new suburban Illinois home not being built in a good neighbourhood. It turns out to be a lot worse than anyone expected!

It doesn’t take too long for the terrifying apparitions to make their evil presence known and then to escalate their attacks and spirit off the family’s younger daughter Maddie (Kennedi Clements) – ‘they’re here!’

Who ya gonna call? Instead of calling the police, her parents (Sam Rockwell, Rosemarie DeWitt) call in ghostbuster Brooke Powell (Jane Adams), her geeky helper Boyd (Nicholas Braun) and her old lover and TV star, the gifted medium Carrigan Burke (Jared Harris), to try to rescue Maddie from the ghosts.

[Spoiler alert] They turn out to be the souls of the dead, whose burial place was desecrated by builders who made the new housing development just removing the headstones but not the bodies beneath.

Rockwell and DeWitt are excellent actors and do well with their roles, helping to establish a ‘real’ atmosphere and a ‘real’ credible family situation, and Clements, Kyle Catlett and Saxon Sharbino are good as the kids too. It helps a lot that David Lindsay-Abaire provides some very decent dialogue in his capable screenplay.

Wonderful little Zelda Rubinstein and her role as the medium called Tangina Barrons are much missed of course, but otherwise this reboot works very well, with its mix of low-key but amusing humour and low-key but creepy horror. The production is quite contained too, with most of the movie on the one house set, and an effort to keep the effects old-fashioned in feel, not relying too heavily on a CGI bonanza. That all pays off nicely.

Harris is excellent, but could have had more to do, and the climax is slightly fumbled, but only a little. The movie’s quite a lot of fun, and won’t let down fans of the genre or even of the old Poltergeist movie. Pretty much a success, then, ending up above expectations.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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