Incident In A Ghostland AKA Ghostland (2018)

Although it often feels like a step up from his previous feature film (The Tall Man), Incident In A Ghostland once again shows that writer-director Pascal Laugier is a man who knows how to take some great ideas and squander them for the sake of some misguided attempts to wrongfoot viewers.

It's not long into Incident In A Ghostland when things get uncomfortable and nasty. A woman (Mylene Farmer) and her two daughters (Emilia Jones and Taylor Hickson) find themselves terrorised by a pair of vicious home invaders. As things build up, temporary relief from the onslaught comes when an adult incarnation of one of the girls (Crystal Reed) wakes up from a nightmare. She has suffered ever since that fateful night but at least it is all now behind her . . . or is the past about to catch up with her?

Jones/Reed and Hickson/Anastasia Phillips are both very good as, respectively, the younger and older incarnations of Beth and Vera, with the younger actresses having to put themselves through the wringer as their characters suffer through more and more violence. Farmer is also very good as the loving mother who wants to protect her daughters from harm, and both Rob Archer and Kevin Power do as well as can be expected while pigeonholed as the one-note psychos.

It's interesting that this movie begins with a quote about H. P. Lovecraft, for two reasons. First of all, the quote is one of the few moments of humour in the film. It's attributed to the main character played by Jones/Reed, summing up her literary aspirations and her main obsession. Second, it is in his fine essay, "Supernatural Horror In Literature", that I learned of the term conte cruel, a style of storytelling "in which the wrenching of the emotions is accomplished through dramatic tantalisations, frustrations, and gruesome physical horrors." Sound familiar? It's certainly something that Laugier is known for, with others giving it the modern label of torture porn.

Sadly, despite the humour and self-awareness shown by that opening quote, this is a movie that shows Laugier to be uninterested in anything other than pain and suffering, which becomes tiresome rather quickly, especially after scenes that hint at a much better tale to be told. We could have had a very smart and resonant film here. Early scenes show Reed being helpless, and even disbelieving, as her sister continues to suffer and be abused by unseen assailants. There are two possibilities in those moments, considering what we know at the time. Either an abuse survivor is so damaged by her experience that she cannot return to any state of normality, or someone is still being abused while the loved ones around her are unable to see it. Both of those ideas are intriguing, and both are immediately dropped as soon as Laugier can get back to simplistic moments of abuse and torture.

The film manages to avoid being a complete waste of time thanks to the scream-filled performances of the main actresses, some great production design, and the first 15-20 minutes. But everything else ensures that it also manages to be a crushing disappointment, especially if you were hoping for something with a bit of depth to it. Which actually puts it right on par with his previous feature.

4/10

You can buy the movie here.
Americans can buy it here.