Despite its bland, unimaginative title, I found this a taut, well-wrought ghost film. At times, the plotting reminded me of earlier genre-classics like "The Shining", "The Others" and especially "The Innocents", the latter based on Henry James's definitive "The Turn Of The Screw", all being concerned with the precarious psychological condition of the main character and of course of unhappy spirits from the past returning to impact on the present.
The present here, though, is immediately post-war England, and the tragedy and tension of those times, with the themes of the loss of what Seigfreid Sassoon called doomed youth, the psychological (and physical) scars on those that survived the Great War while their friends perished (personified here in the character of Mallory) as well as the enmity between those that fought and those that didn't (the latter portrayed in the character of Judd, the school caretaker), loom large in the character studies presented here.
At its heart however is the complex character Florence, a vintage if very young, "ghost- buster" if you will, herself bearing guilt over her part in the loss of her own soldier sweetheart, eventually takes on, at Mallory's beseeching, a new case, involving the unexplained death of a young boy pupil at a remote boarding school, supposedly haunted by an earlier pupil from years before.
The story takes many twists and turns with some scares and jumps along the way, revealing its major twist effectively and by the end just about explains its complexities although I'm sure there are still some strands I'm not quite connecting in the summing up.
The period is evoked excellently, the cold, austere boarding school in particular and the acting too is very good by all especially Imelda Taunton as the the school matron whose importance to the story becomes clearer as it progresses and particularly Rebecca Hall as the central character of Florence, her haunted eyes and blank expression well conveying the fragility of her character beneath her initially super-confident Holmes-ian demeanour.
If I have a criticism, it is that the Florence character is probably too overloaded with her various neuroses plus a lot happens to her in the narrative, but as in the end, it turns out to be all about her anyway, maybe I should grant the director and writer a little more licence.
Anyway, more psychologically thrilling than downright scary, this was my type of ghost film, just right for a late night viewing.
