- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
38The Awakening looks great but never develops a plot with enough clarity to engage us, and the solution to the mystery is I am afraid disappointingly standard.
-
67Not to be confused with a dramatization of Kate Chopin's great 1899 proto-feminist novel, this by-the-numbers British ghost story, set just after WWI, devotes a lot of energy to set decoration.
-
50Most of the supernatural sightings are flickers at the corners of the screen, so that at certain moments watching the movie feels like taking an eye exam. You see it, then you don't. But the film is not especially scary, and even its boo! moments lack a visceral shock.
-
50The handsome production design notwithstanding, The Awakening is not an elegant thriller. It's more like solemn drivel.
-
40This stately chiller owes a lot to 1960s British flicks like "The Innocents" and "The Haunting," but unfortunately heads towards cliches with every step.
-
50Though handsome to look at, so-so supernatural chiller The Awakening recalls "The Others," "The Orphanage" and other haunted-house tales of recent vintage, making an impression more derivative than memorable.
-
60This handsomely made spook story (love those echo-prone hallways!) becomes less involving the more the narrative's mysteries are solved. By the time all the tarot cards are on the table, it's likely that you too will feel conned.
-
60There is nothing in the film that will keep you awake at night. Instead, The Awakening works much more subtly, with a profound sense of dread and resignation, a death-obsessed movie given life by Hall's performance.
-
58As ghost stories go, this one's done just well enough to provide reminders of how it has been done better.
-
60Hall's committed performance validates even the maddest developments, and she slips into the period well, recalling Virginia Woolf in her lank, swan-necked bearing and tremulous suffering.
-
70A too-rare instance in which a gifted young actor signs on for a fright flick without coming away tainted, The Awakening places Rebecca Hall in a convincing historical setting and gives her more to do than widen her eyes in fear.
-
60There are some nicely creepy moments, and director and co-writer Nick Murphy interestingly dramatises some of the neuroses feeding the appetite for ghostly phenomena – repressed sexuality, guilt and self-harm.
-
40Solid production values lend a polish to the spooks and there are strong performances all round, especially from the ever-excellent Rebecca Hall, but there's little here to add to the well-worn haunted house genre.
-
70The film benefits enormously from having the luminous Rebecca Hall as its lead. It also gains an ominous gravity from the haunted, wounded and wobbly England in which it's set.
-
75Has more than its share of flaws, but it also gets its balance of tones right, proving spooky, involving and occasionally resonant, while still managing to bring something new to a well-worn tale, and providing a terrific lead part for one of the most promising actresses of her generation.
-
Aug 18, 201270The Awakening has the good sense to find a mood and stick with it. It's not afraid to take itself seriously. It'll send shivers up your spine, both as a thriller and as the melodrama it eventually becomes.
-
Aug 17, 201275The self-possessed Hall is well-suited to this proto-feminist role, smoking and rolling her eyes as the pasty old men around her exclaim, for what is clearly the millionth time, "An educated woman!" as if she were a zoo animal.
-
Aug 16, 201250There is a rich movie to be made about this culture of fake seers and gullible marks, but it isn't The Awakening, a dull British import that never lives up to the pretensions of its period setting.
-
Aug 16, 201238The Awakening is nonsense, but with its posh British cast and colors drained to near-gray, it's very solemn nonsense.
-
Aug 16, 201250Perhaps this is a film that needs to be seen several times to fully understand the last 20 minutes. But in my book, that's not what a great ghost story should do.
-
Aug 16, 201250The Awakening just meanders like an aimless ghost.
-
Aug 15, 201267The Awakening is both a ghost story and an exploration of mourning and survivor's guilt, though a late twist turns the film away from its delicate merging of these two themes into something both more plotty and stilted.
-
Aug 15, 201225The film takes pains to ensure that the story feel like laborious toil rather than a trip through the dark side of the ethereal.
-
Aug 6, 201260Creepy, jumpy, if somewhat samey, it's set above the spooker norm by its strong visuals, grief-steeped period setting and lingering ambiguity.