Three Films Make A Post: It'll never let you go

1917 (2019): As a technical feat, and an example of visually extremely beautiful filmmaking this war movie taking place in World War I, shot in two long shots, is an incredible achievement, deserving all the copycats of its tech that’ll surely follow. It’s a film I found myself appreciating on the level of craft a great deal. However, I believe it is exactly this focus – I’m tempted to say fixation - on the technical that makes the film lose emotional impact for me, the humanity it is trying to speak of buried under layers of prettiness and technical chops until it can hardly move. No character in the film has an actual personality, but then, director Sam Mendes’s structural decisions make personalities pretty unimportant, what with no interaction between characters ever having any impact later on in the movie; a swelling score alone is not enough to make me care. Philosophically, we do learn that war is indeed hell, but the why and the how seem to interest Mendes as little as treating his characters as anything beyond ciphers with suffering facial expressions.

Shelter Island (2003): Despite a couple of pleasantly weird details – the film’s protagonist played by Ally Sheedy is a pro golfer turned motivational speaker for example – Geoffrey Schaaf’s thriller about the plot a million late night TV thrillers followed in the decade before, is about as bland as they come. Not clever enough to do anything interesting with the slight variations in its set-up, not sleazy enough to tickle the exploitation bone, and as obvious as “twisty” thrillers come, this one’s about as interesting as watching a middle-aged guy fall asleep watching it. It’s pretty short, though.

The Man with the Magic Box aka Czlowiek z magicznym pudelkiem (2017): But let’s end this on a high note, with this weird (in all the best ways) Polish movie by Bodo Kox concerning a dystopian society that feels like a culturally Polish variation of the kind of society Terry Gilliam would be into making a movie about, psychic time travel, and love across class divides. It’s full of brilliant little ideas realized with the kind of verve that’s usually the result of a fecund imagination coming to life, driven by a weirdness that has its own internal logic, and shows a view of life that’s like an Eastern European shrug that can hardly disguise an honest romanticism.


It’s also really beautiful to look at, Kox turning found locations into organic parts of a strange near future (and the strange land known as the past), while leads Olga Boladz and Piotr Polak breathe human life into characters other films would treat as abstract ideas.

The Haunting of Seacliff Inn (1994)

Yuppie couple Susan (Ally Sheedy) and Mark Enright (William R. Moses) are giving up on the big city lifestyle to open up an inn – really a bed and breakfast place – in a small California coast town. It’s an attempt to get their marriage back on track after Mark cheated on Susan, which sounds like a bad plan to me, but what do I know?

When the Enrights have already decided on a house to buy for their genius plan, Susan takes one look at a different place and feels at once drawn to it, as if it were calling to her. Too bad the house already belongs to a nice, elderly lady who doesn’t want to sell. But what do you know? She conveniently dies the day after the Enrights visited her, so it looks as if the Enrights can go about building their dream inn in Susan’s dream house.

However, something’s certainly not right with the house: Susan has strange visions, feelings and dreams; curious accidents happen; a rather mysterious stranger (Lucinda Weist) appears and disappears as their first guest and seems rather interested in seducing Mark; and a black dog that certainly doesn’t act normal threatens. Why, you might think the house is haunted and has some sinister interest in pushing the couple into repeating a dreadful sin of the past!

If you’re going into Walter Klenhard’s TV movie The Haunting of Seacliff Inn expecting a standard horror film, you’ll probably be disappointed by its rather mild nature. This is more in the tradition of the second coming of the Gothic Romance that mostly happened in paperbacks – predominantly marketed to women – during the 70s and later, and filtered through the filter of a TV channel that certainly was rather more tame than HBO.

However, there is of course nothing wrong at all with the ghost story tradition this film belongs to, and while I generally prefer my ghost stories a bit nastier, and their ghosts rather more unpleasant to look at, I did enjoy my time with the film quite a bit. Klenhard (also working as a co-writer) certainly makes the most out of pleasantly shuddery shots of the coast line set to Shirley Walker’s romantically sumptuous score (which – as is typical of Walker’s TV scores as far as I know them – doesn’t sound much like a typical TV score at all), and while he’s never going all out on the horror, the ghostly attacks and visions are generally creepy and never feel harmless. I’m also very fond of the film’s use of a black dog which adds a folkloric edge to the film, giving it a pleasant resonance with quite a bit of British supernatural lore concerning these creatures.

Klenhard handles the Enrights’ marriage troubles very well, too, adding an appropriate dramatic punch to scenes that often feel very much like a real couple fighting – which means they often transfer the core problems of their relationship onto some minor crap, so they can become bitter about things of little to no import instead of facing their actual troubles. And as any fool knows, ghosts really like to wallow in this sort of thing, particularly the evil ones with their tendency to see the smallest parallel between their lives and those of the living as an invitation to cause bad history to repeat itself.


As a whole, The Haunting of Seacliff Inn is a well made and effective example of a type of ghost story one doesn’t encounter too often on screen (large or small); one of those films that knows exactly what it is and wants to be, and then proceeds to be just that.