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Quiet and understated but very effective, this is a genuinely creepy horror movie.
The story concerns four old men, who have lived their entire lives in a small, almost permanently snowbound American town. They're played by legendary movie veterans Melvyn Douglas, Fred Astaire, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (it was the last film for all three of them) and John Houseman (who despite being in his sixties had only started acting several years earlier, making him a relative newcomer). Fifty years earlier, when they were young, proud and arrogant, they'd befriended a free-spirited and independently wealthy heiress named Eva Galli (played by South African actress Alice Krige) who was spending the summer in the town. However, after drunkenly inviting themselves to her house late one night, they accidentally killed her, then panicked and dumped her body in a lake.
In the five decades since, all four have been riddled with guilt, their sleep constantly interrupted by vivid dreams in which Eva's death is endlessly repeated. Their lives also effectively ended that night: one of them was a high-flying medical student who planned to become a surgeon, while another had political ambitions and hoped to eventually run for senator and perhaps even president. But the two of them achieved no more than respectively becoming the local G.P. and the town's mayor. All four men are trapped in the town by their own consciences, unable to leave the scene of the crime.
And then, half a century after she died, Eva Galli returns...
The most chilling part of the movie that Eva has waited fifty years before seeking her revenge. Her killers have grown old and frail, and are already close to death themselves. They've had long, miserable, wasted lives, and the only possible single luxury they have left is dying peacefully in their beds. But Eva is going to make sure they don't even get that...
Despite fine performances from her elderly co-stars, it's Krige who steals the film as the vengeful spectre. Although highly talented and breathtakingly beautiful, Krige never subsequently had the career she deserved. There's an undefinable otherworldly quality about her, and therefore Hollywood never quite knew what to do with her. She's kept working, but unsurprisingly her best known roles have been in other fantasy projects - Sleepwalkers, the Silent Hill movie, and playing the Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact, the final feature length episode of Star Trek: Voyager, and several Star Trek computer games.
Ghost Story is mostly forgotten now, but was a strong influence on films such as What Lies Beneath (2000) and practically the entire wave of J-Horror movies. The female phantoms of The Ring, The Grudge and their various sequels, remakes and imitators, all owe a debt to Eva Galli.
score 8/10
misbegotten 28 September 2008
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1952704/ |
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1-4-2020 12:05:08