The Spiritualist (2018) Reviews

• A solid premise executed very badly.

  andywilson-178342016-12-05

  I applaud Carl Medland for investing time and effort into one of my favourite genres, but The Spiritualist is just too badly acted and poorly fleshed out to be anything but a thoroughly frustrating 100 minutes. The Good - The setting is beautiful (though far too grand for a normal middle class family to inhabit without explanation). The camera-work is proficient and the lighting and soundtrack both create the right atmosphere. I mention these basics because they're often woeful in low budget horror films of this kind. The Bad - Quite simply, the acting is awful. Sometimes great actors make up for a lack of budget, but here the cast utterly destroys what could have been a decent film. Julie Wallace (The Mother) does fairly well despite being hamstrung by her binary, hokey dialogue. The rest of the cast is instantly forgettable. Drama school performances from an immature and over-matched group of young actors. I couldn't wait for them to be gruesomely murdered just so they'd go away. The exception is Caroline Burns Cooke (the titular Spiritualist) who delivers a performance so laughably poor that you hope it was some kind of bet. She flip-flops from mystic aloofness to annoying chattiness at random. In the big crucial 'scary' seance scene, she clearly fluffs her timing but rather than go again and waste a four minute shot, the Director must have said "screw it, that'll do, it's the best she's done all day". She either didn't understand the character she was playing, or she just didn't have the ability. The role of the wily old spiritualist / psychic / exorcist sets the tone for the scariest parts of films like this and it must be delivered well or the film falls flat. The Spiritualist is a functional movie with a manageable plot and for that it deserves a small amount of credit. It won't get a lot of reviews, so each one counts towards it's rating. Amazingly, the first was a 9/10. The Author is either linked to the film, or this is the only horror film he has ever seen. 9/10 for this thing is completely indefensible. Save yourself 100 minutes because this isn't worth it.

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• unbearable

  attorneyandrewjohnson2016-11-18

  Please read this review before committing your valuable time to this failure of a movie. The only conclusion I can draw is the positive reviews (some of which are absolutely *glowinug*) are "canned" reviews by people in the movie. My wife and I sat down to watch this, with fairly high hopes, and as time passed......and we watched our lives cut shorter and shorter with each passing second wasted on this dog of a movie, we became very frustrated. There isn't even a cogent story line to follow. What's it about? Shouldn't you have a general idea within the first 20 minutes of the movie? But you don't. The scenery is interesting. It was shot in an old house. If you need to see pics of an old house, go to Pinterest and search for Old House. 5 minutes and you are done. But as for the movie, it's a turd.

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• Never Ending

  momoruluke2018-04-10

  This is the British Blair Witch Project with steadier cameras. Endless, plotless bleh that makes no sense.

• I don't have a brother

  nogodnomasters2017-09-07

  Jake (Judson Vaughan) a gifted attorney and Laura (Jasmyn Banks) live in the home of her deceased parents. Her mother (Julie T. Wallace) was diagnosed with Marfan Syndrome, which is genetic. Laura has visions and believes the house to be haunted by her mother. What better thing to do than to invite a few friends over with a blind spiritualist (Caroline Burns Cooke) and have a seance? The seance is when the film picks up and unfortunately it was half over by then. Events happen in rapid succession after that with the audience only seeing half of what is happening. Things are then revealed quickly, not allowing the audience to fully digest it before giving them something else. The twist has been done before. I thought the script clever, the clues are in meaningless lines that would take a second viewing. The film was funded from a web site offering incentives for cash donations (free DVD, honorable mention, etc.) I don't feel most of the audience appreciates writer/director Carl Medland's efforts in this feature and wasn't until I started remembering things in the film that I appreciated it. Carl Medland's other film "The Cost of Love" deals with a homosexual and for some reason he felt he needed to have a homosexual couple in this film. Guide: F-word. Near sex. No nudity.

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• Tremendous waste of time

  richmanc732018-09-30

  The story was good. It has potential. The acting just so bad. The only one I give any props to is Caroline Burns Cooke, the spiritualist. The sound was so bad at times I couldn't hear the dialog. Then it was so loud it was over whelming. The set was gorgeous. The estate was beautiful.