Ghost Game
Jill Gevargizian’s follow-up to The Stylist opens in found footage style – as masked pranksters Laura (Kia Dorsey and Adrian (Sam Lukowski) take a creepy hobby too far … as players of the ‘ghost game’, a craze apparently invented by guru ‘Mr Watley’, they play ‘hider in the house’ in inhabited homes, convincing the residents that the places are haunted. Then, the film pulls back to show Vin (Zaen Haidar) – Laura’s just-moved-in boyfriend – finding this footage on her laptop and learning about her morally dubious, obviously high-risk passion project. Oh, and that Adrian guy shows up and is a short-fused asshole to boot, which makes the notion of playing the ghost game in a house which has an Amityville-style history of familicide an obvious no-no. But that’s not how it pans out, and Vin talks himself into going along to keep things on an even keel in Halton House.
Before the ‘ghosts’ are even settled in, fixing cameras and squirrelling into hidey-holes, the new owner arrives – Pete (Michael C. Williams), a burnout writer who once involved his previous family in a UFO hoax and has now not told his wife (Emily Bennett) that they’re moving into a haunted house so he can write a paranormal best-seller. Just about the only uncompromised member of the household is Sam (Vienna Maas), Pete’s autistic stepdaughter, who is the only one capable of noticing some odd circumstances without throwing blame at innocent parties.
With ghosts and normals at odds, spooky stuff starts happening without anyone apparently being behind it? Is Pete faking a haunting? Are there real ghosts? Is someone pranking the pranksters? Ghost Game gets past the fact that almost all its characters are the sort of people you’d work hard to avoid in real life by making their interactions convincing – Vin’s failure to be the moral compass he hopes to be for Laura is extremely believable – and their situation weird and desperate enough to be involving. Like the thematically-similar Let’s Scare Julie, it taps into the era of the ‘internet challenge’ as young people drift into ill-thought-through, casually cruel stunts without even being evil – only to find that this sort of situation always bites back. Its third act ramps up the peril and suspense to great effect. For a low-budget genre film, it has unusually good performances.