[Film Review] The Banishing (2020)

The true horror of a haunted house is the unknown – the trauma that has seeped into the very foundation of an immovable object.

The mystery comes from the souls that have been buried within the walls of the house, those apparitions whose nails scratch at the wood and whose eyes peer out from affixed mirrors. Dread settles into the pit of the stomach upon the realization that it isn’t just the house that is possessed, but every person who resides therein – that is good horror.

Director Christopher Smith (Severance, Triangle) has attempted to capture this aesthetic with his gothic ghost story, 2020’s The Banishing. Set in the late 1930s, The Banishing centers around what is said to be the most haunted house in England. 

Three years after a horrific murder-suicide in a gorgeous, sprawling mansion, Marianne (Jessica Brown Findlay, Downton Abby) and daughter Adelaide join Marianne’s new husband Reverend Linus (John Heffernan) in the infamous house after he has accepted a position as the town’s vicar. In classic haunting fashion, Adelaide quickly begins acting strange, talking to the horribly creepy dolls she found in an old armoire and claiming to hear voices in the walls. 

It is clear early on that Linus and Marianne’s relationship suffers from a lack of intimacy. It almost feels like it is an arranged marriage, but in an uncustomary twist, it is he who refuses her sexual advances and not the other way around. The house seems to feed on Linus’s shame and suspicion, and the film offers a classic look at the religiously fuelled belief that women are the root of all evil and can’t be trusted. 

As the story unfolds, it dives deeper into the dark influence of the church, including the presence of a nefarious Bishop who seems to have his hands in everything occurring in the house, and a sometimes too informed occultist, Harry Price (the incredible Sean Harris, Possum). 

The performances that Smith gets out of Brown Findlay and Sean Harris are truly spectacular. Brown Findlay’s Marianne is both resilient and vulnerable as a woman hiding a troubling secret, and Sean Harris’s unhinged Price is an endearing mess as the pagan with an affinity for liquor and a target on his back. 

The Banishing is at one point a dark gothic ghost mystery, at another point a time-bending torture chamber of secrets, but it never really melds into one cohesive narrative. Smith sets the film in the early days of the rise of Nazi Germany and adds a Nazi subplot that leaves more questions than answers and ultimately doesn’t pay off. Within the house, there are almost too many battling tropes – alternate timelines, doppelgangers, ghosts, dolls, haunted mirrors with reflections that remain, torture chambers, deadly cloaked monks, hallucinations, water glasses that move on their own– if this reads too long a list it is even more overwhelming on screen.

The overarching feeling after watching this film is that there was simply too much going on, and this could be due to the fact that there appears to be three writers credited on the screenplay. The Banishing is an incredibly interesting story that addresses shame, the rise of fascism, and the dangers of religious fervour, but gets lost in its overindulgence in horror set pieces and, quite simply, ideas. If the filmmaker had stripped the story down to its bare elements and chose a clear tonal direction, this would have been a truly terrifying film. Instead it feels like it falls just short of greatness. 

The Banishing has been released in Cinemas and On Demand on March 26th 2021.

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