As recently as the 2010s, a substantial percentage of children's entertainment was designed to give the kids a scare. The Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride, Coraline, Monster House, and numerous other PG horror films earned fond recollections. Haunted Mansion chickens out on its charge by delivering a slapstick comedy with a few moderately spooky CGI effects. It'll be a hit with the type of seven-year-old who wishes every night was Halloween and a mild distraction for their parents.
Director Justin Simien exploded onto the scene with his 2014 satire Dear White People. His 2020 horror film Bad Hair felt cut from the same cloth with a healthy dollop of Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist. He was hired to bring Haunted Mansion back from development hell after the much more promising iteration written and directed by Guillermo del Toro tragically folded. Simien is simultaneously a strange choice for the material and uniquely responsible for its best aspects.
An hour north of New Orleans, the self-proclaimed most haunted city in the world, sits an abandoned estate with a new owner. Single mom Gabbie and her socially-inept son Travis move into the Gracie Manor after an ill-advised Zillow purchase. Her dreams of converting the mansion into a cozy bed and breakfast are shattered as she discovers an army of restless spirits wandering the halls. Gabbie wisely packs up her things and heads for the hills, but the ghosts follow her no matter how far she runs. Gabbie hires an eccentric priest who reaches out to a hard-living expert in the field. As soon as they enter the titular château, they are trapped as well.
LaKeith Stanfield is the film's central character, a shockingly deep and textured figure in a story otherwise packed with live-action cartoons. The opening scene depicts Ben Matthias meeting the love of his life in a crowded New Orleans bar. He's a celebrated astrophysicist. She's a ghost tour guide. Ben has lived his whole life in a career he's both passionate about and excellent in. He finds Alyssa, and its love at first sight. She's the jigsaw piece that completes him. He's never the same man again. Then, after years of imperfect but beautiful companionship, she dies in a freak accident. Ben is destroyed. There's a scene near the end of the second act in which someone asks Ben what Alyssa was like. Ben chokes through tears describing completely banal traits and events in their day-to-day life together. Stanfield's performance does a lot of the heavy lifting, but the scant moments that delve into his character reveal a world of untapped potential.
Ben's central motivation leads into Haunted Mansion's other surprising aspect, its message. The film does nothing to hide its moral, but its lesson is refreshingly rare and well-handled. The film is about grief. It's about carrying the remnants of someone after they leave the living. This subtext becomes text when the villain uses dead relatives to trick his victims. Moving on isn't just the advice every character offers. It's the only way to defeat the antagonist. Children's entertainment rarely deals with death. Sure, every Disney character loses a parent or two, but they don't mourn. They don't gradually learn to accept a world without their loved ones. They don't confront the struggle of waking up every day and continually choosing to live the life they would've wanted. Haunted Mansion boldly tackles those topics and handles them with some impressive maturity.
Haunted Mansion isn't just the story of Ben Matthias, a grieving widower. It's mostly a comedy. These human elements feel wildly out of place next to Danny DeVito's cant-miss physical comedy or Tiffany Haddish's hilarious line delivery. Some of the jokes are funny, but most will fall flat with audience members over ten years of age. It's a mixed bag. Every viewer will have a different experience. The horror is much more consistent. This film will not scare anyone save perhaps the most squeamish of children. The scares and the jokes are the most important elements of the film, but they both fall flat far more often than they soar. The final scenes are especially embarrassing, devolving into ghost-themed superhero antics. Focus found its way into strange corners of the Haunted Mansion. Most viewers will find something to enjoy, but almost no one will walk away satisfied.
From its ensemble cast to its shaky writing, Haunted Mansion is a confusing film. It wouldn't stick in the memory for more than an hour without its best elements, but those aspects barely take up a fifth of the runtime. It's a hard project to recommend. Guillermo del Toro's take on the material could've been transgressive and unique in a way that would've justified its existence. Haunted Mansion feels like a film made by a director desperately trying to slip some life into its ghost-filled expanse. The limited target audience for Haunted Mansion will be just fine waiting for it to drop onto Disney Plus.
Haunted Mansion
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- Release Date
- July 28, 2023
Based on the Disney theme park ride of the same name, Haunted Mansion is a supernatural comedy that shares no elements with the prior films. Rosario Dawson stars as Gabbie, a single mother with a son looking to start over and happens upon a mansion that seems too good to be true in New Orleans - and her hunch proves correct. To resolve her ghostly problem, Gabbie seeks the help of a priest and a widowed paranormal expert, a psychic, and a historian to hopefully rid her home of unwanted guests.