Ben is an astrophysicist who falls in love with a medium and builds a quantum camera, theoretically capable of immortalizing ghosts … only he has never found any. Years after being ridiculed by the scientific community for his invention, he has changed jobs: now a tour guide in New Orleans, but is depressed and alcoholic. Meanwhile Gabbie and his son Travis move into a haunted mansion not far from the city and ghosts prevent him from leaving. So they ask for help from a priest, who contacts Ben, but things take a turn for the worse and the four will also have to contact a medium and a scholar of local history. Will they be able to break the curse of the house before it’s too late?
A fine group of stars goes the extra mile to make a film with uninspired writing likable. A handful of beautiful visual gimmicks are not enough to make up for the paucity of jokes, really suitable for an audience of children only.
After all, it was a declared intent, given that the previous script for the project, signed by Guillermo Del Toro about a decade ago, had been rejected because it was aimed at a PG-13 audience: Disney then preferred to change direction. Thus Rosario Dawson, Lekeith Stanfield, Owen Wilson, Tiffany Haddish, Danny De Vito and also Jaime Lee Curtis, Jared Leto and in a cameo also Winona Ryder, face the challenge of conquering the little ones and playing around smiling. But they will be the only adults to do so, because apart from some over the top costumes and the always funny and eccentric Danny De Vito, adults have no reason to be happy. In fact, didacticism reigns, to explain all the passages well, with the effect of dampening the rhythm and above all of neutralizing the surprises and the mystery, which instead should be the salt of a film like this.
So much so that one regrets not being in the parts of Scooby Doo, where at least the ingenuity would have been called upon to explain the supernatural presences, instead here the ghosts must be taken literally. After all, it is the film adaptation of a Disneyland attraction opened in 1969. This version for the big screen is faithful to the look of some ghosts (the one with the hatbox and the bride with the hatchet for example, but also Madame Liota reduced with a single floating head), but the precision of these references will not have great success in Europe: at Disneyworld Paris the Haunted House does not exist and in its place there is a variant with several differences entitled Phantom Manor.
Among the most surprising things in Justin Simien’s film is the name of the main villain: Crump, which could be taken as a reference to the former president of the United States. But of course Disney didn’t try to insert completely off-target political satire and the reason for the surname is another: it is a tribute to one of the creators of the attraction, Rolly Crump. In fact, his associate Yale Gracey is also paid tribute in a similar way, using his surname to baptize one of the most important ghosts.