Brooklyn 45

My wife turned to me about three hours after we watched this and said "what was the point of that movie?". She couldn't articulate her question beyond that, and as I've thought about it overnight, I think I understand the question, but I can't articulate it either. Which I think is a reflection of the movie itself: it can't articulate its own purpose. Not long after the end of WW2, five friends (all veterans in one way or another) gather together to help one of them conduct a seance for his recently deceased wife, who killed herself. From there, things go sideways, as two very sudden developments start to expose the rifts in these friendships, the skeletons in their closets, the secret resentments, and how none of them have escaped the long shadow of the war. So, yeah, it's a bottle story, which can be fun, especially in a horror movie, where it can provide some claustrophobia and slowly squeeze the characters. Unfortunately, all it does is help highlight the movie's flaws. The dialogue is unnatural and stagey. That's not a knock on stage performers, but there is a difference in acting for the stage and acting for the camera. This feels very much like a stage play that was captured on video. Dialogue also covers the same ground quite a lot, to the point where the movie feels like a plane circling the airport. One person makes a suggestion or has a thought, argument over secret, back to the suggestion, back to the argument, and so on. The actors try to make it work, and most of them are good enough, but that's also all they are. They work with what they have. None of them can elevate the just-okay material. Another problem is the movie forgets its own premise for a very long time. The seance and the ramifications of it -- they "leave the door open" on accident -- just go away for an hour of this movie's hour and a half. That leaves the majority of the movie devoid of its own premise, so it has to chug along with nothing but the bickering supposed friends (who have so very little in common, I can't imagine how they were friends to begin with) to carry the load. It feels like the seance was a hook to bring them all together instead of a major piece of the movie, and since it's description on Shudder revolves around the supernatural aspect, the bait and switch leads to some ill will the movie can't afford. If it had chosen to ride with the supernatural stuff, okay; if it had been just a melodrama about these friends and their relationships unraveling from the secrets and the burdens of the war, fine. But mixing the two in such a haphazard way leaves the combination somehow weighing less than their individual components. And the unanswered questions it leaves feel like the screenwriter just shrugged and walked away because they didn't know how to wrap it all up in the time or space allotted. It's fine for what it is, I guess. It's not terrible, but it's not all that good either. It sells itself on a premise it never has any intention of fulfilling, which leaves a bad taste in the mouth and a movie that is too muddled to see its ideas through to the end.