Movie Review - 'The Haunting in Connecticut'

The Haunting in Connecticut Starring Virginia Madsen, Martin Donovan, and Kyle Gallner Directed by Peter Cornwell Rated PG-13

Every now and then, you see a movie that feels like it was developed on the premise of one scene or a couple of cool visual effects or stunts. "Wouldn't it be groovy to see two planets collide?" And then a movie has to be built around that somehow. The trouble with The Haunting in Connecticut is that it tells us upfront it isn't constructed from the special effects shot down, although it certainly feels that way. This is one of those "Based on true events" films, which gives the unfolding events more credibility to someone gullible enough to believe this isn't at all fictionalized. The names have been changed to protect the innocent, but you can find the genuine article on the film's website. Classy. The true events on which the movie is based have to do with a house in Southington, Connecticut that was once, many years earlier, a funeral home. Because of that, the family that lived there in the 1980s claimed all sorts of creepy visions and levitations, and if you think that sounds like The Amityville Horror, you're not alone. In fact, the family bought the house from the paranormal researchers who chronicled the Amityville story a few years earlier. But the house is quiet now, outside of the many tourists who flock to it and bug the hell out of its new residents. The film puts the family in the converted funeral home because it's close to a hospital, which is important because the family's oldest son, Matt (Kyle Gallner) has cancer. Matt stays in the basement, which is where all the dirty work happened, but that's not why he experiences the inexplicable and the rest of his family doesn't. It turns out, at least according to the very helpful and incredibly knowledgeable local reverend (Elias Koteas), that the closer you are to the other side, the easier it is to make contact with those people caught in between, the spirits who haven't crossed over. Matt's parents (Virginia Madsen and Martin Donovan) seem positively clueless that anything truly out of the ordinary is going on, and Matt is afraid to tell them what he sees for fear that he'll be taken off an experimental cancer drug. So for a good 40 minutes, the movie is at an impasse. It can't possibly resolve itself as quickly as we'd like but it can't avoid showing us flashes of supernatural trouble. It gets very, very repetitive. That is, perhaps, why whatever true story esists here feels tacked on to director Peter Cornwell's pièce de résistance. There are some decent ghoulish effects and some nice makeup throughout the movie, but a scene in which a medium has ectoplasm roaring out of his mouth is the crown jewel. It's on the poster, it's in the commercials, and it's teased a few times in the film before it's actually seen. Without being entirely necessary, it provides a few answers, though not as quickly as that reverend, who proves an incredibly handy guy to have around if your house needs an exorcism. But, as it happens a lot with supernatural movies that don't know how to maintain the suspense, by the time we get it all figured out, we're bored with the true story, underwhelmed by how little that key moment with the ectoplasm really factored into things, and a little put out that so little happened along the way. Not to be lost in this is a nice performance by Kyle Gallner. I don't recall seeing him before, but I thought he handled playing a cancer patient believably, and displayed a little more depth than we're used to seeing out of a lead character in an underdeveloped thriller.
Watch the Haunting in Connecticut trailer