I don’t assume I’ve been so all in favour of how a movie’s been financed earlier than. Haunting of the Queen Mary takes place nearly totally on board the Queen Mary, a retired transatlantic ocean liner and vacationer attraction at present docked in Lengthy Seashore, California. You may go and go to the ship your self: as soon as owned by Disney, it’s been totally refurbished and opened for public viewing this yr. What fascinates us is that The Queen Mary has by no means actually been recognized for its ghosts. But, right here we’re, with a film specializing in precisely that, coinciding with the reopening of the ferry alongside its ghost excursions. It might’t be coincidental, proper?
Enterprise proposition apart, the Queen Mary makes for a incredible backdrop for a horror film. From Deep Rising to Triangle, ocean liners have confirmed to be large, remoted settings for horror motion pictures, whereas the inner furnishings of the Queen Mary appear to be they’ve been ripped proper out of The Shining’s Outlook Resort. Scary and kitsch? The Queen Mary has obtained it nailed.
We’re not the one ones to assume the ship is made for cinema. The primary characters of Haunting of the Queen Mary, Anne Calder (Alice Eve – Star Trek Into Darkness, Males in Black 3) and Patrick Calder (Joel Fry – Plebs, Cruella) imagine so too, as they’ve a pitch to make to the captain of the ship. They imagine that the Queen Mary is ideal for some type of augmented actuality expertise, with vacationers seeing the ship because it as soon as was. They create their son, Lucas Calder (Lenny Rush, refreshingly an actor with dwarfism in a job that doesn’t even reference it) alongside for the tour.
That tour doesn’t go nicely. Younger Lucas will get waylaid by ghosts who entice him into the bowels of the ship and a swimming pool that has lengthy been boarded off. He will get whisked away to the spirit realm and a substitute Lucas goes residence with the Calder mother and father. Et voilà: you’ve got however one of many many strands to Haunting of the Queen Mary’s narrative.
Haunting of the Queen Mary, you see, is a lattice of timelines and subplots, a few of which intersect. Two of these timelines transfer in a roughly chronological sample: there’s the fashionable day one which we’ve simply talked about, which comes again onto the ferry because the Calder mother and father attempt to work out what occurred to Lucas; and there’s a 1938 plot, the place we observe a transatlantic voyage of the Queen Mary. The main target shifts between these two as they progress, however they’re interspersed with flashes of a grisly collection of murders. They’re the ultimate, deathly moments of that 1938 voyage, and Haunting of the Queen Mark dips into them, now and again, for a little bit of claret.
There’s a motive for the leaping about, as time will get smudged and tinkered with. Ghosts from the 1938 crossing seem and reappear within the modern-day, and occasions echo throughout time too. The movie has numerous enjoyable with mirrors, as themes repeat throughout the many years. Even the credit score sequence is mirrored.
It’s a daring construction for what’s a fairly low-budget horror film, and – in all honesty – it really works and fails in about equal measure. We discovered that essential plot factors have been bypassed totally, chucking readability out of the portholes. It took us too lengthy to grasp that Anne and Patrick knew in regards to the Queen Mary’s historical past as a result of Faux Lucas actually instructed them about it. They waltz in with a grand plan to root out Queen Mary’s evil, but there’s no clue how they’re so ready. There’s extra of those jumps in logic than we care to say.
However it will probably create a dreamlike expertise the place characters weave out and in of the timelines nearly seamlessly. The Queen Mary turns into the fixed as we transfer from 1938 to ghosts to modern-day, and the characters themselves query which layer of actuality they’re at present experiencing. Some even transfer between them. When it really works, it’s fairly darn intelligent.
That skinny thread of understanding is put underneath stress by the sheer variety of subplots. Haunting of the Queen Mary may have carried out with shedding a number of. The Queen Mary’s authentic captain is given an excessive amount of display screen time and finally doesn’t find yourself wherever in any respect. The trendy day captain is performed with grim panache by Alan Booty, however the query over how a lot he is aware of, and whether or not he’s implicated isn’t all that fascinating. Lastly, a dance quantity with a real-world superstar is initially dazzling however runs for too lengthy. The tip result’s a runtime that feels bloated.
There’s additionally a mismatch of high quality when it comes to the 2 important timelines. The 1938 stuff is atmospheric and genuine. There’s echoes of Bioshock in the way in which that the visitors are dolled up in Halloween masks and circus outfits. The sense that every little thing is constructing as much as dying, and an entire lot of it, is palpable.
However the modern-day sequences simply can’t discover a comparable stage of risk and emotional funding. It does occur to have among the film’s greatest set items – an arm pushing by a smartphone is a selected spotlight – however it’s general a tad wishy-washy, made worse by the miscast Alice Eve and Joel Fry. Joel Fry, greatest recognized for his comedic roles, is clearly making an attempt to push out of the envelope he’s discovered himself in, however is generally simply sulky as Patrick Calder. Alice Eve has extra of a punt at bringing some hard-nosed dedication to Anne Calder, however nonetheless doesn’t persuade. There isn’t any chemistry between them in any respect, the script doesn’t assist issues by making what they’re doing clear, and largely they’re anticipated to uncover exposition. We stored wanting to maneuver the time-slider again to 1938.
There’s no doubting that Haunting of the Queen Mary is bold, making an attempt with all its would possibly to incorporate a number of timelines, subplots and realities in a single indie horror film. Whereas it’s typically efficient, within the 1938 sequences particularly, it’s simply as more likely to be confused and dishevelled. Your curiosity will peak and trough with the waves, and also you would possibly want that somebody steadied the ship and chucked out numerous the narrative’s lifeless weight.
