123 min | PG-13 | July 28, 2023 | Walt Disney Pictures
A grieving scientist who built a camera to photograph ghosts takes a job clearing spirits out of a New Orleans mansion. He brings a fake priest, a loud psychic, and a tipsy historian along for the haunting. The cast is stacked, the mansion is gorgeous, and the movie still cannot decide whether to scare you or hug you.
Ben Matthias is an astrophysicist who builds a camera to photograph the dead. Grief over his wife turns him into a cynical ghost-tour guide working the streets of New Orleans. A priest recruits him to clear spirits out of a mansion where a widow named Gabbie and her son Travis cannot escape what lives in the walls. Justin Simien’s film wants to be a haunted-house comedy and a sincere study of mourning at the same time. It commits to neither. The ghosts stand in for the people we lose and refuse to release, and the movie keeps explaining that metaphor instead of trusting you to feel it.
LaKeith Stanfield plays Ben with real sadness underneath the wisecracks, and he gives the film a center it does not earn. Rosario Dawson grounds Gabbie as a mother holding her panic together for the sake of Travis, played by Chase W. Dillon. Owen Wilson plays Father Kent as a fraud who improvises Latin and shrugs at his own incompetence, and the joke wears out fast. Tiffany Haddish and Danny DeVito play the medium Harriet and the professor Bruce Davis at full volume, mugging through scenes that need timing instead of noise. Jamie Lee Curtis turns up as Madame Leota, a head floating in a crystal ball, and she has more fun than anyone else on screen.
Justin Simien directs from a script by Katie Dippold, and the two pull in opposite directions. Dippold writes for jokes. Simien shoots for atmosphere. The production design is the strongest thing here, a genuine set piece of endless hallways, a stretching portrait gallery, and a ballroom of waltzing translucent guests lifted straight from the ride. The CGI spirits look weightless and rubbery, and the camera cuts away from them before any image can settle. The score swings between spooky and whimsical from one cue to the next, which tells you the film never decides what it wants you to feel.
There is a tender movie buried in here about a man learning to carry his loss, and Stanfield plays every beat of it. The film keeps interrupting that movie for a haunted-house romp too gentle to scare anyone and too scattered to make you laugh. Simien assembles a cast that could anchor a sharper picture and then hands them a plot that lurches from set piece to set piece. The pieces never lock into a shape. The result is pleasant and forgettable. It is a ride that drops you off exactly where you got on.