96 min | R | September 17, 2021 | Lionsgate
A stoner cons her way into a costumed tour-guide gig at a historic manor and gets haunted by the aristocrat she is paid to impersonate. The ghost wants to teach her to be a proper lady. The movie just wants to make her fart.
Hannah is a small-time hustler who scams her way through life one bad decision at a time. She lands a job as a costumed tour guide at the historic Wadsworth manor, playing a nineteenth-century aristocrat she knows nothing about. The real Lady Wadsworth appears as a ghost and sets out to remake Hannah into a refined woman. Justin and Christian Long build an odd-couple ghost comedy on that single hook. The film mistakes a premise for a plot and never finds the second thing it wants to be.
Melanie Lynskey plays Hannah with a loose, lived-in slovenliness that suggests a sharper film around her. She commits to the bong hits and the belching and still locates real warmth underneath the slob. Judy Greer plays Lady Wadsworth with rigid posture and clipped, corrective diction, and her chemistry with Lynskey is the one thing that holds the movie together. Ryan Phillippe doubles as the smarmy academic Tanner and the dead Lord Wadsworth, and neither role gives him anything to push against. Justin Long casts himself as the manor heir Max, and Patrick Duffy turns up as patriarch Grayson Wadsworth to no real purpose. Luis Guzmán appears as a bartender and exists mostly to occupy the frame.
Justin Long and Christian Long write and direct their first feature, and the seams show in every reel. The script runs on disconnected gags and scatological filler instead of scenes that build toward anything. The editing cuts between bits with no rhythm, so each joke lands and dies in isolation. The manor gets shot flatly under even, sitcom lighting, with none of the gothic atmosphere a ghost story should mine. The Longs assemble a cast that can do far more than the material asks and then ask almost nothing of it.
The film keeps reaching for the sweet bond between a slob and a ghost and keeps undercutting it with another fart. There is a small, decent comedy buried in the Lynskey and Greer pairing. The Longs cannot locate it. They confuse vulgarity for energy and a string of skits for structure. What remains is a likable cast stranded in a movie that has no idea what to do with them.