This may sound like a bold statement, but a film needs to constantly have something happening. I’m not talking about having a short attention span where there needs to be a car chase or explosion every 30 seconds. Every scene needs to serve a purpose, this could be some crucial information to the plot or character development, but something has to be happening or developing. The script for The Haunted must have been only 40 pages with how much our main character searches through rooms. It is a master class in having interesting things in your film and smothering them with padding.

Emily, an exhausted young woman, is being berated by her new boss until she dropped off at her new worksite. In need of money, she has taken the night-shift position as a caregiver for a man suffering from a serious case of Alzheimer’s. When the job begins to become boring she decides to start searching the large house and discovers much of the house’s past. While she expected to find dust and old photos she instead stirs something long buried in the house that begins to stalk her.

The Haunted is the type of film that comes off as the most disappointing, one that clearly had an interesting concept but the writing was left in the hands of someone who didn’t know what to do. The tone that is set up in the first 15 minutes is palpable and tense. The house where the patient lives is cluttered and gives a great sense of claustrophobia. The way the handheld camera work is done gives a very voyeuristic quality to how everything is shot. The film has so much going for it, that is all for not because of the awful pacing and an ending that is quite frankly insulting and not earned in the slightest.

So Emily works her way through the house, exploring and finding bits and pieces of lore about the house such as the man had a daughter. The major issue is there is an organic way to weave these nuggets of information into the story while still keeping the tone and intensity. What you don’t do is have a solid 20 minutes of the film dedicated to your main character wandering about and not forwarding the plot in any way. By the time anything interesting happens you are so exhausted from waiting that the surprises have no impact.

There isn’t a way to talk about The Haunted without sounding like a parent who just found their child failed a class, I’m upset but mostly disappointed. The building blocks are all there and there is clearly a vision but the organization is a complete mess. Cut all the padding away and you have a magnificent short with some truly tense moments but as it stands you just have a subpar haunted house story that feels like a waste of the audience’s time.

3 out of 10