Ti West has long proven himself to be a filmmaker for whom horror is less a genre than a way of looking at the world, one he has happily turned on everything from a porn shoot gone wrong in X to a lonely farmer’s daughter in Pearl.
West’s latest sees him take on Charles Dickens, with a version of A Christmas Carol that feels closer to the author’s gloomy Victorian soul, than most of the adaptations that have come before it. It is a bold, often properly frightening piece of work, even if its central performance never quite matches the nerve of everything around it.
Written by Nathaniel Halpern, Ebenezer follows the familiar path. A bitter, miserly businessman is visited on Christmas Eve by the ghost of his dead partner, and then by three spirits who force him to face his past, his present and the grim future that awaits him.
What sets this version apart is how little it cares about being cosy. Halpern’s script doesn’t so much reinvent Dickens as dig him back up, restoring the spectral unease and moral brutality that so many versions have politely sanded down. West is clearly not afraid to go full gothic here. The ghosts are not ethereal; they are intrusive, unsettling and genuinely otherworldly, and the film gives them plenty of room to scare us.
Fog-slick cobblestones and candlelight that seems to shrink from Scrooge rather than light him give the whole thing a rich, immersive texture. It is, in the best possible sense, a Carol for anyone who always suspected it was a ghost story at heart.
The film’s real showstopper is Tramell Tillman. His Ghost of Christmas Present is absolutely terrifying and terrific in equal measure, a figure of judgement rather than jollity whom you simply can’t take your eyes off. Ian McKellen is equally good as Jacob Marley, playing him as a sorrowful, wounded spectre rather than a mere warning sign.
The flashbacks work just as well. Arthur Conti plays the young Ebenezer, showing us the man Scrooge was before the bitterness set in, while Ellie Bamber is brilliant as Isabel Fezziwig, the love he gave up for money and success. Elsewhere, Andrea Riseborough, Rupert Grint and Sam Claflin all bring a sincerity that keeps the supernatural theatrics grounded. West has always been an actor’s director, and he draws textured, lived-in work from almost everyone on screen.
Almost, because the problem here is Johnny Depp. His Scrooge is never dull, but he doesn’t always seem to understand the man he is playing. Dickens’s miser is someone whose cruelty is a hardened defence against grief, and his redemption only works because we catch a glimpse of the wound underneath.
The result is a lopsided success. Devotees of the novella will appreciate the fidelity and the gloom, and horror fans will find the atmosphere and craft they came for. Families expecting a cosy festive tradition may be in for something colder and stranger than they bargained for. Ebenezer is impressive, dark and truer to Dickens’s intentions than most, and a more vulnerable lead would have made it essential. As it stands, it is a fascinating, frightening near-miss from a director who usually knows exactly what he is doing.
