Director Jill Gevargizian won a great deal of fans in 2020, when she burst onto the indie horror scene with full-blooded character-thriller The Stylist, a tightly wound and exceedingly well-shot debut. Adapting her own short about a disturbingly empathetic hairdresser with a penchant for scalping, Gevargizian not only announced herself as an exciting new voice, but proved a dab hand at stretching budgets too. And her follow-up, the equally small-scale haunted house procedural Ghost Game, certainly offers more of the same from the latter, although really struggles to make the same amount of impact with its scares.
Which is a crying shame considering the strength of the set-up here; the ‘ghost game’ of the title being a viral trend wherein thrill seekers break into an ordinary house and film themselves living there in secret, while regularly pranking the unsuspecting residents. It’s a very literal interpretation of ‘ghosting’, and one that tests the limits of what Vin (Zaen Haidar) will do for love, when he discovers his new girlfriend Laura (Kia Dorsey) is a keen participant.
Things get a little more generic though, when the couple decide to step things up a notch by taking their ghost game to a very obviously haunted Amityville-esque manor house, that’s for some elusive reason, just been bought up by a young family. But Adam Cesare’s script keeps things spicy with some clever relationship obstacles early-on, and Gevargizian floods the first act with neat looks at the games themselves through one or two gorgeously grainy, POV-lead home invasion sequences.
But from there, Ghost Game sadly descends into something achingly forgettable; a by-the-numbers haunted house movie that grapples with classic true-crime scares and the occasional bump and/or thump, never quite making enough of an impression with either. The personality of the set-up dissolves fast, and aside from a brutal-ish finale, there’s little here that horror fans won’t have seen done better a thousand times before.
What’s maybe most frustrating is the character work. Gevargizian having proven herself a true maestro with The Stylist – trojan-horsing a deeply compassionate character piece into an otherwise thoroughly grisly serial killer movie – this sophomore effort lacks any real depth at all. Dorsey and Haidar really try their best with the material, but the central pair’s decision making on the page only gets worse and worse. And the less said about the haunted family (and their almost offensively presented autistic daughter) the better.
Even with that aside, it’s tricky to recommend a film that doesn’t offer much in the way of actual horror spectacle. Ghost Game is most exciting when it’s at its eeriest, playing with perspective early-on. And considering how tight the budget often seems, it’s a genuine wonder there were no conversations around doubling-down on the creepy POV-elements, and making this as an out-and-out found-footage movie. Instead, what’s here is almost maddeningly broad and far too easy to zone-out from, with barely any real sense of tension or disquiet.
Ghost Game was screened as part of Pigeon Shrine FrightFest 2024.
