Pay The Ghost (2015) Review!!

Synopsis – A professor frantically searches for his son who was abducted during a Halloween parade.

My Take – Back in 90s & maybe the earlier 2000s, actor Nicolas Cage used to represent those fun kind of pop corn flicks which you could watch once & have a good time. In recent years, he has become the butt of many jokes for his scenery chewing, general overacting, and a willingness to appear in all manner of projects you never heard of, no matter how dubious, just to earn a buck. As much as he’s become a punch line, he still occasionally delivers performances, like this film. Frankly I don’t remember seeing him much in horror movies, terrible films like Season of the Witch (2011) & the remake The Wicker Man (2006) are the only ones which come to mind if you think about it. Personally, I’m a fan, not in a “haha, let’s laugh at how he acts” kinda way, but as someone who is genuinely curious about what he can do, especially when he is directed by people that have demonstrated some sort of talent at some point, like this time with German director Uli Edel, who has taken serious part in some really popular TV series such as the prison drama Oz. And, to my surprise, his performance here might be among his best acting in the last five years. Yes, the premise adapted by Dan Kay from the novella of the same name by Tim Lebbon, sounds simple and intriguing enough; a mystery of a ghost that kidnaps children on Halloween with a scale of a basic detective story; the movie hardly finds anything scary within this story. Sure, this story does have some interesting details that intersects both supernatural and crime movie elements. But without offering much terror, this combination just makes it half baked, in the sense the film works as a mystery but fails as a horror. Plus the main antagonist seems like a love child between The Woman in Black & Mamma. You can’t blame anyone for being hooked with this premise. While it’s nothing original exactly, there is still something gripping from its details. But the characters are taken as seriously as a typical domestic drama. Even though for a story that involves a lot of ridiculous supernatural elements, these moments never feel out of place. The detective work seems quite grounded and the more they’re figuring out what really abducted the son of its protagonist, the more interesting the movie really gets.

To its credit, it does take us to interesting places and shows us some campy side characters to probably spice up the atmosphere, but what really lacks here is the scares. Sure, it has jump scares, mild violence and awful darkness, but they’re not quite effective. The story follows Mike Cole (Nicolas Cage), an English professor with a more or less idyllic life. Sure he works too much, and he’s stressed out waiting to find out if he’ll get tenure, but he has a lovely wife, Kristen (Sarah Wayne Callies) and a devoted son, Charlie (Jack Fulton), who occasionally sees spooky things in the darkness, like a raggedy woman who ominously points at him and then disappears. On Halloween night, after his son had to go trick ‘r’ treating with his mother, Mike takes him to a nearby Halloween themed fair, filled to the brim with people. Seconds after Mike gets distracted, Charlie disappears into thin air. This puts a strain on Mike and Kristen’s relationship, and a year later he has moved out. He continues his duties as a teacher, and has become obsessed with finding his son. On his way down the rabbit hole, he pesters overworked cops, runs down any possible lead, and, a few days before Halloween, he starts hearing and seeing Charlie everywhere. Realistically, you’re supposed to wonder if this is real or if Mike is simply losing his grip, but it’s obvious there is something more going on, and as he follows the clues, he stumbles onto a centuries-old supernatural mystery. What follows is a predictable string of events that most viewers will see coming a mile off. While an interesting premise, especially as the film progressively gets closer and closer to a supernatural drama than to what might’ve been a much dryer film about the struggle of couples after their child goes missing, the rest of the film is written in a way that turns it predictable, and you can almost hear how the gears of the film itself cringe and squeak as they try to move forward with the events that it has to play out and the dialogue in the events. It’s, in more ways than one would imagine, over-written, and it follows all the tricks, hints and tips that fill “get your screenplay to Hollywood” novels. Director Uli Edel works as much as he can with the script, and tries to ease us into the implausibilities that are on the surface, like the fact that in the recent history of New York, where the film takes place, more than half of the kids who go missing on Halloween never come back, while in any other date they mostly appear again, something that an inquisitive mind anywhere would’ve found out years ago, but here it’s treated as the big discovery made by Cage‘s character, one he informs the police, which maintains an annoyingly oppressive disbelief to most of the weird crap that’s happening, and hadn’t realized before that.

The film abuses jump scares and has a few CGI effects that don’t really manage to be fully convincing, and even if the story ends up being a bit predictable as it ends up explaining the roots of the horror, the ghost and the disappearing kids, we are treated to some surprising imagery. This is especially so when it comes to the Irish/Celtic origins of the whole supernatural element in this movie. It could manage to bring up some momentum and interest from most viewers, enough for them to be invested in the climax and how the movie ends, not with a bang, but with a nice enough chase between dimensions, which sounds cool, but it’s just the crossing of a bridge. Where the film is the strongest is in the look and feel of its settings. Taking place in New York, Edel and company use the city to nice effect, creating a dark, dismal atmosphere with sinister overtones that fit the subject matter. The Halloween carnival provides an opportunity to showcase all manner of spooky imagery, though at times it does go a bit overboard, straying into silly territory. Nicolas Cage does an admittedly good job here. There is no trace of the manic Cage that everyone likes to make fun of, especially from The Wicker Man. Even though, Cage doesn’t look the part anymore, and it shows as he runs just a bit slower and with a longer gait that his days in The Rock. Yet, Cage does his best to carry the film. Sarah Wayne Callies bears a well-tuned slate of reactions to fictional trauma, tested throughout her time on The Walking Dead—and the scene in which their two characters struggle to accept that their son is gone is a relatively stirring one, everything that needs to be conveyed held completely within her red-rimmed eyes. On the whole, ‘Pay the Ghost’ is a weirdly predictable yet moderately entertaining film. It breaks absolutely no new ground. In some ways, we have seen this kind of movie at least a hundred times before. It’s like any other watchable mundane thriller/horror that has come out in the past twenty years. It’s a movie you watch, that fills up some time, and then you never need to think about again. Pay the Ghost isn’t bad, but it just isn’t great either.