At the LFF: "The Awakening"

Brought to you in association with BBC Films, The Awakening is a period ghost story given the kind of deluxe treatment only those TV companies not having to shell out for a dozen episodes of Downton each year can afford. In 1920s London, author and professional sceptic Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall) specialises in unmasking phony mediums, partly for profit, partly as a way of holding onto the memory of her late soldier husband. One afternoon, she receives a visit from Robert Mallory (Dominic West), Latin master at a boarding school in Cumbria where one of the boys has, to all outward appearances, been scared to death. Heading north to investigate, Florence encounters a teaching staff variously hurting, brutish and indifferent, and particularly resistant to taking instruction from the fairer sex.

The script, by Stephen Volk and director Nick Murphy, fuses two institutions - the school movie (one shot of a steam train traversing the Cumbrian countryside sparks memories of the trip to Hogwarts) and the haunted-house movie - while leaving itself three separate lines of inquiry. First, there's the staff room intrigue, with teachers who, shambling and damaged from the Great War, form a kind of walking dead in themselves. (The most hardline of the educators justifies his use of the cane by insisting "These boys must be stronger - stronger than us!") One underdeveloped theme involves difference: as well as Florence's forthright suffragettisms, there's a literal red herring in a coppertopped kid suspected of having a hand in the supposed haunting, and hear the deceased was a bedwetter, and mercilessly teased for it.

And as distinct from 2001's The Others - which had Nicole Kidman very definitely on her lonesome - The Awakening also proposes a thwarted romance: Hall and West are convincing as individuals trying to get over their shared guilt and give themselves reasons to live in what an opening title card, quoting from one of Florence's bestsellers, defines as "an age of ghosts". Murphy surrounds them with creepy business - replica dollshouses and period photography - but the film as a whole is maybe too handsome, too cosy, to be properly chilling, as maybe happens when a production can afford to bring in Imelda Staunton as the school nurse and the cinematographer (Eduard Grau) who shot A Single Man for Tom Ford, and here takes great care to calibrate each and every shadow.

It manages one genuine coup de cinéma at the moment of revelation, when Florence discovers the same formative scene of trauma playing out in several rooms at once, yet too often Murphy directs in a way that defeats the film's primary purpose: you end up cooing at the design, rather than jumping out of your seat. The conservatism traditionally associated with the period movie comes to stifle the subversive instincts of the scary movie: you spot it in the way the plot seeks out respectability, to tidy up and return everybody to their rightful place. What's frightening about the ghosts and monsters in this skilful yet ultimately muffled exercise is that they're ugly or damaged in some other way; they have to be banished, because they just don't fit in with the decor.

The Awakening screens on Tue 25 at 6.15pm at the Vue West End, and again on Wed 26 at 3pm.