Movie Review: 'Haunted Mansion'

Haunted Mansion (2023)

Directed by Justin Simien

Written by Katie Dippold

Starring LaKeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Tiffany Haddish, Owen Wilson, Danny Devito, Chase W. Dillon, Jared Leto, Jamie Lee Curtis

Release Date July 28th, 2023

Published July 31st, 2023

There is a lovely idea at the heart of Haunted Mansion that gets lost among the muck of trying to make a wide appeal blockbuster family movie. At the core of Haunted Mansion, director Justin Simien, creator of the ingenious, Dear White People, appears fascinated by the concept of grief and the ways it manifests in negative ways for many people. Losing someone you love is a life altering event, it can lead to any number of negative manifestations if it is not dealt with and processed in a healthy fashion. It manifests in Haunted Mansion via LaLeith Stanfield's Ben, an astrophysicist who gave up everything after his young wife died.

Stanfield is unquestionably an actor who can handle this kind of heavy material but the heavy nature of Haunted Mansion unfortunately drags on what is otherwise intended to be a summer blockbuster version of a Disney theme park ride. While Simien is working in the emotional space of Stanfield's grieving widower, the rest of the movie appears to be going for something broad, campy, scary and yet family friendly and the tonal dissonance is a big part of the overall failure of Haunted Mansion. By attempting to serve a large number of disparate ideas, the film ends up serving none of those ideas particularly well.

Ben (Stanfield) was once a very successful and happy Astrophysicist shyly using his unique profession to hit on women. One of those women is Alyssa (Charity Jordan), a tour guide who leads haunted tours through New Orleans. Ben, being a man of science, doesn't believe in ghosts but he still falls hard for Alyssa and the two end up getting married at some point, we don't see that part. What we do see is that Alyssa is no longer with us as the story begins, a mystery that will be unsatisfyingly resolved later in the film, and Ben is floundering. Having given up all aspects of his previous life, Ben now leads Alyssa's tours while drunk and being entirely uninterested in indulging and any notions of ghosts being real.

Ben's trajectory is altered forever by the arrival of Father Kent (Owen Wilson). Kent knows Ben by reputation. He knows that Ben had, years earlier, invented a camera that could theoretically, take pictures of the dead. He has a job for Ben. A single mother, Gabbie (Rosario Dawson), has moved into a decrepit mansion on the outskirts of New Orleans. Gabbie, and her son, Travis (Chase W. Dillon), are also dealing with the fairly recent loss of Travis' father, a loss that neither mother or son has fully processed. The parallel of both Ben and Gabbie having lost someone is used as something of a shorthand to bring them together as love interests but the love story feels rushed and forced. Oh, and they believe that their new home is haunted.

That's the thing about Haunted Mansion, I am this far into this review and I haven't mentioned any ghosts. That's because none of the ghosts or scares in Haunted Mansion are very memorable. Jamie Lee Curtis is perhaps the most interesting of the spooks. She plays a dead psychic who was killed and her spirit was trapped inside of a crystal ball. The visual of Curtis's head in the crystal ball isn't bad but its not very elaborate. It's fine, like far too much of Haunted Mansion is... fine, it's there, it exists, but it doesn't have much of anything interesting about it.

The big bad of Haunted Mansion is the Hat Box ghost, played by Jared Leto. The Hat Box Ghost is a remarkably weak villain. The ghost's real name is Crump and the lame comparisons between Crump and Donald Trump are not stated out loud but are very clear. It's a lame non-joke, clearly intended but not well executed. It stands out as a bad idea because Leto's performance as Hatbox Ghost is half-hearted at best. The same can be said of the weak CGI look of the character which is scarier in a single drawing by a sketch artist in the movie than it ever is alive and moving around in Haunted Mansion.

Incidentally, the Police sketch artist in Haunted Mansion is played by Hasan Minaj, a very funny man who is wasted in a nothing performance. Minaj is there to skeptically poke fun at Stanfield and Devito's claims about a ghost and he's offscreen in less than 3 minutes. And, Minaj isn't the biggest waste of talent in Haunted Mansion. Dan Levy and Winona Ryder both make appearances in Haunted Mansion and you are left to wonder if they owed someone a favor and that favor was being in this movie. Levy, one of the most dynamic comic personalities working today gets less than 2 minutes of screentime and his outfit is funnier than anything his character does.

As for Winona Ryder, I am genuinely concerned that her career has fallen to the point where she's desperate to be cast in anything and took this role because she desperately needed work. She is almost unrecognizable, she adds nothing to the movie, and plays her brief appearance as a tour guide with the typical energy of a day player desperately hoping to get noticed for their big break. If you told me that director Justin Simien had no idea who Winona Ryder was when she was cast in this role, it would be very easy to believe.

Haunted Mansion is not a bad movie. It has elements that work. The dramatic performance of LaKeith Stanfield, especially at the end of the movie as he's considering the chance to see his dead wife again, is genuinely moving. Sadly, the rest of Haunted Mansion is a hodgepodge of family friendly attempted scares, laugh free family friendly humor, and a villain with such vague motivation and power that it is genuinely confusing as to why he wants what he wants. What did the Hatbox Ghost want? What was the endgame? I watched Haunted Mansion, I am writing about the movie, and I am racking my brain to try and recall what the motivation of the main villain was.

That's telling of either I had given up caring or the movie was just so slipshod in delivery that the plot didn't register. It's probably a combination of those two things. At a certain point in Haunted Mansion I was thinking of other things. I recently bought a special edition of Everything Everywhere All at Once on Blu-Ray and I was wondering to myself about whether I would need to pick it up at the post office or whether they would bring the order to my house. I ended up having to pick it up, in case you were wondering. That preoccupied me for a portion of the second act of Haunted Mansion as the film failed to capture my full attention.

Perhaps the Haunted Mansion concept is doomed to failure. This same property failed miserably as a family comedy 20 years ago with Eddie Murphy in the lead role. Now, we have a similarly mediocre attempt at melding family friendly comedy and horror comedy with LaKeith Stanfield upgrading the lead performance, he's certainly more interesting than Murphy's coasting for a paycheck performance in 2003. But it seems that neither of these wildly talented leading men are capable of lifting the Haunted Mansion concept to anything beyond wildly mediocre.

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