The Unintentional Genius of Ghosts of War

A while back I was watching this movie called Ghosts of War. It didn’t get much publicity like many of the movies that came out during the last few months. I only stumbled across it because I was looking for a horror movie and this one came with a unique premise. The movie takes place in the French countryside near the end of WWII. There is a group of American soldiers that are assigned to guard a mansion to prevent the Nazis from taking it. The Nazis had killed the family that lived there so as to be expected, as they spend time in the house, creepy things start happening; typical horror movie stuff. However, while I was watching it, something felt off. The actor’s lines seemed to be delivered with slight inauthenticity that I chalked up to bad acting. The words and phrases used were that typical of the era, but somehow the lines failed to feel genuine, which was odd because, while not well known, many of the actors are recognizable and have some respectable credits to their names.

Now, this is where, if you haven’t seen the movie, you need to stop reading because I am going to spoil it. At one point, the Americans must fight off a contingent of Nazis from taking the house. They succeed, but one is severely injured when he jumps on a grenade. For the next day or so, the rest of the solders pump him full of morphine, trying to keep him comfortable as they wait for him to die. One day he becomes semi-lucid and starts screaming the phrase, “This isn’t real,” over and over again. Eventually, he passes away and the rest of the group blames the outburst on his injuries.

As they continue to guard the house, they come to realize, through a journal written by one Nazis that killed the family, that the family had never been buried. The Nazis had just thrown their bodies in the crypt on the property. The soldiers decided to bury the bodies because the hauntings are getting dangerous. Also, amongst other things in the journal, there is this word that keeps popping up. It isn’t German, it isn’t French, it's Arabic.

Anyway, they bury the family and the haunting gets worse. They can’t figure out why until the soldier who’s been reading the journal all this time (he’s a translator) reaches the final page and it's written in Arabic. But he doesn’t speak Arabic, or does he? Either way, he can read the last page of the journal and it turns out the Arabic word that kept popping up in the rest of the journal was a curse. Basically, the curse was put on anyone who buried the bodies of the family. The climax of the movie, or what we think it is at the time, comes when the ghost of the mother traps two of the solders in the study. She slowly approaches them as the others appear and they keep repeating, “This isn’t real,” over and over. And suddenly, they glitch. Like computer glitch. This is jarring, to say the least, and confusing as a viewer until a few seconds later, one of the soldiers wakes up in a modern/futuristic hospital.

It turns out the whole haunted mansion was a technique devised by doctors to help wounded soldiers in Afghanistan overcome their PTSD while their physical wounds healed. This specific unit had witnessed an entire family killed by ISIS for helping the US.

Here’s the genius in this movie. The whole time, there had been clues, the clunky 1940s dialog, the Arabic word, the "this isn't real," etc. None of it came together for me until just before the cut to the hospital scene. I am usually very good at spotting twist endings because it takes a very good director and screenplay to hide a plot twist and have it still make sense. I don’t care what Rotten Tomatoes or other critics say about Ghosts of War, I liked it. It’s a movie that, while maybe a bit convoluted, takes the viewer on a ride. It definitely deserves more attention.