Amityville: The Awakening (2017)

Amityville: The Awakening arrives as the tenth entry in a franchise that has been running on fumes since roughly 1983, and it carries itself with the grim professionalism of a tax write-off. Franck Khalfoun's contribution to the mythology concerns Belle Walker, a teenager who relocates to 112 Ocean Avenue with her mother, her younger sister, and her comatose twin brother, whose expensive care has drained the family finances. The house is famous. The wallpaper hides bloodstains. The dog does not survive. This is a haunted house film assembled from spare parts, and it seems dimly aware of the fact.

For those of us who catalog the cultural temperature of such things, the pickings here are thin to the point of emaciation. The cast is uniformly white and the film has no interest in that fact or any other. There is a female protagonist who ultimately rescues her sister, which is the oldest tradition in the genre and not a statement of any kind. The brother's locked-in syndrome and his letter-board communication device serve as a possession vessel, nothing more. A single line of dialogue gestures at the American medical system as the reason the family took the house, but this is plot scaffolding, not an indictment of anything larger.

What remains is a competent, joyless chiller with a metafictional gimmick that treats the earlier Amityville films as fiction, which is franchise housekeeping and not a reframing of history. It was filmed in 2014 and then sat on a shelf through four release dates before being given away free on Google Play, a distribution strategy that communicates more about the studio's confidence than anything in the screenplay. The film lectures no one. It moralizes about nothing. In an era of relentless messaging, there is something almost restful about a movie with no opinions at all.