Marrowbone (2017)

Marrowbone arrives dressed as a period piece, 1968 rural Maine, covered mirrors, a manor with a bricked-up attic, and a family of English orphans pretending their mother is merely resting. It is a psychological horror mystery of the old school, which is to say it cares about atmosphere and a twist, not about instructing anyone in how to live. The siblings hide a corpse, forge a signature, and dodge a lawyer, all while a sinister presence thumps around upstairs. The film has no interest in the culture wars. It wants to frighten you and then make you feel slightly ill about the reason you were frightened.

The cast is uniformly pale and British or Spanish, and the story engages race not at all, despite its American setting in a turbulent year. Allie, the librarian, declines a suitor's offer of New York, which registers as a faint pulse of self-possession and nothing more. The villain, Tom, wants a partnership at a big firm and stoops to blackmail to afford it, a motivation so standard it barely qualifies as a theme. There is no environmental sermon, no body politics, no revisionist reframing of the era. The film simply uses 1968 as wallpaper.

Where it lands, unintentionally, is on the mind. Jack's dissociative identity disorder is the engine of the entire plot, the twist that recontextualizes every earlier scene. It is handled as a trauma device and a horror reveal, not as an affirmation, and the ending, in which Allie withholds his medication because the delusion keeps him company, is the sort of gesture a film makes when it wants to be haunting and has not thought it through. The result is a moody, well-acted, faintly exploitative ghost story that lectures no one and means to unsettle everyone.