The Awakening (2011)

The Awakening arrives in 1921, a year of mourning and rationed hope, and places Rebecca Hall at its center as Florence Cathcart, a professional sceptic who earns her living exposing fraudulent spiritualists and, in her spare time, hunting ghosts to determine whether her dead fiancé might be retrievable. It is a handsome film. Old stone corridors, damp English light, a boys' boarding school emptied for half-term. The camera lingers with the patience of a sommelier decanting something old and slightly corked.

Miss Hall carries the picture with a severity that suits a woman working alongside police in a decade that offered her few such positions. The screenplay treats this as texture, not argument. She is a professional because the plot requires one. No thesis is advanced about her place in the world, and the surrounding ensemble is uniformly white, uniformly British, and uniformly uninterested in commenting on itself. The film has other preoccupations: grief, loneliness, the ghosts that visit only the solitary, and a twist that arrives like a bill for a meal we did not order.

There is no racial consciousness here, despite India and Africa drifting through the dialogue as convenient furniture. There is no queerness, no climate anxiety, no economic grievance, no body politics, no neurodivergence advocacy. The dead are simply dead. The living are simply sad. What remains is atmosphere, competently assembled, and a moral about belief delivered as mood instead of sermon. We have tasted worse. We have also tasted better. This one is a decent vintage from a vineyard that has never once considered its carbon footprint.