We Are Still Here (2015)

We Are Still Here arrives from 2015 with a title that promises endurance and a premise that promises nothing of the sort. Ted Geoghegan's debut deposits a grieving couple, Anne and Paul Sacchetti, into the snowbound Massachusetts hamlet of Aylesbury, where the locals are withholding, the basement is busy, and the house has been eating on a thirty-year schedule since the nineteenth century. Barbara Crampton plays Anne with a hollowed-out stillness that the film trusts more than it trusts dialogue. This is a haunted-house picture, plainly and completely.

On the matter of contemporary social instruction, the ledger is blank. The Dagmar funeral-home swindle supplies the plot's engine: corpses sold, caskets buried empty, a village that burned a family alive to feed something underneath. That is horror mechanics, not an indictment of commerce. The cast is white, the village is white, and no character pauses to observe either fact. Anne's grief belongs to a mother and to no thesis. The New Age couple arrive as comic relief and exit as casualties, their spiritualism serving the séance set piece and nothing further. There is no climate anxiety in the snow, no body politics in the carnage, no vocabulary for anyone's neurology, and no revisionist reading of the historical record. The 1979 setting is a costume, not an argument.

The film's closing image, a father smiling down a cellar staircase at whatever his son has become, is offered without comment. No lesson is appended. No audience is addressed. Geoghegan set out to honor The House by the Cemetery and stopped when he was finished. We are left with craft, atmosphere, and a body count, a leaner proposition than most of the decade's genre output, and a rarer one.