In Brooklyn 45, World War II has recently ended, and the wounds that it’s left are raw for some of the veterans at the film’s center. Among them is Major Archibald “Archie” Stanton (Jeremy Holm), who’s on trial for war crimes, and Lieutenant Colonel Clive “Hock” Hockstatter (Larry Fessenden), who drinks away the sorrow of his wife’s suicide, committed weeks prior after raving that their neighbors were Nazi spies. It’s the holidays and concern for Hock has brought the comrades in arms together, who are corralled into the drawing room that they will occupy for almost the entirety of the film—and not always of their own free will.
Among the other guests are buttoned-up Major Paul DiFranco (Ezra Buzzington) and ace interrogator Marla Sheridan (Anne Ramsay), who brings her husband, Bob (Ron E. Rains), into their friend group. It’s through Bob, who spent the war comfortably behind a desk, that the film establishes its clumsy, declarative means of conveying information, such as the way that he mutters to Marla upon first encountering Archie that “he’s a war criminal.” When Paul prefaces a protest to Hock, he does it by stating they’ve known each other since they were eight years old.
What Bob is protesting is the séance that Hock eventually gets them all to perform in order to commune with his dead wife. As they join hands around a table, the candles light on their own, the furniture moves, and an ectoplasmic arm emerges from the table. Yet Brooklyn 45’s supernatural flourishes soon take a backseat to a moral conflict of a much more mortal variety, as a woman (Kristina Klebe) breaks from her restraints and spills out of the room’s closet. Speaking with a German accent, she reveals that her name is Hildegard and that she’s one of the neighbors who Hock’s wife had accused before killing herself. And that’s after the party’s host, having received proof of the afterlife, shoots himself in the head to reunite with his beloved.
To writer-director Ted Geoghegan’s credit, he has fulfilled the most crucial step of any locked-room story and assembled a strong cast. Ramsay and Fessenden are the standouts as, respectively, the steely Marla and the anguished Hock. And as Paul, Ezra Buzzington effectively plays against outward and seemingly obvious villainy, despite how swiftly his character becomes the most vocal proponent for fulfilling Hock’s apparent wish to murder Hildegard.
Still, all the hemming and hawing around what to do about Hildegard is easily Brooklyn 45’s weakest element. When the woman argues for her life, she speaks near-exclusively in platitudes and overwritten rebuttals, with lines about “choosing hate” and personifications of guilt. The phrases “melting pot” and “American dream” fit the film’s rather stagey setup insofar as you can imagine them being recited during a middle school play. The “right” decision is obvious, of course, leaving only the minuscule suspense of whether Paul can be convinced of that.
There are also scant insights here into the perceptions, hypocrisies, and morality of wartime violence, with the characters by and large offering simplistic, self-consciously timely dismissals of philosophical quandaries while conspicuously ignoring others. An early thread that suggests Bob is in denial about what Marla’s interrogation methods might have entailed during the war is left dangling, and Hock offs himself long before anyone can dig into his tendency to get others to do his dirty work. These deficiencies might have mattered less if Brooklyn 45 had more to offer in the way of visceral thrills, but in the end, none of the film’s goopy, gory moments can rescue it from its own determination to center its most cardboard conflict.
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