Review: The Banishing Tells a Timely Story of Past Horrors Amplified by War

Haunted houses are such an integral part of the horror genre that it’s easy to write them off as formulaic, overlooking the elemental fears that underlie the trope. It’s not enough to say that their archetypal power derives from the violation of home as a place that supposedly insulates a family from their fears of the outside world. The Banishing reminds us of the other side of the equation: that home is also a microcosm of the outside world, and a site where fears are passed down from one generation to the next.

Set in rural England in the months leading up to WWII, Christopher Smith’s film begins with newlywed Marianne (Jessica Brown Findlay) and her young daughter, Adelaide (Anya McKenna-Bruce), arriving at their new home. Marianne’s husband, Linus (John Heffernan), has been posted by the church to this stately manor in order to fill the role of the former vicar. The building is made unsettling by a grotesque profusion of flower motifs and a basement with strong resemblance to a catacomb. And from the outset, the household is rife with tension. Marianne desires a sexual marriage, but Linus recoils from her touch, combing his Bible for excuses to avoid committing an act he considers shameful. He has, to his mind, “saved” Marianne from a life of bohemian permissiveness, of which Adelaide is the product, having been born out of wedlock. Adelaide, for her part, obsesses over elaborate rituals involving the dolls she finds in her new bedroom, using them to stage a microcosm of the house.

When the inevitable ghostly disturbances begin to rupture the fabric of reality, the house is revealed to be the site of an age-old tussle between the forces of Christianity and paganism. These are embodied, respectively, by Linus’s boss, Malachi (John Lynch), and Harry Price (Sean Harris), a freethinker whose pulpit is the local pub. Both seek to influence the family, with Linus kowtowing to the severe and dominating Malachi, and Marianne drawn by Harry’s subversive charisma (which Harris conveys in superbly unhinged fashion).

All of this would be boilerplate if it weren’t for the film’s historical backdrop, which is more than a source of unease or period ambience. The Banishing achieves an unexpected timeliness by probing fears of regression. The question of what stance to take on the looming war exacerbates domestic tensions in the film. To his new flock, Linus preaches a pacifism bordering on passivity, while Marianne, an outspoken antifascist, donates their pots and pans to aid in war preparation. Meanwhile, the victim of an atrocity committed in their basement centuries ago threatens to renew a cycle of violence that consumed the home’s former occupants. To complicate matters, the victim, tortured for bearing a child out of wedlock by a Christian sect obsessed with punishing sinners, mirrors Marianne’s own life. Before the family can resolve their differences and shoulder the burden of war together, they must first confront and rectify the horrors that are haunting and tearing apart their home from within.

In attempting to juggle the nesting dolls of society, house, and psyche, The Banishing strays dangerously close to incoherency. As in many a horror film that thrives on atmosphere, there’s a thin line between catharsis and farce when the climax forces the object of horror out into the open. In the end, The Banishing is more horrifying on a conceptual than visceral level, and its ham-fisted ending condescends to the audience that it’s trusted up to this point. Instead of resolving in a satisfying manner, many of the carefully layered tensions up and disappear. For all that, the film applies the haunted house trope in unfamiliar ways, and between that, Harris’s performance, and the mirrors leading between the material and ghostly worlds, the result is something that’s almost more than the sum of its parts.