'Ghost Game' is a Dull Playtime with Haunted House Tropes [FrightFest 2024 Review]

​We all have that thing we do for a good kick. Some of us go skydiving (I would never). Others swim with sharks (count me out). And some, well, they break into people’s homes and play pranks on them. Hopefully none of you participate in that last one, though that is the central premise of Ghost Game, the latest from The Stylist director Jill Gevargizian and writer Adam Cesare (author of the “Clown in a Cornfield” novels). A grim film about how boredom of life haunts us and the community we sometimes seek to banish that mundane specter, it attempts to simultaneously play into haunted house tropes while also subverting them, ultimately delivering a dull game with one too many vague rules.
 
Having just played at FrightFest, the film follows Vin (Zaen Haidar), who discovers that his girlfriend, Laura (Kia Dorsey), has a hobby dubbed the Ghost Game, in which she and her partner, Adrian (Sam Lukowski), break into homes and play pranks on the residents to make them think they are being haunted. Jealous of Adrian and desperate to hold onto Laura, Vin decides to join her for her next “haunt” at a supposedly haunted mansion where a woman drowned her loved ones before taking her own life. A new family has just moved in, and they seem like the perfect targets for the game. But when incidents begin occurring that neither Vin nor Laura claim responsibility for, they’re left to wonder, is it just a game, or do vicious spirits actually roam the house?
 
By opening on a previous haunt—it’s what Laura calls them—where we see a young girl wake up to Laura and Adrian in her room, resulting in a bit of violence, Ghost Game sets the stage for a “game” that isn’t nearly as innocent as the two claim it to be. Gevargizian and Cesare effectively establish that there is an inherent insidiousness to the so-called “hobby”, while also gutting the pair’s bullshit belief system. They have a morally opaque code, appearing shocked that Vin would think to consider them thieves, as if breaking into someone’s home and harming them is somehow a good deed. Laura does, in fact, believe this, offering the idea that they are giving people something to believe in by making them think their house is haunted. You might be rolling your eyes now, and that’s the point. Cesare is a writer often critical of the mental gymnastics some people perform to justify beliefs that allow them to escape the misery of their lives, and those themes are present here. We may be dumbfounded by Vin’s easy acceptance of how Laura likes to spend her free time—clunky as the performances in these early moments are—but it’s all with the intent of exposing the foolishness we allow into our life when things aren’t going how we imagined they would.
 
Aiming to toy with haunted house conventions, Ghost Game pulls all the usual tropes out from underneath the dusty floorboards. A gruesome backstory. A cobweb filled house that screams danger like the Lost in Space robot. Even the family that has just moved in will remind of a few haunters, featuring a deteriorating father who may or may not be about to murder his timid wife and on the spectrum child (The Shining, anyone?), as well as a ham-fisted inclusion of a storyline that has the struggling writer of a dad bring his family to the house so he can write about it, ala Sinister. Smoky atmosphere and sickly yellow lighting also give the already decrepit home a sense of rot that you can practically smell through the screen. All good and well, except the filmmakers spend more time leaning into clichés than they do subverting them. It’s rare that we see Vin and Laura committing any pranks, and even rarer that they face being discovered (despite arguing so loudly you’d think the family must constantly be wearing earplugs). The concept promises a tense game in which suspicion grows and characters can no longer trust each other, and shades of those elements are there, but the film is trying to do so much that various storylines conflict with and distract from each other. Ghost Game spends too much time trying to convince the audience that the house really is haunted, leaving the more intriguing pieces of the premise buried out back, much to its detriment.
 
A severe lack of focus and palpable tension leave Ghost Game as a film that can’t seem to manage more than a half-hearted “boo”. Scares arrive sparsely and with little set-up. Stiff direction and unconvincing performances make moments that should feel intense come off as silly. For a concept that, on the surface, feels like it should have the audience on the edge of our seats, it doesn’t manage to get there until towards the very end, even then going out with more of a whimper than a scream. Gevargizian and Cesare save answers until the last possible moment, ultimately leading us through eighty minutes of a dull haunted house movie we’ve seen a thousand times before attempting to throw something different at us. By the time this happens, though, Ghost Game has already dug its own grave.
 
An interesting haunted house concept held up by shaky beams consisting of tired tropes, Ghost Game tries to offer something subversive, but spends too much time setting up spooky pins before knocking them down. Gevargizian and Cesare are both talented at their craft, but ultimately, this feels like a step down a set of dusty stairs from what we’ve come to expect with their work. 

By Matt Konopka