Brooklyn 45 (Ted Geoghegan, 2023)
A thought-provoking ghost story for the Xmas
Just a few short months after the end of WWII, a group of former military colleagues reunite to conduct a séance.
Each of them has issues and is struggling to adjust to life in peacetime, following their individual heroics during the war.
Our cast of characters includes Marla (a renowned interrogator who suffered a catastrophic injury during the war), Bob (Marla’s Pentagon clerk husband, the only one of the group who didn’t serve in the war), Archie (an openly-gay triggerman, currently accused by the media of committing war crimes), Paul (still in uniform, still not ready to accept the war is finally over), and Clive (their former commander, grieving the recent death of his wife).
It’s immediately clear that settling back into civilian life — or even post-war life — has not been easy for any of those assembled here. The lone exception being, of course, Bob, who is both looked down on by the other men and who seems more than a little intimated by the rah-rah-war attitude of his wife’s heroic brothers-in-arms.
Clive, perhaps, has it worst of all. Not long after he returned to the States, his wife, Susan, committed suicide. And that is why he has called them all to his house; he needs them to help him conduct a séance. Reluctantly, they agree.
All of this setup happens expeditiously and efficiently. We know we’re here for a horror movie, and Brooklyn 45 wastes no time getting us to it. Sure enough, there are some typical séance tropes employed — banging from the closet, electrical glitches, ghostly apparitions — but there are quite a few surprises as well; not least of which is the emergence of a German woman tumbling from the closet.
A neighbor of Clive’s, Hildegard, was kidnapped by the good colonel — and he now implores his most loyal soldiers to kill her, claiming that she is a Nazi spy. Never mind that his only evidence of this is that his late wife was sure of it. (Susan apparently suffered from acute mental illness, and towards the end of her life became fixated on her belief that her German neighbor was secretly a Nazi spy.)
And so ensures a chamber drama that evokes all manner of ghosts: real ones, sure, but also those even less tangible if also all-too-real…
Clive has locked everyone in, and no-one is getting out until they decide what to do with the alleged spy. Former allies argue. Ambiguous morality is tossed about like a hot potato. Truths are revealed. Themes of guilt, trauma, trust, and xenophobia run rampant.
If War is Hell, then this particular Brooklyn townhome’s parlor is some kind of special purgatory for those who are simultaneously both the best of mankind and its worst too.
Brooklyn 45 is a highly original take on the séance subgenre of horror cinema but is its focus on the human drama that is most haunting. There are those who will argue that this film’s classification as a horror movie is misleading.
I disagree. Brooklyn 45 is a great demonstration of my resolute belief that horror is an incredibly malleable genre. There is no limit to what a great horror story can be, because great horror can be almost anything.
With that in mind, Brooklyn 45 feels like a classic Twilight Zone episode, updated with a modern polish. And that, dear horror fan, is no bad thing.