This review is a message for Mr. Wattley.
If anything is clear from Ghost Game it’s two things.
Firstly, writer Adam Cesare is having one hell of a 2024 and is rightfully getting the chance he deserves. His penned film Last Night at Terrace Lanes was an excellent debut screenplay, and his third entry into his Clown in the Cornfield series drops later this year. Secondly, The Stylist writer/director Jill Gevargizian isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. And that’s a damn good thing for horror. Working together, Gevargizian and Cesare mesh their two styles perfectly to create one hell of an engaging film.
Ghost Game comes at a very coincidental point in my life in an odd turn of events, or what I can only describe as a cruel irony. I’ve recently become frustratingly entranced with an older YouTube channel called Ally Law. He was a young British guy who popularized overnight challenges for views. With a group of friends, Ally would enter businesses (typically gyms, trampoline parks, pools, or water parks) near the end of their business hours and then hide until employees left. From there, they would spend the nighttime hours having a grand old time, leaving at sunrise or running from the cops if they would show up. Or as the British call them, policeman officers. I’ve started outlining a horror script based on this…and then I saw Ghost Game! You beat me to the punch Adam, and I concede that you wrote a script ten times better than I would have.
Ghost Game follows content creators Laura (Kia Dorsey) and Adrian (Sam Lukowski) who, at the behest of Mr. Wattley (Aidan Hughes), do extended overnight challenges in occupied houses. They create forced paranormal experiences and basically gaslight homeowners into thinking supernatural happenings are going on. Through a turn of events, Laura’s new beau Vin (Zaen Haidar) discovers her ominous occupation and strongarms his way between Laura and Adrian’s professional relationship—Vin takes Adrian’s spot in Laura’s latest haunt. Only, it seems the house they are entering may offer more than anyone bargained for…even the tenants who just moved in.
Mr. Wattley, and by proxy Laura and Adrian, have some sort of internet clout. To label them as influencers would be difficult, but it’s clear they have enough of a following to live well enough. Screenlife films have become one of the most overdone sub-subgenres and it’s gotten pretty lazy. Ghost Game gives us the best of both worlds. It’s clear from the start that Laura isn’t necessarily a good person. She’s not evil by any means, but what she does for a living is truly antagonistic. It should be stated Ghost Game is a different take on screenlife and doesn’t exist as a found footage film. Instead, it takes the content creators and puts them through horrors, but presents it to the audience as a regular film. This works in favor of the film and the audience. Rather than getting an hour and a half of Joseph Winters putting on a gratingly awful performance, we get content creators forced to reconcile their actions without making them perform like content creators.
The performances are stellar for everyone involved. But it’s Kia Dorsey who truly takes the CAKE. Each performer found excellent ways to perform against each other in fascinating ways, but Kia Dorsey is going to be a goddamn horror icon. She understands the genre and completely embodies the role of Laura in a way horror hasn’t seen in a long time. As much as I’ve been crapping on screenlife found footage movies, if this were found footage from Laura’s perspective, I would have been a thousand percent okay with that. She’s that good.
While this film was overall enjoyable, it did suffer in a couple of ways, though it didn’t take away from my overall enjoyment. The biggest pitfall Ghost Game faces is an incredibly rushed finale. It just…ends. This could be from Cesare being a relatively new screenwriter and trying to play it safe, or this could have been due to budgetary constraints. Ghost Game comes in at a lean hour and 25 minutes, and it definitely could have been 10 minutes longer without sacrificing the film’s pacing. The second issue I had with the film was its predictability. Again, it wasn’t enough to detract from the film, but it does feel incredibly on the nose.
A lesser filmmaker would have taken Ghost Game into the realm of found footage- but its charm lies in that it doesn’t exist as found footage. If you want a scarily exciting paranormal romp with a fresh outlook on the subgenre, then Ghost Game is the film for you.