Review of the film “The Conjuring. Unfinished Chapter by Paul Wilkins

At the box office – Paul Wilkins’ thriller The Conjuring. An Unfinished Chapter ”(The Ghost Writer), dedicated to the dangers of the writing profession and growing up in the shadow of a famous father. The authors clearly aimed at a chilling story in the spirit of Stephen King, but they were let down by the modesty of the means at their disposal, believes Yulia Shagelman.

Stephen King’s “King of Horrors” draws inspiration for his works from the surrounding reality, and since his reality is a writing craft, it is writer’s nightmares that often come to life on the pages of his books (and then on the screen in their film adaptations). Fear of a blank slate, professional stagnation or, on the contrary, too violent imagination, fear of overly enthusiastic fans who do not distinguish the author from the lyrical hero, or even of his own characters who suddenly begin to live their own uncontrollable life – all this is in his books: from short story “The Almighty Word Processor” to acclaimed masterpieces like “Misery” and “The Shining”. The influence of these last novels and the films based on them, as well as, for example, the story “Secret Window, Secret Garden”, also filmed, albeit with less success, is clearly felt in the “Unfinished Chapter”.

In the original, the film is called The Ghost Writer – this concept in Russian roughly corresponds to a “literary black man”, and it means a person who writes books for someone else, most often for some celebrity not endowed with the gift of words. But Paul Wilkins and his co-author Guy Fee take the literal meaning of these words – “ghost writer”, populating their picture with phantoms, about which the main character, and ideally the audience, cannot understand until the very end whether they are the fruits of a sick fantasy or greetings from very real past.

The once-successful detective Gilliger Graham (Luke Mably) can’t deliver the new hit that his agent (Howard Lee) demands of him. He runs away from this problem under the pretext that he needs to deal with the inheritance – a cottage lost in the wilderness, where some thieves or vandals seemed to be trying to invade. It was in this house that the late Irwin Graham (Robert Portal), a far more famous and reputedly more talented writer than his son, wrote his books and gave young Gill (Iago Erith) lessons in worldly wisdom like “Don’t aim your gun, if you don’t know how to shoot” and “There are no heroes in real life”.

It is clear that constant comparisons with his father in favor of the latter put pressure on Gilliger and make him doubt himself. He unsuccessfully tries to swoop down on the first page of his future novel and, filling another failure with a fair amount of alcohol, falls asleep right at the laptop. At four in the morning, he is awakened by a knock on the door and a woman’s voice insistently demanding to let the owner in. She turns out to be the attractive brunette Jane (Andrea Dack), whom Gilliger sees for the first time and not too gentlemanly tries to kick her out. He even succeeds, but in the morning Jane in a negligee is found in his bed and treats him as if they were lovers.

Gilliger puts her out the door again, but then another stranger (Brendan Patricks) appears on his doorstep – either her jealous husband, or an accomplice who hunts celebrities with her. Gradually, Gilliger realizes that both of them, although they look more like his peers, are somehow connected with Irwin, and memories of something terrible that happened in the cottage when he was a child begin to return to him. Or is it his fantasy, inspired by the last, unfinished manuscript of his father, which he finds in a hiding place under the sink? The hero falls into a strange state on the verge between sleep and reality, in which he either follows in the footsteps of Irwin, then he himself takes his place, then he tries to cling to the remnants of normalcy, turning to a local realtor (Matthew Ure), who knew Graham Sr. well, for help. .

The idea underlying the film, despite its secondary nature, is quite interesting, but the extremely low budget of the production prevents it from being fully realized. The heroes running in circles around the cottage, brandishing fake axes, seem to be participants in an amateur performance, and the actors are very squeezed in their desire to convey all the emotions they experience. Therefore, it is impossible to believe in the fears that overwhelm Gilliger – they remain disembodied ghosts on a blank sheet of paper.