Review of the film “The Haunting of Garrett House” by Paris Zarcilla

A film by an English director of Filipino origin (Raging Grace) is in theaters. Mikhail Trofimenkov it seemed that the director only remembered about twenty minutes before the end that he was making a horror film, and not a social drama about the plight of illegal immigrants in the UK.

Zarcilla staged a film quartet in a ponderous London mansion, each of whose participants alternately turns out to be either a victim or an executioner. Its only participant who almost never steps out of the role of victim is Joy (Max Eigenmann). An illegal Filipino immigrant, the single mother of daughter Grace (Jayden Boadilla), subsisting as a day laborer as a cleaner and cook for arrogant white masters. And besides, she is ungodly in debt to a shady guy who supposedly guarantees his clients obtaining legal status. So the offer to work for the Garrett family with their five-hundred-year-old business seems like manna from heaven to Joy.

But she is forced to hide Grace from her employers, hiding it in the closet or under the bed. It would be better, of course, to lock the child in a cage. Grace’s favorite pastime is adding spices to her mother’s coffee (at best). In the worst case, add something to the bad aunt’s shampoo that will cause her hair to fall out, her face to be covered with red spots, and it’s good if her eyes don’t fall out.

That same bad Aunt Katherine (Leanne Best) manages the Garrett mansion and diligently and selfishly keeps an old uncle (David Heyman) in a medically induced coma, even in an unconscious state reminiscent of Dracula, dead and content.

And finally, the fourth member of the quartet is the uncle himself, carelessly brought out of a coma by the kind-hearted Joy. It is curious that the magical remedy for reviving the half-dead turns out to be a certain Philippine decoction, actually a hallucinogenic drug.

Oh yes, there is also a fifth heroine. But she sleeps in a crystal coffin somewhere in the hidden basements of the mansion. And what role it plays in the plot seems unclear to the director himself.

Basically, the plot is organized according to the principle “if in the first act there is a gun hanging on the wall.” If at the beginning of the film Catherine regrets that there was no fire in the mansion, which promises her incredible insurance, then you can be sure that closer to the end the screen will blaze with a fierce flame.

But the main thing in the film is the credits that interrupt the action: quotes, first of all, from the great poem by the great imperialist Rudyard Kipling, “White’s Burden.” Because The Haunting of Garrett House is not so much a thriller as it is an anti-colonial or, as they say now, a post-colonial pamphlet. And even a crowd of zombies who suddenly occupy the doomed mansion towards the end are not just zombies, but Filipinos tortured over the years of exploitation and occupation. The fact that the Philippines exploited and occupied the United States, and the British seem to have no historical guilt, is indifferent to Zarsilla.

The anti-colonial message could be read on its own, without references to Kipling. It is enough to see how the reanimated Garrett, having thrown off the mask of a kind grandfather, eats chicken with his hands with a guttural growl, to understand: here it is, as they would say in the USSR of the 1920s, the mug of imperialism.

But the problem with the film is that Joy and the Garretts, in between arson, knife attacks and other poisonings, constantly exchange verbose ideological invective.

The white gentlemen insist that people from the third world owe them all their lives, that it was they who gave them work, a roof over their heads, otherwise they would all die in their lousy Philippines. And Joy proudly replies that, on the contrary, white gentlemen would die if it weren’t for the labor force walking their dogs, taking care of their children, scrubbing their toilets. Joy, of course, is mostly right. But when rightness thunders from the screen more than once or twice, it makes you want to act as the “white devil’s advocate.” Or, in any case, ask the director to have more zombies on the screen and less ideology.