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A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
01
Why this pick
A meticulously controlled haunted-house mystery with a period setting, lonely estate, grieving protagonist and escalating uncertainty over what is real; its hushed dread closely suits The Awakening.
02
Why this pick
Its grand, isolated old building and child-centred apparitions turn bereavement into deeply felt Gothic suspense, balancing investigative momentum with the melancholy that drives The Awakening.
03
Why this pick
Another postwar British ghost story in which personal loss follows an investigator into a remote, decaying property; it offers similarly polished period atmosphere and steadily tightening scares.
04
Why this pick
This refined country-house chiller shares the ambiguous supernatural perspective, unsettling children and psychological restraint of The Awakening, letting unease build through suggestion rather than spectacle.
05
Why this pick
For its lavishly tactile Gothic mansion, spectral encounters and emotionally wounded heroine, it delivers a more romantic and visually heightened companion to The Awakening’s ghostly melancholy.
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01 / THE STORY
In 1921, Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall) is a published author who works with the police to debunk supernatural hoaxes and thus to expose charlatans. It is revealed that she lost her lover in the war and that she "hunts" ghosts in an attempt to see if it is possible to bring him back. She receives a visit from Robert Mallory (Dominic West), a teacher from a boys' boarding school in Cumbria which had been a private home until twenty years earlier. Robert explains that there have been sightings of the ghost of a child at the school and that such a sighting might have been the cause of the recent death of a pupil. Although Florence initially refuses to help Robert investigate, his concern for the children - whom he describes as being almost like orphans - at the boarding school causes her to change her mind, since she is an orphan herself. At the school, she meets Maud (Imelda Staunton), the housekeeper, who tells Florence that she has read her books. After she conducts an investigation on her first night at the school, Florence comes to the conclusion that the sightings are the result of a prank, as two pupils had bullied a third into dressing as a ghost. With regards to the recent death, one of the teachers admits that he had forced the deceased pupil to stand outside the school in order to "man up" after he claimed to have seen the ghost, thus scaring the young boy and causing him to have a fatal asthma attack. The school then closes for half-term with the only occupants being Florence, Robert, Maud, and Tom (Isaac Hempstead-Wright), a pupil whose parents live in India.
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02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
Tom
Constance Strickland
Freddie Strickland
Reverend Hugh Purslow
Alexander Cathcart
Vera Flood
Albert Flood
Edward Judd
