A home invasion is a terrifying prospect, though it’s even more blood-curdling, especially from a third-party vantage, if the occupants are unaware of the intruder. The Internet has coined the term “phrogging” for this phenomenon, defined as the act of secretly living in someone else’s home, literally often hopping from place to place, with the homeowner none the wiser. This sort of bone-chilling premise seems ready-made to be milked for an effective horror movie, with the artistic zenith unquestionably belonging to Black Christmas, Bob Clark’s 1974 masterpiece, which depicted members of a sorority house being picked off one-by-one by a deranged maniac hiding in their attic. Other notable examples include The Strangers, You’re Next, and Don’t Breathe, with the latter film actually placing viewers into the shoes of the trespassers themselves. That particular twist forms the narrative backbone for Ghost Game, the latest film by director Jill Gevargizian, which looks to explore the daring individuals who partake in this experience for the thrill. Gevargizian is previously responsible for 2020’s The Stylist, a film that offered a nifty spin on the serial killer subgenre, demonstrating the filmmaker’s keen visual eye and talent for coaxing strong performances out of her actors. Four long years later, Gevargizian has finally returned with her second feature, and the results are… extremely underwhelming. Whereas The Stylist showed great promise of a budding voice in horror, Ghost Game is a lousy, complete creative step backwards. Cut-rate, ugly, and atrociously acted, Ghost Game is one of the year’s weakest features, and a disappointing follow-up to Gevargizian’s debut.
The film’s home invaders in question are Laura (Kia Dorsey) and Adrian (Sam Lukowski), business partners who shoot their exploits on hidden cameras to share online with fellow content creators in a “Ghost Game” web series, with the best of the bunch being a mythical figure known as Mr. Watley. From pranking homeowners by replacing their fresh milk with spoiled product to rearranging furniture in unconventional methods, the Ghost Gamers operate under three strict rules: don’t get caught, don’t steal anything, and always have a plan. Uncovering their scheme is Laura’s boyfriend Vin (Zaen Haidar), who expresses outright repulsion but also mild curiosity at these domestic violations, and he soon finds himself asking to join them. Reluctantly inviting Vin to their next gig, the trio set their sights on the Halton House, a dilapidated mansion with a notorious history — the matriarch turned crazed and slaughtered her entire family — and has been recently sold to a family of three. Breaking in one evening, the three begin planting surveillance bugs around the house when they discover, to their horror, that the new homeowners have arrived, observing mother Meg (Emily Bennett), daughter Samantha (Vienna Maas), and stepfather Pete (Michael C. Williams) as they settle into their new abode (that the family decides to move in during the middle of the night is one of the strains at credibility the film never bothers to address). Quietly shifting about the house as one night turns into several, the Ghost Gamers also discover the Halton House’s tendency to go bump in the night, and that its haunted past may in fact be more than legend.
There are no two ways about it: Ghost Game reads as bargain-binned entertainment. While The Stylist offered a respectable amount of polish, Ghost Game is aggressively cheap-looking, staging many of its scenes in dingy rooms and claustrophobic attic spaces that don’t offer much discernible geography for viewers to explore. The cumulative effect is of an eyesore, and not helping matters are the performances, with the Ghost Gamers themselves coming off as a highly unlikable bunch of pricks, the performances relegated to the territory of constant bickering that in execution feels like it would be more at home in a community college Drama 101 course. The family doesn’t fare much better, with Williams stuck playing a one-note alcoholic monster as the cruel stepfather, while Maas is unfortunately saddled with the role of an autistic child, speaking in truncated sentences and allowing her to develop something of a sixth sense as the mansion gets spookier. It’s simply one giant misstep after an another, with Gevargizian stretching each bit of incident to painfully interminable lengths as she sweats to barely fill 80 minutes of runtime (and that’s before the end credits tack on an additional five minutes of the slowest text crawl you could ever imagine). Of course, one could make the case that Gevargizian is deliberately trying to subvert expectations for her follow-up; The Stylist was sleek, elegant, and, well, stylish, while Ghost Game is messy, frantic, and drab — but that would require a very generous reading, and even then the aesthetic choice would need to feel governed by something beyond budgetary constraints. If Ghost Game is the final product of Gevargizian’s past four years, a third feature should be met with considerable trepidation.
DIRECTOR: Jill Gevargizian; CAST: Kia Dorsey, Aidan Hughes, Zaen Haidar, Michael C. Williams; DISTRIBUTOR: Epic Pictures; IN THEATERS: October 18; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 26 min.
