Certificate: 12A (sex references, dangerous behaviour, violence). Running Time: 125 mins. UK Distributor: Netflix
WHO’S IN IT?
Anthony Mackie, David Harbour, Tig Notaro, Erica Rash, Jennifer Coolidge, Isabella Russo, Niles Fitch, Steve Coulter, Faith Ford, Jahi Di’Allo Winston
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
Christopher Landon (director, writer), Marty Bowen, Dan Halsted and Nate Miller (producers), Marc Spicer (cinematographer), Ben Baudhuin (editor)
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
A ghost (Harbour) becomes a viral sensation, and a target of the CIA…
WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON WE HAVE A GHOST?
Filmmaker Christopher Landon has truly made a name for himself with horror-tinged spins on classic movie concepts, from the Groundhog Day-like time-loop comedy/slasher mystery Happy Death Day (and its surprisingly solid sequel) to the Freaky Friday-esque body-swap comedy/gory serial killer thriller Freaky, but with his latest feature We Have a Ghost, he’s switching things around slightly. Here, he’s working with perhaps the most classic of horror templates – the haunted house, and its supernatural residents – and then bringing to it a more realistic sensibility that makes an eerie amount of sense in 2023.
If that sounds like it’ll be a total Gen-Z nightmare, don’t wake up in a sweat just yet, for We Have a Ghost is a reasonably thoughtful, often funny, and indeed very touching comedy-horror (emphasis on “comedy”) that offers some decent fun for a lot of families.
The film begins as most haunted house movies tend to do: a family – in this instance being parents Frank (Anthony Mackie) and Melanie (Erica Rash), and teenage sons Fulton (Niles Fitch) and Kevin (Jahi Di’Allo Winston) – moves in to a slightly dilapidated and rundown old house, which of course also happens to be inhabited by a ghost (David Harbour). However, instead of screaming and running for their lives, the family ends up recording the ghost – named Ernest, for the name on its bowling shirt – on their phones, and very quickly Ernest becomes an online viral sensation. However, while Frank is keen to monopolise on his online success as much as possible, young Kevin befriends the ghost and tries to help him remember his past, which also puts them in the crosshairs of obsessive ghost-hunting CIA agent Leslie Monroe (Tig Notaro).
Narratively, We Have a Ghost isn’t quite as fresh as some of Landon’s other comedy-horror entries, as it does tend to stick more to the familiar “boy-and-his-[BLANK]” formula than anything else, which often makes it easy to tell what’s coming next and where exactly we are in this story. However, that isn’t to say that the rest of the film feels just as well-worn; in fact, Landon brings a lot of the same upbeat comedic energy he previously brought to the Happy Death Day movies and Freaky, which here – particularly with it being targeted more towards an audience of families and teens – gives the otherwise standard template a jolt of personality and charm. There are plenty of fun scenes where characters, including this rather lovable ghost, are just simply messing with other people, such as when a campy TV psychic played by Jennifer Coolidge pays the house a visit, and Landon leans hard into the silliness of it all to really drive home how much he likes to laugh both with and at the regular conventions of typical ghost stories. You can tell that this was a film made by people who are passionate about this kind of movie, and aren’t just cynically replicating all the familiar beats step by step just to fill itself out.
Aside from his uncanny ability to blend traditional narratives with horror flavourings, perhaps Landon’s biggest asset as a filmmaker is his strength in making his central characters easy to like and feel comfortable with rooting for, while also offering some surprising dimensions to others which don’t make them quite as black-and-white as you’d expect. You definitely warm up to this ghost very fast, not least because David Harbour is extremely likeable in a mostly silent performance where he can express so much emotional range without any audible dialogue, and this central family – even Anthony Mackie’s opportunist Frank who at times, especially when he’s milking his viral star for all he’s worth, comes across as more soulless than the actual ghost – is a believable enough unit for you to understand why they function the way that they do, and make the decisions that they make. There’s also some room for Tig Notaro’s antagonist to grow as a character, and she also has moments where she gets to feel like an actual person rather than an evil governmental archetype. The vast majority of Landon’s characters are fun and plentiful to watch, and they share a rather sweet connection with each other that you really do care about them and whether or not they achieve all of their goals by film’s end.
It’s certainly not a perfect film, for its conventional trappings do often tend to prevent it from reaching its full potential with some of its main ideas. While the movie gets a lot of fuel out of the idea that a ghost in a haunted house could not only fail to generate the right amount of scares, but then become a massive internet celebrity to where people on TikTok are even doing some dumb physical challenges related to his ability to travel through walls, the fact that it does stick so closely to the “boy-and-his-[BLANK]” formula means that it’s very easy to predict certain outcomes and forecast which messages that it ultimately wants to teach its target audience. It can seem corny, which I’m sure was the intention to begin with, but in a way where you can’t always tell if they’re being genuine or simply spoofing certain tropes. There’s also a climax which, admittedly, contains one of the few twists I didn’t see coming, but comes almost out of nowhere to side-line the much bigger threat which had been more developed across the rest of the film.
However, We Have a Ghost is watchable and wholesome enough to overcome some of its more glaring flaws, and shows that even when he removes all the gore and gruesome deaths, Christopher Landon still puts a lot of heart and soul into his horror-tinged comedies that show a decent amount of the respect to the sub-genres he’s always paying homage to.
SO, TO SUM UP…
We Have a Ghost is a fun and enjoyable comedic take on the classic haunted house movie, which sees writer-director Christopher Landon get a lot of mileage out of his central concept and its very likeable cast of characters, but a reliance on much safer narrative formulas ultimately prevent it from reaching its full potential.
