Film Review: The Changeling

Film Review:

The Changeling

A changeling, in traditional folk tales, is a child stolen by the faerie folk and replaced with a fairy child. It's a cuckoo for humans, and likely came about as a way of explaining post-natal depression in an era before, well, psychological science. It is absolutely not - take note YA authors - another name of a shape shifters.

The Haunting of Changeling House

Composer John Russel (George C. Scott) lost his wife and daughter four months ago in a car accident; now he's ready to start working again, and start living again. He takes up a position in a university at Washington and moves into a house that could not be more clearly haunted from the moment that you set eyes on it. Russel doesn't, however, have the foresight to know that he is in a horror movie, so settles in to his new life. Doesn't take long before his new life throws up a surprise or two...

You've seen this movie before, you've read this book before; you've crouched fireside with a torch under your chin and told this story before. This is a haunted house story at its most essential. A guy lives in a house, spooky things happen, he investigates and it turns out the ghost of a wronged soul dwells within the walls. What makes The Changeling absolutely worth watching is how well-realised it is within that very well worn framework.

The House Talks

The Changeling moves at a slow clip. It takes its time. He doesn't move into the house for the first fifteen minutes, and there are no horror set-pieces. The filmmakers assemble the pieces slowly and carefully, lulling the audience into the world in an understated way. There's a patience to it that is gratifying. As such, tension simmers and the creepiness - well, it creeps slowly but surely under your skin.

One of the focuses of the story early on, as it motors at a sedate pace, is the surroundings. The film is filmed with a great emphasis on place, especially within the house itself. Wide shots aplenty. Many of the shots are either from low or high angles, making them seem small in the house, or making the house tower over them. It is the star of the show, and it is shot like the star of the show.

Aesthetically, the house itself is just a perfect piece of casting. It screams haunted house. It looks like how I imagined the house in The Haunting of Hill House - the original adaptation of which (The Haunting, 1963) is no doubt a key inspiration. Early on especially, it feels like the house itself is the malicious, malevolent presence. Banging doors, noises in the pipes, running taps: classic staples of haunted housery.

Deja-Vu

One of the things that struck me very strongly during watching The Changeling is the similarities that it bares towards many of the key films in the eruption of J-horror that happened during the noughties. One scene specifically surely has to have had some influence on Ringu - the source novel was written over a decade after The Changeling hit theatres.

The iconography is very similar too, and very good to boot. Much of The Changeling's most memorable moments are not what happens so much as the images. Whilst the story may be deftly hitting familiar beats, the power of the visuals and the lightning help The Changeling feel like its own beast, and lend power to what could otherwise be tired and generic. The wheelchair, especially, is a haunting image, and one that is borrowed to this day in haunting house stories - the modern Hill House adaptation, to call back to early, is a good example of this.

The other thing that The Changeling has in common with J-horror is that your dear narrator, man of iron nerves, actually found it genuinely creepy in a way I haven't since I watched Ju-on (The Grudge) as a teenager. Whatever it was, there is a quiet power to the visuals, the score and the pace, that really had me on edge.

Big Endings

And then the end happened. In every sense it is absolutely the right ending to the film - it ties up the plot points and escalates both the set pieces and imagery in scale. Both in terms of the storytelling and the filmmaking the decisions made are the right ones.

Unfortunately, it overplays its hand and really than ratchetting up into horror, descends slightly into farce. It becomes the silly and generic spookfest that the premise suggests it should be. It's all very well done and fun in a schlocky sense, but it is does not fit tonally with the understated and genuinely creepy movie it was capping off. A shame, because otherwise The Changeling smashes it out of the park.