Hollow Season
The house remembers who left.
- horror
- mystery
A first-rate opening half hour attached to a haunted-house film that has nothing of its own to say.
What works
- A genuinely great cold open
- Whitlock knows exactly where to put the camera
- No digital jump scares
What falls short
- Every beat after the first act is borrowed
- The rules of the haunting change whenever the plot needs them to
- A closing scene that undoes its own best idea
The first ten minutes of Hollow Season are as good as mainstream horror gets this year: a single unbroken take through a house being packed up, in which nothing supernatural happens and everything feels wrong.
What follows is a competent, entirely familiar haunted-house picture. Whitlock is a real filmmaker and the craft never drops. But the screenplay is a collection of beats you have seen, arranged in the order you expect them, and the film's own mythology contradicts itself twice before the end.
The verdict
Rent it for the opening. Do not stay up late for the rest.
One more thing about that cold open
It is worth saying plainly: the unbroken take that opens this film is a genuine piece of craft, and it will be taught. That it is attached to this screenplay is the year's most frustrating mismatch.