Jack (MacLeod Andrews), a handyman, is sent to deal with checking a property when its latest tenants clear out in a hurry. This is apparently not the first time that people have done so, because the house is fairly haunted. This isn’t a spoiler; for one thing, check the title of the film, and for another, we get to see the eponymous ghost, Muriel (Natalie Walker), spook them people out the door right at the start of the film before things get going. Oh, well, anyway, Jack’s house is out of commission for fumigation and his alleged friends are either unwilling to put him up or studiously not answering the phone, so he throws himself into his work, as one does, and ends up crashing in a sleeping bag on the living room floor. Work however slows to a crawl pretty much immediately, as he doesn’t know what in the house was included in the lease and what belongs to the erstwhile tenants, and that’s not likely to be cleared up until they pull their finger out and get the movers in which is definitely happening but no one seems to have any idea when or at least if they do then they’re not keeping Jack in the loop. Also, yon ghost is screwing around and doing ghosty type things that aren’t really helping progress either. And yet he won’t leave, not until his job is done. Back at the ghost office however, Muriel’s boss (Amanda Miller) wants results! (And we can infer so does her boss, and presumably their boss, and so on.)

A Ghost Waits is the debut film by Adam Stovall. A haunted house film shot on a shoestring budget (I haven’t found specifics, but they claim it to have been five figures) while not really making a spectacle of its cheapness, it merges a bunch of genres and has a lot of fun and interesting ideas and, to cut a long story short, I wish I liked it more than I do. It’s the kind of film that has a lot to like about it, but somehow just doesn’t seem to click, at least for me. Evidently it has with quite a lot of people though, given the warm reception it’s seen at festivals and from critics who know a lot more than I do.

So… a recurring thing that seems to happen when writing these things is my fascination with ambitious things that don’t really succeed. A Ghost Waits has this odd thing where it’s hard to say that it doesn’t succeed somehow in what it sets out to do. While there are things that I don’t think work, it nevertheless doesn’t feel like it’s not doing precisely what it wants to be with them. The big thing that I don’t think works is mainly the much ballyhooed romantic comedy element that tends to dominate descriptions of the film, rather specifically the ‘romantic’ element. The shift in Jack and Muriel’s relationship to having a romantic component feels… abrupt. I’m not entirely sure if this is one of those problems that a lot of films have where the passage of time isn’t properly conveyed or if it is supposed to be a fairly quick development. To be fair, it does try and paper over the cracks there a bit with a quick bit of romantic cliche, which is perhaps more than some romantic comedies do. Furthermore, in the grander scheme of the film, there are elements that explain it away for ease of handwaving.

The grander scheme in question is one of the film’s most puzzling, I guess ‘parts’ is the way to put it. Unlike many tiny budgeted genre themed comedies which are invariably in black and white, a bizarrely sprawling section of films, this one doesn’t really go in for a self-consciously camp or kitsch or whatever aesthetic. Everything is played fairly earnestly, even the idea that haunting is just another job isn’t done in any tongue-in-cheek manner. While it’s clearly aware of its relationship to such things; it opens with that generic ‘Our Feature Presentation’ card that’s a standard part of B-movie throwbacks; it doesn’t really engage in the sorts of shenanigans that one expects of such fare. That is to say, it isn’t really pastiching anything in particular, at least not overall; there are a few scenes that directly evoke other ghost movies, but they’re not the focus of the film as a whole. In some ways it’s pretty refreshing to see, especially in something with a premise that could very easily lend itself to constantly winking at the audience, to see it not only play its various elements straight, or as straight as comedy will allow, but also do so reasonably successfully, but it does introduce us to the grander scheme question. The recurring motif throughout the film is that of isolation and loneliness; one could consider this as the reason why Jack apparently falls in love with the ghost in what feels like an obscenely short amount of time (all the aforementioned feelings are apparently mutual, but frankly it’s a lot more telling rather than showing on the other end), she’s there paying attention to him when no one else seems remotely bothered. That’s all well and good, but the puzzling element here is that the film doesn’t seem especially concerned with what all this means. What are the implications of all this? It’s kind of frustrating that it highlights and then skirts around all this (the director does talk a bit about it elsewhere, but the metaphor afoot doesn’t seem to be the best considered). Instead, it’s content to just be fairly cute and kind of funny. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does leave the film feeling less substantial (ho ho) than it could have been.