A Ghost Waits

  Shot over a number of years with a rotating film crew, Adam Stovall’s A Ghost Waits is a fun, cute, black and white microbudget horror/romantic comedy mashup.

 Jack (MacLeod Andrews) is a handyman who earns his living by surveying vacant properties before they’re put on the market again. Because his own flat is being fumigated, he ends up having to stay at the latest place he’s surveying, a house where the previous tenants mysteriously left all their stuff behind.

 We know from a cold open that the reason for that is that the house is haunted. And when Jack spends a night there, he becomes a target for the resident ghost.
 At first the supernatural stuff is subtle; opening and closing doors, strange noises, that sort of thing, played mostly for comedy as Jack remains oblivious to it (this movie is only nominally horror; there are no scares.) There’s a cute bit where the ghost provides backup singing when Jack’s fooling around with a guitar.

 Jack’s a likeable character, a slacker type who nonetheless takes pride in his work and tries to be professional about it. This actually factors into the plot in a couple of ways: mainly, that when the haunting begins in earnest, his reluctance to leave his work half-done wins over his fear. So he decides to come back and confront the ghost.

 And here the film splits out in several interesting directions. For one, the ghost, Muriel (Natalie Walker,) is taken aback that someone would try to establish a dialog with her, and she goes back to a sort of underworld office (which looks exactly like a normal office) to ask her own boss for advice; Turns out Muriel is also a kind of blue collar worker, and the film’s nebulous metaphysics provide some really interesting parallels between her and Jack.
 This was my favourite aspect of the movie – once Jack and Muriel get to talking, they establish an easy rapport – Jack’s easy-going and talkative, Muriel is more reserved and old-fashioned, but both start questioning their… maybe not values, but what they’re doing and how they’re going about it. At one point Muriel accuses Jack of being The Enemy, because he’s the one who brings people into the house while she’s in charge of keeping them out… and the movie kind of supports that, with its wonky, low-key metaphysics. It’s great.

 Some complications are introduced when a junior, more gung-ho ghost is sent by Muriel’s supervisor to help her get rid of Jack. This is the second bit where Jack’s professionalism comes into play, because we’re shown that Muriel takes as much pride in her work as jack does.

 The script does an admirable job of setting up interesting tangents like that. It isn’t very good at being naturalistic, with a lot of lines that feel a bit too forcedly twee, and people talking at each other rather than having anything resembling a dialog. The love story, in particular, feels a bit too compressed, even though both actors sell it well and the story supports it well. The film had to be retooled and it shows (the fact that it’s black and white is just as practical as an aesthetic decision – it helped make the original footage mesh with the reshoots.)
 There are no special effects beyond some very simple makeup effects (which must have been hell to do at this budget level,) and the acting is... a little on the stilted side, with some slight over-emoting, but nothing that should take you out of the story. At eighty minutes, none of the film's problems are major enough to get in its own way.

 It’s not going to set anyone’s world on fire, and its quirky indie-style dialog can get to be a little exhausting, but it’s brisk, brings some cool/funny concepts to the table, and a shitload of charm. Not bad.