Haunted Mansion Review: Just As Tonally Disjointed As The Ride

Posted in: Disney, Kaitlyn Booth, Movies | Tagged: disney, haunted mansion, Review

Haunted Mansion is just as tonally disjointed as the infamous ride it is based on, trying to walk the line between horror and comedy while hiding the best parts of the film from prospective audiences.

Haunted Mansion is just as tonally disjointed as the infamous ride it is based on, trying to walk the line between horror and comedy while hiding the best parts of the film from prospective audiences.

Director: Justin Simien
Summary: A single mom named Gabbie hires a tour guide, a psychic, a priest, and a historian to help exorcise her newly bought mansion after discovering it is inhabited by ghosts.

Ever since Pirates of the Caribbean became a massive hit for Disney, they have tried to replicate that success with other movies based on theme park rides. However, none of those other attempts have really stuck.  This latest attempt, yet another stab at the Haunted Mansion, is no different. People who like the Haunted Mansion tend to be obsessed with every single detail of that ride and will be the first ones to point out when things in the movie don’t exactly line up the way they do in the ride. That can leave little room for creative expression when it comes to story. Still, the filmmakers behind Haunted Mansion decided the best way to capture the essence of the ride was to make the set dressing as authentic as possible and lean into the original ride’s tonal juxtaposition.

If you’ve ever ridden the Haunted Mansion ride, you’ll notice that it is almost two rides in one. The first half is genuinely unnerving, and once you get to the graveyard, it becomes a little goofier and more light-hearted. Imagineers couldn’t decide what kind of ride they wanted Haunted Mansion to be, so they just smashed two rides together, with the first half raising the tension and the second half being the release. It would be a bit harder to replicate something like that in a movie, but the film also can’t seem to figure out exactly what it wants to be, and it feels much less by design than the ride. Instead of a natural progression that helps the experience, Haunted Mansion, the movie swings between comedy and moments that will likely make some of the younger ones want to sleep with the lights on. This inconsistency might be true to the tone of the ride, but in a film, it comes across as Haunted Mansion not knowing how to pick a lane.

And the worst part is that the third aspect of the film, which the marketing has carefully hidden, is the strongest part. This is a minor spoiler for an aspect of the film’s story that the marketing decided not to focus on. That minor story is a rather mature and deep discussion on loss, grief, and healing. It makes sense that of the three things Haunted Mansion is, the marketing would focus on horror and comedy because “complex discussions of grief and healing in the wake of loss” is hard to put market in a trailer. This is a shame because many people don’t know that aspect of the film is there, and it’s the strongest part. Haunted Mansion really shines when it takes the time to explore that. It shouldn’t feel disappointing when a movie about a haunted house swings back into horror because the grief discussions were better, which goes double for the comedy.

While that part of the story might be stronger, and there are some memorable performances, Haunted Mansion is another film that has been released in a summer that hasn’t been kind to films that are less than spectacular. While films like Elemental that weren’t smash hits slowly made their way to a decent box office, there have been just as many high-profile flops that aren’t bad but aren’t great either. This film had serious competition with Barbie and Oppenheimer the week before and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and Meg 2: The Trench the week after. It’s also a movie that feels like it should have been released in the fall or at least the late summer. It doesn’t fit with the vibes of triple digits temperatures that a decent portion of the prospective audience in the Northern Hemisphere might be feeling. There was likely no winning for any film released this weekend, but it is a shame to see something with plenty of love for the source material getting essentially thrown under the proverbial bus.

Haunted Mansion will likely become a favorite film for those obsessed with the ride because of all the little things hidden in the background. It’s not great, but it’s far from bad.  It overstays its welcome a little, with a run time of over two hours. There is also a good chance this will find a second life on Disney+. Movies are expensive, and it’s not surprising that audiences have to pick and choose which ones they want to spend their hard-earned money on. Most people already have Disney+, and when this film is released there, likely in time for Halloween, maybe more will come to enjoy it. However, as it stands now, the exploration of grief and healing isn’t good enough to sit through an overall disjointed film. It’s not “welcome foolish mortals,” but “welcome to the small audience that is loyal but isn’t enough to counter massive studio blockbuster budgets.” An actual ghost would be more surprising than a studio knowing how to properly budget a film so they could get into the green.

Haunted Mansion

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Review by Kaitlyn Booth

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6.5/10

Haunted Mansion will likely become a favorite film for those obsessed with the ride because of all the little things hidden in the background. It’s not great, but it’s far from bad, too, and while it does overstay, its welcome a little, being that it is a little over two hours long. There is also a good chance this will find a second life on Disney+.

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