THE AWAKENING UK thriller-horror, directed by Nick Murphy, starring Rebecca Hall, Dominic West, Imelda Staunton. 107 min. Rated 15.

Here is a supernatural melodrama in the tradition of "The Innocents," or Alejandro Amenábar's "The Others." Rebecca Hall plays Florence Cathcart, a campaigning rationalist and hoax-buster in 1919, exposing phoney spiritualists who prey on credulous souls tormented with postwar grief. Then schoolmaster Robert Mallory (Dominic West) asks her to investigate a tragic case at his boarding school: a sickly boy has reportedly died of fright at seeing a ghostly child with a "twisted face." Florence accepts, suspecting some deception, or group hysteria. But naturally things are not as clear as that. There are some nicely creepy moments, and director and co-writer Nick Murphy interestingly dramatises some of the neuroses feeding the appetite for ghostly phenomena – repressed sexuality, guilt and self-harm. — Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian