For all its pedestrian qualities, there are a couple of big plus points in its favour. They are Rebecca Hall and Dominic West.

| Oct 26, 2022

Though the story spirals a little out of control in the film's final scenes, "The Awakening" offers the low-key pleasures of an old-fashioned thriller and a lovely central performance.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 30, 2012

Whatever.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 30, 2012

The cast is anchored by two wonderful actresses: Imelda Staunton and Rebecca Hall, whose talents are squandered on this lackluster horror drama.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 23, 2012

West is so underused, he barely gets to raise an eyebrow in this watchable but pedestrian film, with Hall ghostbusting in a Downton Abbey setting. Cliched and never chilling.

| Aug 17, 2012

A dull British import that never lives up to the pretensions of its period setting.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 17, 2012

An enjoyably old-fashioned ghost story in the vein of "The Others" and "The Orphanage."

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 17, 2012

"The Awakening" is nonsense, but with its posh British cast and colors drained to near-gray, it's very solemn nonsense.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Aug 17, 2012

A lot of tension and buildup leads us to ... well, it's hard to say.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 16, 2012

"The Awakening" takes so many unnecessary twists and turns that the final one, which should be a biggie, ends up feeling inconsequential.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 16, 2012

For all of its airs of refinement, "The Awakening" is pretty stale stuff.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 16, 2012

The film benefits enormously from having the luminous Rebecca Hall as its lead. It also gains an ominous gravity from the haunted, wounded and wobbly England in which it's set.

| Aug 16, 2012

This stately chiller owes a lot to 1960s British flicks like "The Innocents" and "The Haunting," but unfortunately heads towards cliches with every step.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 16, 2012

There is nothing in the film that will keep you awake at night. Instead, "The Awakening" works much more subtly, with a profound sense of dread and resignation, a death-obsessed movie given life by Hall's performance.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 16, 2012

It's routine stuff as horror setups go, especially if you've seen such obvious influences as The Orphanage and The Others.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 16, 2012

The Awakening is both a ghost story and an exploration of mourning and survivor's guilt, though a late twist turns the film away from its delicate merging of these two themes into something both more plotty and stilted.

| Original Score: B- | Aug 16, 2012

The film takes pains to ensure that the story feel like laborious toil rather than a trip through the dark side of the ethereal.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Aug 15, 2012

This handsomely made spook story (love those echo-prone hallways!) becomes less involving the more the narrative's mysteries are solved.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 14, 2012

Hall's committed performance validates even the maddest developments, and she slips into the period well, recalling Virginia Woolf in her lank, swan-necked bearing and tremulous suffering.

| Aug 14, 2012

If cinema is a dream, 'The Awakening,' I suppose, has just enough oomph to keep you hitting snooze

| Original Score: C- | Aug 14, 2012