Haunted Mansion

A story that mainly serves as an excuse to publicize the attraction ride, from which countless details and characters are extracted. [Full review in Spanish]

Disney’s Haunted Mansion is a fair enough choice for a family night in, experienced from the comfort of your couch, where the flaws are less glaring and the price of admission for Disney+ is cheaper.

No central theme emerges beyond a blandly generalised one about moving on from the past, which is to say that overtly at least, this Haunted Mansion plays it even safer than its 2003 predecessor.

Owen Wilson is a priest who may be a man of the con rather that the cloth. He does manage to exorcise a few jokes out of a demonically unfortunate predicament.

This is a grimly efficient IP cash-in that defuses any potential scares with a hot-pink colour palette and a bunch of oddly specific and distracting product placements.

The movie only gels once, in a sequence featuring Winona Ryder as Pat, a hilariously sour member of the heritage industry. Serenely quirky and coherent, this segment offers a haunting glimpse of what might have been.

Haunted Mansion feels like a movie that’s tailor-made for Disney+, rather than as a 150-million dollar blockbuster.

Haunted Mansion comes to audiences 20 years after the Eddie Murphy led version. Although curiously debuting in the summer, the film’s cast and script bring the necessary topic of grief and how to work through it to the forefront, all in an unabashed way.

One of the biggest duds of the year.

A movie based on a theme park ride is always going to be a marketing exercise, but what’s remarkable about Haunted Mansion is how uninterested it is in pretending to be anything more.