This is a very different review than I would have written two weeks ago.
Disney’s Haunted Mansion wants to engage the audience in two ways. First and most definitely foremost, the film offers wall-to-wall allusions to the iconic rides from both Disneyland and Walt Disney World layered over a handful of laughs and scares. I’m a massive fan of the park attraction and its quaint, outdated “thrills,” but I’m confident even I didn’t catch all of the easter eggs stuffed into the film. Frankly, the production design serves the most fun in the film as it appears to have been constructed by Disney Imagineers themselves. It creates an environment for a talented cast (including LaKeith Stanfield, Tiffany Haddish, Jamie Lee Curtis, Owen Wilson, Danny DeVito, Rosario Dawson, and more) to run around in a barely Scooby Doo-level plot, certainly a downside to the film.
On top of that, director Justin Simien (Dear White People) and screenwriter Katie Dippold (The Heat) imbue the film with a deep meditation of grief and loss. It’s clear that the creative team behind the film didn’t want to just roll out a film that feels like an amusement park ride. They want to engage parents (and certainly their talented cast) with a more thoughtful approach.
And that’s where Haunted Mansion loses me.
Last Monday, July 24, my mother lost her extended battle with Parkinson’s disease. It’s something I’m very much in the early stages of processing despite having “pre-grieved” last year thinking she was dying then. Given the long-term nature of the disease, I thought I’d be more prepared for the unavoidable end. I thought I knew how I would feel once she finally let go. Certainly, the last several weeks of Parkinson’s-induced dementia were a misery to behold. How do you deal with someone who thinks her food and water are poisoned? How do you force someone to drink when all medical professionals tell you not to if she can’t swallow on her own? How do you allow someone to starve to death knowing they never wanted any kind of medical intervention to prevent it? I am relieved that she’s no longer struggling, that she’s at peace now. As the days tick by in a foggy haze of memory, I’m always thinking of her and small details of our 48 years together. It’s the most devastating thing I’ve dealt with to date, and I had years to prepare for it.
Which leads me to Haunted Mansion.
The film features Stanfield as a former astrophysicist adrift in New Orleans, devastated by the sudden loss of his wife. After he picks up her ghost tour as a way of continuing her memory, Stanfield meets a priest (Owen Wilson) who convinces him to investigate a supposedly haunted mansion recently purchased by a mother and son (Dawson and Chase W. Dillon) who are intent on refashioning the dilapidated mansion into a bed and breakfast. Ghostly hijinks ensue as they bond together to defeat the evil Hatbox Ghost (Jared Leto, believe it or not).
The lighter moments of the film are all fine, and I did find a great deal of amusement in the Haunted Mansion artifacts on display. But two weeks ago, the themes of grief, loss, and acceptance felt ill-fitting against the more comic ghostly moments. I wanted more comedy and more thrills, less heavy moments. Now, as I’m faced with literal grief as a result of a very deeply tragic loss, the blending of the theme with the amusement park atmosphere feels like an insult. Haunted Mansion explores grief in a very surface-level, trivial manner. The actors seem to struggle with the erratic material: one minute lost in a soliloquy about loss and the next scrambling away from any number of moderately rendered ghosts and ghouls.
Credit the creative team for trying, but the combination doesn’t work for me. Not two weeks ago and certainly not today.