London Film Award Nomination Nick Murphy: 'Rarely does a horror film make the back of your neck tingle with the calibre of its performances as well as its jumps and jolts – but The Awakening, a beautifully mounted ghost story in the style of The Turn of the Screw, provides chills of both kinds.'

The Telegraph: “Rarely does a horror film make the back of your neck tingle with the calibre of its performances as well as its jumps and jolts – but The Awakening, a beautifully mounted ghost story in the style of The Turn of the Screw, provides chills of both kinds.”

Nick Murphy's directional debut is a an incredibly powerful film set against the emotionally brittle backdrop of 1921. England is post-war and saturated in grief, and it's a perfect time to start believing in ghosts. Enter Rebecca Hall, who gives a fantastic performance as Sherlock-Holmes-style hoax exposer Florence Cathcart, a character who acts as a kind of horror-themed cover story for the real meat of the film; which is actually an intense drama about guilt and loneliness. The Awakening is not simply a throwback to old period ghost stories of the past, not that there's anything wrong with that, it's a thoughtful and provocative mystery about hidden emotions. Cathcart may be a ghost debunker in practice, but deep down she's searching for some supernatural entity to act as an antidote to her own suffering. The Awakening is a beautifully shot, chilly ghost story, that's more interested in the skeletons in the closet than the ones walking around.