‘Brooklyn 45’ Movie Review: A Captivating Chamber Play That Conjures Up Tension
Photo from AMC
From Jeremy Kibler
A group of war-vet friends reunites, only to conjure up ghosts in the paranormal and figurative sense, in Ted Geoghegan’s beautifully staged and expertly acted wartime horror drama Brooklyn 45. It’s a character-driven ghost story with the feel of a chamber play, and Geoghegan (2015’s We Are Still Here) directs his perfectly chosen actors from a tightly written script that lets them go off.
It’s December 27, 1945—only a couple months after the end of World War II—when said group of military veterans get together in the Brooklyn brownstone of their best friend, Lt. Col. Clive Hockstatter (genre mainstay Larry Fessenden). “Hock,” as his pals call him, is grieving the loss of his wife Susie, who killed herself on Thanksgiving morning. There’s former interrogator Marla “the Merciless” Sheridan (Anne Ramsay), who’s married to the straitlaced Bob (Ron E. Rains) and now works as a pencil-pusher at The Pentagon. Rigid military commander Paul DiFranco (Ezra Buzzington) has already been at the party at Clive’s for hours, and resident homosexual Major Archie Stanton (Jeremy Holm), a war criminal, arrives around the same time as Marla and Bob. Once they all catch up and unwind a little with some scotch, Hock asks them to humor him and partake in a séance, so he can move on. They do make contact with the other side, but one of them breaks the circle. As the real enemy reveals itself to be paranoia among friends, it becomes a night they all have to live with.
In less than fifteen minutes, we have a clear sense of each friend in the group and their dynamic without any of it feeling like forced hand-holding for the viewer. After the séance, the story takes a horrific turn. Let’s not get into how Kristina Klebe’s German immigrant Hildegard Baumann comes in, but we’ll just say that this is where the story becomes even more tense and thematically relevant. Not every character has put the war behind them; some of them take too much ownership of their country to xenophobic degrees and make righteous excuses for their actions. Others have enough understanding of humanity, the Land of the Free, and the melting-pot city that not every person with a German accent is a Nazi spy. These veterans have seen things in Berlin that they cannot unsee, and some of them carry secrets that should have them on trial or now have them eat crow. How all of these different points of view get carried out is captivating to watch.
Posing questions about the world then and now, Brooklyn 45 is not a traditional haunter, and it’s all the better for it. Confined to six (or seven) players in one parlor room and never finding use for flashbacks, the film somehow never feels stagy or dull. It’s actually a thrill to find a genre piece that doesn’t just rest on its laurels with spooky shocks but finds genuine tension in close-quarters conversation and compelling character work. That writer-director Geoghegan and his cast can get so much across through dialogue that never feels heavy-handed is a miracle in itself; notably, the dialogue during these friends’ decision to wake the dead might also have the most synonyms for “nonsense” (there’s “hokum,” “hooey,” and more!). Brooklyn 45 may have the gnarliest head smash in recent memory, but above all, there is a beating center and an emotional release that’s more melancholy than expected. Seek this one out.
Brooklyn 45 is currently available to stream on Shudder and AMC+.
