Rent The Banishing (2020)

horror by numbers - The Banishing review by SG

Jessica Brown Findlay is great in this - but sadly the film is not.

all the tropes of a horror film appear in this so much its cliche OD.

jump scares CHECK

old fashioned music hall tunes CHECK

quirky zany characters CHECK

old time setting - 1950s CHECK

stern vicar v mild scared locals CHECK

not a good 91mins sadly, i was hoping for a good film and not watching Newsnight

Ponderous bore - The Banishing review by Alphaville

A disappointingly ponderous shaggy-dog haunted house story. Christopher Smith is one of the UK’s most stylish directors, but he can do nothing with this hoary old nonsense. There’s nothing in it we haven’t seen a thousand times before. Yep, things go bump in the night and our heroine goes exploring in the darkness with a torch.

Unlike the trailer, which revs things up with fast edits and exciting music, the film drags from one dull scene to another with barely a score for most of its length. Scary? No, just a drag from beginning to end. For Christopher Smith completists only.

Christopher Smith's first dud - The Banishing review by AER

It's a great shame that Christopher Smith, one of the UK's best and most original film directors, has delivered such an incoherent horror/ghost story. There is none of his usual flair, ability to shock, or imagination at play in The Banishing. It's just trundles about, wallowing in cliches, played-out jump scares, and tropes we've got tired of 20 years ago. Also this contains terminally bad child acting too, which wrecks the films authenticity from the start. Sadly, this is boring, slow, and difficult to follow (maybe because it is so repetitive) or it's just badly edited and written. A big shame as Creep, Severance, Black Death, and Triangle are all ace. The director halts one of the best runs by a British film director - please don't banish him though, this could be a blip!

2 out of 10 - dull, unscary, and unoriginal.