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If This Were the '90s, David Harbour's 'We Have a Ghost' Might Actually Be Good

By Petr Navovy | Film | February 27, 2023 |

By Petr Navovy | Film | February 27, 2023 |


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Watching Netflix’s new film, We Have a Ghost, there was one thought that I couldn’t help returning to, over and over again: ‘In the ’90s, this might have been good.’ That’s not to say that the movie is terrible, but it’s not good either, and the hypothetical contrast that it encourages doesn’t do it any favors. Had it been made thirty years ago, I could imagine We Have a Ghost having some actual texture in its visuals. It would likely have a killer soundtrack, too. And though David Harbour as the titular ghost is probably one of the strongest parts of the production, I can too easily picture a version of it from earlier decades starring some monstrously talented industry heavyweight, anchoring what could otherwise be easily dismissed as a frothy family movie and infusing it with more pathos than it has any right to have.

We Have a Ghost comes to us from writer-director Christopher Landon, a name I didn’t know but which the promotional material kept going particularly heavy on in a way that made me think that maybe I should. After looking him up, it’s fair to say that based on Landon’s current track record, my ignorance wasn’t exactly a huge knock against my cinema bonafides—though I will say that he deserves credit for his work on 2017’s horror comedy, Happy Death Day, and its 2019 sequel, Happy Death Day 2U, both of which are fun and well-executed (wink wink) bits of popcorn entertainment.

We Have a Ghost tells the story of a family who unwittingly move into a haunted house, only to find that its resident ghost, Ernest, isn’t everything they might expect. Ernest is himself haunted by a tragic past he can neither remember nor articulate (literally: he’s unable to talk, and Harbour does some nice work within those constraints), to which the family members have wildly different reactions: Some wish more than anything else to help him, others to exploit his presence for fame and fortune. In its mining of interpersonal drama and existential angst and its mashing of those elements with comedy, We Have a Ghost does share some storytelling DNA with the Happy Death Day films—though the latter did turn out significantly better, and Landon seems to struggle with the mix more this time around.

The key tension here is the relationship between the family’s youngest son, teenager Kevin (Jahi Di’Allo Winston), who is withdrawn and unhappy with his family’s house move, and father Frank (Anthony Mackie), an outwardly confident man with deep layers of insecurity brought on by life’s vagaries. There is a lot of familial drama, both spoken and shown as well as hinted at, that infuses the proceedings with more weight than I expected. It’s not executed terribly well, but the film is served well by at least the attempts at some of its broader, more cartoonish elements being contrasted against genuine attempts at specificity and empathetic characters. The performers all acquit themselves well, with Harbour and Winston selling the connection that lies at the heart of the film’s story. I’ll be perfectly honest: I was bored for about ninety percent of We Have a Ghost’s runtime, but I think it’s important to remember what this film’s purpose is. This is a movie for kids, and as much as I try to appraise things on that level, I’m fundamentally unable to. I would be curious to see how kids rate it, as from my perspective as an adult film fan, mostly what I can see are the attempts at verbal and visual gags, as well as the admirable reaches for tonal complexity—and while I can admire the effort, I’m also painfully aware that they fall short far more often than not.

To its credit, We Have a Ghost isn’t afraid to reach for some dark places, and it does remember to try to ground the proceedings in real human emotion—both staple features of the kinds of family movies made in eras past—it’s just that it doesn’t tie it all together nearly well enough for it to result in a good film. On top of everything else, its runtime sits at 2 hours and 7 minutes. A cardinal sin for a film like this that the ’90s would have never entertained.