Debuting at this year’s SXSW Festival and premiering on the Shudder Channel in June, Ted Geoghegan’s Brooklyn 45 is a metaphysical potboiler that stews up everything from post-war phobia to Evil Dead like vibes when five friends reunite at Christmas time. But since this is the Shudder channel, the film is far from a joyous occasion of holiday bliss, instead choosing to sink its delirious horror claws in the viewer for an entertaining one-set thriller that also feels tailor made for the stage. And it’s just great to see Larry Fessenden in anything.
And it’s Fessenden’s Colonel “Hock” Hockstatter who gets the horror ball rolling when he invites four of his old military friends to his New York apartment. Each carries with them their own recent psychological baggage so soon after the war. Marla (Anna Ramsay) is fresh from a long career of prisoner interrogations that ceded much information in helping America win the war. Her husband, Bob (Ron Rains), is the closest thing the film offers as an audience avatar in his clerical duties in Washington and obvious pushover for the strong willed Marla. His naivety is expressive the minute the others begin congratulating his wife on her prisoner-nail-pulling skills.
The most boisterous of the group is the aptly named Archibald Stanton (Jeremy Holm) who faces his own upcoming judgement at Nuremberg for his actions during the war, which he hopes will be smoothed over by the fifth guest, Major DiFranco (Ezra Buzzington).
With the characters firmly established and locked inside the apartment, their host decides to take drastic measures in understanding the circumstances around his wife’s death just a month earlier. From there, Brooklyn 45 slowly elides into a push-and-pull between the real and unreal as a nasty seance, a German neighbor (Kristina Klebe), and the festering past actions of everyone trapped become simmering elements in the boiling plot narrative.
As a treatise on the horrors of war, Brooklyn 45 falls woefully short and thuddingly obvious in its recriminations of war crimes. And while those elements are central to the plot, it doesn’t completely harm the film. Writer-director Geoghegan continually works in genre grounded in some reality as the director of such efforts as Mohawk (2017) and We Are Still Here (2015). While Brooklyn 45 may not fully earn its commentary on historical undercurrents, by the time a demon inhabits Fessenden’s body and does what it does, one forgets any serious matters and gives in to the film’s goofy pretensions. As one character says to another- “This isn’t the front lines. It’s Park Slope!”
Brooklyn 45 begins streaming on the Shudder Channel on June 9th. Check Shudder.com for details and streaming options.
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