USA. 2023.
Crew
Director/Screenplay – Ted Geoghegan, Producers – Seth Caplan, Pasha Patriki, Michael Paszt & Sarah Sharp, Photography – Robert Patrick Stern, Music – Blitz//Berlin, Visual Effects Supervisor – Nicholas Ashe Bateman, Visual Effects – Purple Dog/Light Vault (Supervisor – Crystal Reeves), Makeup Effects – Brian Zurek, Production Design – Sarah Sharp. Production Company – Hangar 18 Media/Divide-Conquer/The Line Film Co.
Cast
Anne Ramsay (Marla Sheridan), Jeremy Holm (Major Archibald Stanton), Ezra Buzzington (Major Paul DiFranco), Ron E. Rains (Bob Sheridan), Larry Fessenden (Lieutenant Colonel Clive Hockstatter), Kristina Klebe (Hildegard Baumann)
Plot
On December 27th, 1945, a group of five friends gather at the apartment of Clive Hockstatter in Brooklyn, New York. The five are long-time friends and have recently all been through World War II in different ways. Clive’s beloved wife Susan recently committed suicide. Clive persuades the others to participate in a séance to contact Susan and they are startled when manifestations occur. Assured of the existence of an afterlife, Clive then shoots himself to join Susan. In the aftermath, the others discover that Clive has German neighbour Hildegard Baumann a prisoner in the closet. The story comes out that Susan believed that Hildegard was a Nazi spy and that this was the cause of her suicide. The others in the room do not know whether to believe Hildegard is innocent or not. They then discover that they are unable to get out of the room, whereupon Clive’s dead body starts speaking and demands that they kill Hildegard. In the course of their arguing over what to do and trying to ascertain whether Hildegard is anything more than the innocent mother and store clerk she says she is, the secrets of what various of the group participated in in the War start to come out.
Brooklyn 45 was the third directorial film for Ted Geoghegan. Geoghegan had started out writing articles on genre cinema and several comic-books, as well as a number of screenplays for German director Andreas Schnass with the likes of Demonium (2001), Nikos the Impaler (2003), Don’t Wake the Dead (2008) and other works such as Barricade (2007) and Sweatshop (2009). Geoghegan made his directorial debut with the quite effective haunted house film We Are Still Here (2015) and went on to the brutal Revolutionary War film Mohawk (2017), as well as the script for the amusing Satanic Panic (2019).
Brooklyn 45 feels like one the productions made during the pandemic where films were shot outdoors or on minimal sets and with small casts. In this case, the entire film takes place in only a single set – the apartment – along with two scenes that bookend the film at the start and finish that take place on the street outside. And the cast consists of only six people, several of whom get killed throughout (not that that stops them from continuing to give a performance). The entire film could easily work as a play.
Within this contained setting, it is not long before Ted Geoghegan jolts us out of our seats. The Seance scene comes with some incredibly eerie jumps – the abrupt slamming from the closet door; the pendant placed on the mirror that extends to the limit of its length and points around the room in a circle extinguishing the candles as it does; Larry Fessenden coughing up a lump of ectoplasm that forms into his wife’s arm. And of course the abrupt and shocking end to the scene.
Thereafter, the film is propelled through a series of whiplash twists and revelations. The script comes with a razor tight tension. The six actors are all largely unknowns – Jeremy Holm, a regular in tv shows like House of Cards (2013-18) and Mr. Robot (2015-9); Ezra Buzzington who has some credits in B-budget horror, while Larry Fessenden has a reasonable career as a director and producer with the likes of Habit (1997), The Last Winter (2006) and Beneath (2013), among others, plus making acting appearances in most of these. All give fine performances.
During the course of this, the characters are pared away and dark and troubling secrets about what they did during the war start to come out. And then of course there is the revelation of Kristina Klebe as the German woman kept prisoner. Much of the film then flips and flops back and forward between accusations of her being a Nazi spy against her protestations that she is simply an immigrant housewife and no more. The film remains carefully ambiguous as to the actuality of this, or whether Klebe might have actually faked Susan’s suicide as the ghost accuses at one point. With both Fessenden’s corpse and the wife’s ghost urging the others to kill Klebe, this leads to the disturbing possibility that the ghosts might just as deranged and paranoid individuals in the afterlife as they were when they were living.
The end credits dedicate Brooklyn 45 to Ted’s father Sergeant Michael Edward Geoghegan (1949-2019). Ted Geoghegan apparently conceived the film with his father, who interestingly enough served in the army, although not during World War II. Given the nature of the story, you cannot help but wonder what exactly it was that Geogheghan Sr did get up to during the war.
(Winner in this site’s Top 10 Films of 2023 list. Nominee for Best Original Screenplay at this site’s Best of 2023 Awards).
Trailer here