Brooklyn 45

The World War II era has been fertile ground for filmmakers for decades. It lends itself to a very wide spectrum of genre and tone, which is likely why it has remained so used for so long. Even during wartime itself, there were battle films like Bataan, spy films like Confessions of a Nazi Spy, dramas like Casablanca, and satires like The Great Dictator. Decades later, the list stretches into the hundreds, with films made all around the world. Writer-director Ted Geoghegan has made his own entry, set just after the end of the war. Brooklyn 45 is a mix of supernatural horror and spy drama. While not entirely successful, the film is interesting and certainly has elements to recommend it.

The film begins with Marla (Anne Ramsay) and Bob (Ron E. Rains) Sheridan arriving at the Brooklyn home of Marla’s friend Clive Hockstatter (Larry Fessenden), an Army officer who has recently lost his wife. Archie Stanton (Jeremy Holm) arrives as the Sheridans do. Here, we begin to get a sense of the relationships of these characters. Bob makes a comment about war crimes as Archie approaches. Marla and Archie are friends, and both served during the war, Marla as an interrogator and Archie as a frontline soldier. Marla was injured during a German bombing and now works for the Pentagon, where she connected with Bob, who did not serve directly in the war. Inside, the group is met by Paul DiFranco (Ezra Buzzington), another officer who served with Clive and Archie. He has been at the house for most of the day, watching Clive drink. We get more of the group dynamic here. Archie is gay and takes some ribbing for it from Paul, but Archie seems confident in who he is. There is also tension with Paul and Bob, as Bob feels that he is treated as less of a man for not being on the front lines. Once the group is assembled, Clive lays out his plan. In the months since his wife Susan died, he has been reading up on the occult. Clive blames himself for Susan’s death because she claimed that their neighbors were Nazi spies, but no one, including Clive, believed her.

Frightened and paranoid, Susan took her own life. Clive sought solace in religion, but finding none, wishes the group to hold a seance to see if they can get any response from the world beyond. Paul is skeptical and initially refuses, but is eventually talked into it. Surprisingly, the group gets a response almost immediately, with a closet door shaking, candles lighting and going out on their own, and Susan’s locket rising and pointing around the room. Paul breaks the circle against Clive’s warning, so the seance is not “closed”. But satisfied that there is an afterlife, Clive shoots himself in front of the others. Soon after, the shaking closet door is revealed to be the escape efforts of Hildegard Baumann (Kristina Klebe), one of the neighbors Susan believed to be a spy. Clive had tied her up, and hinted to Paul throughout the day that it was his duty to “take care of her”. The remainder of the film is a web of grievances, suspicion and anger, as the group is locked in and left to decide Hildy’s fate.

The biggest strength of Brooklyn 45 is in the performances. Especially great is Jeremy Holm. His Archie is given the darkest backstory, as the “Butcher of Berlin”, and spends much of the film playing alternately sarcastic and unconcerned as a coping method for the anguish his actions have led to. His breakdown in the face of them, and subsequent acceptance, are some of the best scenes in the film. Also excellent in more limited screen time is Larry Fessenden. Long a fixture of the independent horror scene, Fessenden is always a welcome presence. His grief and striving for answers set the stage perfectly for the rest of the film. When he returns later in a limited capacity, it is a fantastic, and genuinely scary section of the film. An interrogation scene between Ramsay and Klebe is also very tense and well-acted.

Where the film suffers a bit is in the screenplay. As a 92 minute film where most of the focus is on seance scene and its aftermath, the opening 20 minutes are front-loaded with explaining the decades-long friendship of some of these characters, their actions during the war, what Clive has dealt with following the death of his wife and a philosophical discussion of the afterlife. While necessary to set up the rest of the film, it leads this opening section to feel like an overload of exposition. It doesn’t feel like these friends would need to recount all of this information to each other, so some of it comes off feeling stilted and artificial. This improves as the film moves into the heart of the story. Geoghegan’s direction is solid for what is, for the most part, a one location film. Budget and the interest of keeping the tension of the single locked room likely ruled out flashbacks, but having something else in the mix would have reduced the stage-play feeling the film sometimes falls into. However, there are some excellent spectral special effects, and Geoghegan throws in some aspect ratio changes to keep things lively. Brooklyn 45 is not a typical horror film or a typical spy drama, but an interesting mix of both. Recommended for those who enjoy films that are off the beaten path.

Brooklyn 45 premieres on Shudder on Friday, June 9.