CLARA’S GHOST: Family Specters Roam Freely

If going home is dreadful for some, having everyone come home is the stuff of Clara Reynolds’s nightmares.

Bridey Elliott’s film Clara’s Ghost is a family affair through and through: the Elliott family realizes the Reynolds family onscreen. Daughters Julie (Abby Elliott) and Riley (Bridey Elliott) return to their parents’ Connecticut home to celebrate their dog’s birthday. From the get-go, the tone is absurd. Clara (Paula Niedert Elliott) and Ted (Chris Elliott) have pulled their car over on the side of a dark road, searching for Clara’s shoe. In a stroke of stereotype, Clara demands to speak to somebody higher up at the police station to get an officer to look for it.

The opening credits roll in a slow pan through a bar. The camera falls on the married couple, staring straight ahead and drinking, ostensibly, alone for how they have nothing to say to each other. Quite quickly, Clara and Ted’s discontent and disconnect crystallizes. They’re going through the motions in their marriage on different wavelengths, Ted more concerned with his career acting and painting while Clara scans through Facebook and can’t forget about that shoe (it’s DSW, not Marshall’s). When Clara wants a photo with Ted after a photographer visits to shoot him and the daughters, he’s embarrassed by her request and her inability to read a room.

After their parents’ quiet, separate evening, Riley and Julie ride the train home to Old Lyme, snapping photos of their reunion for social media and talking about Julie’s upcoming wedding. Their discussion quite perfectly recalls larger than life Manhattanites speaking more loudly than usual on the Amtrak.

The film takes place over a single evening in the Reynolds’ home. Riley calls Joe (Haley Joel Osment) the drug dealer to get weed, and they spend the rest of the night eating Chinese takeout, drinking, dancing, and dodging spooky encounters within their home.

As they prepare for the evening of debauchery and doggie celebration, Clara begins seeing a ghost around town, a woman she identifies as Adelia, the daughter of the captain who owned their home back in the 1800s. She was found one day walking naked through the streets and presumed insane.

Comedy Brimming with Anxiety

Family horror is nothing new to the canon, and horror provides an excellent lens through which to study all sorts of power dynamics at work among spouses, parents and children, and siblings. Clara’s Ghost, though, finds its bite quickly through tone.

All of the characters are easy to identify in the real world, lending the film an aspect of satire. It’s not that unusual to hear a bride-to-be whining about her bridesmaid’s waistline, to hear about how your sister is cleansing, to hear about how we should eat more eggplant because it can melt cancer cells. Though characters like these could create a family that’s vapid and a story that’s limp, the exaggeration serves to create discomfort between Clara and her family members.

Clara’s Ghost achieves this quite well through weaving together close-ups and medium shots of Clara with quick cuts between her family members baking brownies, mixing drinks, or eating. With hands grabbing and making messes, they all become grotesque. Coupled with the ridiculous things they say, the noise they create that prevents Clara from becoming part of their discussions of TV and auditions, they become aggressors and figures of horror in their own right.

It would be easy to write off Clara, the dated mom who can’t keep up with her snappy and self-absorbed husband and daughters. Though Clara is easy to dismiss – she’s stuck on her shoe, she spends a bit too long on Facebook – the film does wonderful work making us sit with her and realizing that she needs to be heard.

While the film creates a great amount of sympathy for Clara as a result of its creative storytelling, it carefully problematizes her as well. She can’t find her way into the family’s rhythm, but as their night thickens with alcohol and jealousy, she’s not shy when it comes to shaming Riley’s acting or Julie’s facial treatments.

Simultaneously, tension continues to bubble up through the family’s alcohol use. Oftentimes, their excessive consumption of alcohol, weed, and food is presented in a lighthearted manner; cutesy, nostalgic music underscores ice cubes jingling in glasses. The soundtrack perfectly matches the film’s blending of whimsy and unease. Everyone dances in grand gestures and unencumbered limbs. In one montage, Clara meets Adelia in the kitchen while everyone else dances in the living room in shamelessly bacchanalian splendor.

The scene wonderfully spins together the themes at play in the film: though playful and whimsical on the one hand, Clara is excluded from the party in the living room, and the ghost in the house begins to tighten her grip. Once the fun overflows, Clara’s Ghost skillfully holds the audience in its grip, and everyone realizes how everything has been more serious all along. The transition is gradual – dreamy shots of bloody hands, a startling head submerged in an ice bath as part of a contest – but then it seems there’s no going back.

Not Whimsical Without Gravity

The ghost is fairly insignificant in the end. She exists primarily as a plot device, providing an entryway through which the film explores the family’s relationships. Once those are opened up, the ghost becomes irrelevant and the family members do the work on their own. The things they end up saying to each other become more horrifying than any captain’s daughter watching through the window.

Though Clara’s visions of Adelia create a visual thread to follow her disengagement with her family, when she’s pushed to action throughout the film, her decisions have already grown thick roots as a result of the tensions that the film has developed more artfully.

Throughout the film, a discussion of letting others in emerges. Clara needs to let someone in, whether Adelia or Joe, because her family members are so inaccessible. Moments of care are few in the film, and those that surface are poignant in their stability and the time they are given. When others show Clara care, and her family members notice, it comes as shocking revelations for them.

Clara’s Ghost: Conclusion

While Clara may be the focal point of the film, Clara’s Ghost is an excellent family study. In the end, everyone’s insecurities are exposed for all to see. Underneath their facades, everyone has been actively keeping others out.

What are your thoughts on Clara’s Ghost?

Clara’s Ghost gets theatrical release on December 7th, 2018. Find more screening information here.