A Haunting in Cawdor (2015) User Reviews (7)

Juvie delinquents, ghosts, sordid pasts, oh my....

[wildsparrow16 · 5/10 · 11 March 2016]

Overall, I found this movie dull, but it could have been saved with more in-depth characters. We really don't know much about the troubled young adults who come to the Barn Theatre for "rehab". We know what happened to Vivian, but we don't really know her.

In addition, it just was not scary. It really needed some more haunting moments.

Cary Elwes shines as the tortured soul trying to save a dying little theatre, while running from his own demons - his performance at the end is intense and moving.

A painfully slow-paced movie saved by good acting. Worth watching if you can be patient with it's slow pace.

Begins well ...

[parry_na · 4/10 · 8 September 2021]

This begins in very interesting fashion. An unusual premise, you really don't know how the story is going to pan out. Sadly, it doesn't really go anywhere as interesting as it promises, and when any developments do occur, they are very few and far between.

Some nice performances don't disguise the fact that most characters are severely under-developed, and the horror elements never really gain momentum. Things really don't go anywhere.

Despite being well directed and played, the main thing I took from 'A Haunting in Cawdor' was that it was being made up as it went along. My score is 4 out of 10.

For teen Macbeth fans

[amesmonde · 29 February 2016]

Run by a failed Broadway director a Midwest work release program which rehabilitates young offenders as an alternative to jail puts a group of teens through the mill when a pesky curse is played out.

To cut a long story short director/writer Phil Wurtzel's Haunting in Cawdor is a rework of Shakespeare's Macbeth with a 'Venus in Fur' touch about it. Now some horror fans reading this maybe be thing 'eh, what?' That's because Friel Films' Haunting in Cawdor is not a horror film per say, it's more of a thriller with the associated Scottish curse, speaking the name Macbeth inside a theatre which will cause disaster.

The budget is clearly small, the camera work is crisp and the goings on are centred on one interesting and fitting location. Any work based on Shakespearian play is, as you might expect dialogue driven leaving the special effects waiting in the wing. Wurtzel clearly loves the source material. Pouting, innocent eyed beauty Shelby Young plays the deeply disturbed Vivian faultlessly. The acting is theatrical and fits its offbeat tone which suits Cary Elwes' (secretive Lawrence O'Neil) acting prowess perfectly.

Haunting in Cawdor panders to the Twilight generation of teen angst but also covers suffering and graver abuse issues. Incidentally, Twilight star Michael Welch appears as rouge Roddy. As the curse increasingly starts to look like a reality there's some jump scares, smidgens of blood and dream-like visions but generally it's jammed with teen summer camp-tropes and Elwes pensively looking over his glasses.

It's a wordy, low budget character piece with at best creepy theatre shenanigans, dressing rooms and running through the rain. Don't expect 100 minutes shock and terror and you may 'break a leg' finding some teen cinema charm in Cawdor.

Slow, Yet Painfully Boring

[dcarsonhagy · 2/10 · 22 May 2016]

This one was bad. "A Haunting's" premise was a girl finds an actual recorded murder and tries to investigate. Oh, if that were only the case.

Vivian is sent to some sort of rehab place for wayward souls. The viewer finds out later that she was actually here as a last stint for a murder she committed when she was 15. It is never disclosed who she murdered or why she murdered. In some sort of flashback, you see her with a knife jumping on an unsuspecting man. The backstory to all of this is not hard to figure out, so you're left with a lot of time to watch boring stuff. I could go on about the auditions for a production of Macbeth, yadda, yadda, yadda, but what would be the point.

The only reason I did not rate this snooze-fest a 1 is because at least the director decided not to go the usual route of having the bodies pile up. However, at least that might have made this a little more interesting. I do not believe this was rated, but contains brief nudity, minimal violence, and language.

Waste of time.

[rshaffern · 1/10 · 12 February 2021]

Long, boring and totally senseless. Absolutely terrible.

Unfathomably slow and uneventful haunting in Cawdor...

[paul_haakonsen · 2/10 · 12 October 2016]

Oh my, how this movie was an absolute snoozefest. Running at one hour and forty minutes, without anything, and I mean that literally, anything happening, it was just a losing uphill battle to get through to the end of "A Haunting in Cawdor".

However, I persevered and stuck with it to the end, clinging to the dwindling hope that the movie would get better towards the end. Alas, it did not! For a horror / thriller movie, then the only thing scary about "A Haunting in Cawdor" was the lack of anything worthwhile and the lack of anything to scare the audience. The story was slow-paced and it just felt like torture since nothing interesting happened at any time throughout the course of the movie.

The story, or what is supposed to resemble a story, is about a group of delinquents whom are sent to a remote location to participate in a theater group in order to reduce their sentences. But something is afoul in Cawdor.

Right, well there was potential for something just remotely adequate in a storyline here, but it was all butchered at the hands of the script writers, and not particularly salvaged in the hands of director Phil Wurtzel.

The only thing that worked in favor of the movie was the casting of Cary Elwes, Shelby Young and guy playing the helping hand / supervisor, but I don't know his name. These three people actually put on worthwhile acting performances and did what they could in terms to salvage the movie. Although there was very little even they could do.

For a horror movie released in 2015 then "A Haunting in Cawdor" was just a very, very disappointing and non-entertaining addition to the horror / thriller genre. Unless you are a fan of someone on the casting list, then do yourself a favor and stay well clear of "A Haunting in Cawdor", because it is just not worth it.

Better Than I Thought It Would Be

[ladymidath · 10/10 · 8 October 2022]

I found this movie on Tubi and decided to give it a go and I am glad I did. It's your classic horror mystery thriller and it works. A group of juvenile offenders go to a work release at an old theatre, there, one of the young woman finds a tape of a young woman being murdered.

While this obviously has a middling budget, they make the most of it. The actors are quite good, although a couple of them look a little too mature to be juvenile delinquents. The film does have a few twists and turns with some really creepy scenes.

A few reviews accused the movie of being slow and dull but I didn't find it to be. The movie set the tone and pace and I didn't feel that it dragged. It wasn't throwing blood and bodies at the screen every few minutes like so many movies are doing these days. It gave itself time to tell its story and build tension.

The music and photography was good and the acting was solid enough. Personally it's not a bad way to spend and evening.