dir. Francesco Cinquemani

There is potential in the set-up for The Ghosts of Monday, as we follow a film crew attempting to restore their fortunes for a failing show by checking into a supernatural locale in Croatia. Unfortunately director Cinquemani’s latest never manages to match the potential such a setting allows.

Genre tropes are not a bad thing: the same stories have been told countless times, the same beats and scares frequently recycled, with creatives taking the familiar and fashioning it into something engaging. Sadly this is not the case here, the film even fumbling a potentially interesting strand about the role artifice plays when chronicling the supernatural.

Muddled scares sit alongside acts of violence that play like pale imitations of other films. And into the mix is a confused backstory that has its eyes more on a final reveal than weaving an interesting story to get to that point. The fun must be in the journey not the destination, a mantra that should have been factored in here.

There is talent behind every film and there are moments that play better than others in The Ghosts of Monday, with some performances that occasionally move towards being interesting. But it soon becomes a slog that is neither entertaining nor – crucially – scary.

© Russell Bailey

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