BROOKLYN 45 - Mark Reviews Movies

Brooklyn 45, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 8, 2023

It's a couple days after Christmas in 1945, and everything finally seems relatively fine in the world and especially in the United States. The World War is finished, both in Europe and the Pacific, and the Allies are victorious in those two campaigns. Brooklyn 45 sees a group of friends, most of them involved in the war effort in one capacity or another, coming together to determine what comes next for all them after everything they have seen and done—as well as what has happened to them in just the few months after such an obvious reason for celebration.

Writer/director Ted Geoghegan's tale is a close-quarters drama, mostly set in the parlor of a brownstone in the eponymous New York City borough, featuring only up to five characters at any given moment. Well, it's a couple more than five at all times, if one counts a silent person hidden away somewhere in the room and the potential presence of the undead or spirits there, too. The point is that Geoghegan's screenplay possesses the old-fashioned feel of a chamber play, albeit one with a lot more blood and goo than one might expect from such a description.

The main point beneath all of that, though, is that this is a film that depends on the basics of drama: the writing, both in terms of dialogue and characterization, and the performances. Both of them are fine here, and at times, the film is more than simply fine, if only because Geoghegan sticks to his convictions that a solid premise, a group of intriguing characters, and a conflict that speaks to deeper ideas than the ones that are right in front of us are all that a movie requires.

He has made, in other words, a period piece that, apart from the occasional outbursts of grisly violence that occur here, could have been made around the time of its setting—right down to the way the production design, costumes, and Robert Patrick Stern's cinematography combine to evoke color palette of film's of the era. It's a neat trick.

The occasion for this gathering of friends is a bit of a mystery at first. Marla Sheridan (Anne Ramsay) and her husband Bob (Ron E. Rains) arrive at the home of Lt. Col. Clive "Hawk" Hockstatter (Larry Fessenden) on the cold, dark night of December 27, 1945. The colonel has a favor to ask of Marla, Maj. Archie Stanton (Jeremy Holm), and Maj. Paul DiFranco (Ezra Buzzington), but nobody knows what it could be.

All they know is that Clive is a fairly new widower, since his wife died on Thanksgiving morning. Because they've been friends for so long and have gone through so much over the course of the war, there's almost nothing they wouldn't do for the man.

His first favor is an odd but understandable one, as Clive has gone through a massive existential crisis following the untimely death of his wife. Religion offered some comfort at first, with the man latching on to the hope of an afterlife—until a minister explained the official policy of what happens to a soul under such circumstances. The idea of a final end with death was even worse in Clive's mind, though, so he turned to broadly metaphysical. He wants his friends to help him performance séance, hopefully to channel his wife's ghost and to prove once and for all that there is something—anything—after death.

The second favor, well, depends entirely on the success or failure of the first one—although it's probably not much of a mystery as to whether or not the séance experiment succeeds, since any plot would end if it fails. In order not to give away too much of the genuine surprise Geoghegan has in store for this story, it's probably important to note instead how each of these characters has some quality to make them compelling.

Take Marla, an expert interrogator who seems calm and polite but, according to her three military friends, is capable of inflicting horrific torture on people in order to get answers. Despite that, she's reasonable and skeptical, which can't be said of her friends. Clive is so determined to get answers and results that he's willing to put all of his friends at risk. The same goes for his actions and orders during the war, which have put Archie into the spotlight of an official investigation for war crimes.

He and Paul are so devoted to following orders and a self-righteous belief that anything they do in the name of rules and country has to be the correct choice. That comes to a head, leading to the story's central conflict, when suspicion falls on one of Clive's neighbors: a German immigrant name Hildegard (Kristina Klebe), who arrived in New York before the war but whose name and accent made her a target of the dead wife's—and, now, Clive's—paranoid prejudice. Poor Bob, who refuses to believe the rumors about his wife and is dismissed by her friends, stands as the impotent voice of reason in all of this.

The dynamic of this group offers more than just a constant source for conflict, especially when an alternative fifth participant arrives at the end of the first act. Geoghegan has a larger point to make—about bigotry and humanity's apparent need to find enemies everywhere and anywhere—with Brooklyn 45, beyond the solid drama and the flashes of violence and the supernatural, brought to life by some efficient visual and practical effects. It might not reach a fully satisfying conclusion, but the path there is filled with thoughtful material and formal cleverness.

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