The Murmuring (2022)

This tale of haunting is a fitting bookend, opposite the opening installment, Lot 36, of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities (2022). It carries through a concern with the investigation of strange, ruinous, possibly cursed spaces, along with the tenebrous tone, cinematography, and set design that loosely tie the anthology series. In this last tale, The Changeling meets The Birds via EVP with the cop from Walking Dead and the mom from The Babadook, both playing to type. He polices post-rationality, and she mothers a couple ghosts by way of mothering herself and her dead child, while rebuffing her husband’s awkward advances, fuckless pouting, and inability to empathize with his wife. Which is to say he's two-dimensional and she's, like, 4D. One of the standouts in the series (along with Lot 36, The Autopsy, The Outside, and The Viewing), The Murmuring is an eerie, moving treatment of gaslit ontological tension, where one character sees the world crack open and no one believes them. Fuckers. 4 out of 5 sacs of blood.

—J †Johnson