NOTE: This article will contain light spoilers for Brooklyn 45

It has been a somewhat rough year for Shudder exclusives/originals.

To this point in the year, I only have two of their movies ranking even somewhat highly for me on my 2023 New Releases ranking. There is, of course, Skinamarink, which I reviewed a few months ago. And then there is the batshit crazy Spoonful Of Sugar, which I wanted to review, but never quite got around to because it was going to be a hard movie to discuss without fully talking about the best part: the last fifteen minutes or so.

(That said, by all means, check out Spoonful Of Sugar if you haven’t. I was a big fan, and again… the last quarter hour or so is just bonkers)

Aside from those two, I have no other Shudder flicks ranked higher than 34th out of the 47 movies I’ve seen that were wide released this year. And as you get past that mark, the list becomes a glut of the middling-to-poor efforts the streaming service has churned out. Truly unremarkable stuff like Burial, Leave, Scare Package 2, and From Black. Nothing I’d recommend. Unless the recommendation is “Stay away”.

Still, I remain undaunted, After all, the service had a pretty darn good 2022! I finished last year with five movies in my top thirty, some of which (Christmas Bloody Christmas, Sissy, See For Me) I greatly enjoyed.

So I’ll continue to give Shudder chance after chance, don’t worry. I know what is possible from them!

But it’s fair to say that I went into this weekend’s new release, Brooklyn 45, with at least a dose of trepidation. A movie about various servicemen and servicewomen participating in a seance in the wake of the end of World War II? There’s potential there, but… I’ve been scarred before!

The more in-depth plot summary of Brooklyn 45 can be defined as this: in the wintery gap between Christmas and New Year’s Eve in 1945, five former cohorts from the war effort gather together in the wake of the death of one of their spouse’s. Their host has a much deeper reason for calling them all together, though… and it’s not just the seance he has planned.

So the host’s wife recently killed herself because she became convinced–obsessed, possibly–of the notion that her German-speaking neighbor is a Nazi spy. The widow not only wants to communicate with his lost wife… he has kidnapped the German woman and won’t let his friends leave until he has the answers for everything behind his wife’s death.

Brooklyn 45 goes in some interesting directions from there, and the story is much less supernaturally driven than you might imagine. There is a lot more in the way of character building and the wounds of the war that have not quite healed over. So with that in mind…

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+The movie does a somewhat subtle and impressive job forgoing spooks to show examples of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, xenophobia, mental illness, the struggle of soldiers doing what they are told when they know it is wrong, torture, and more. Writer and Director Ted Geoghegan does a commendable job establishing the characters, letting them take turns you likely won’t see coming, and letting their traumas be the story.

If you are here for the supernatural, don’t worry. You get a fair amount of that, too; especially in the third act. But I’ve seen so many Shudder movies that focus most of their effort on the humans behind the scares, mostly for budgetary reasons. And a lot of those just don’t work because the talent behind the camera can’t make that stuff interesting. But Geoghegan has no such problems!

+Brooklyn 45 has a very brave ending! You spend the entire movie building up question after question, and then… it basically refuses to answer many of them!There is no neat bow to tie on most of what you see, and you are left wondering what really happened. It takes some cojones! Pretty much every character in the room–and virtually the entire movie aside from a small handful of minutes takes place in one room–has his or her own biased notion of what really happened, but we never get confirmation of who is correct. Ultimately, they are pushed away from what is the morally right or wrong thing to do and pushed towards what they have no choice but to do.

-The plot is strong. The story is strong. The direction is strong. The acting is… serviceable. For all of there nuanced elements at play here, the main characters feel more like one-dimensional tropes than wholly realized human beings. You have the coward, the desperate widow, the unfeeling hard-ass, the sympathetic one… The fifth character is maybe the most nuanced, but even then, his transformation across the film doesn’t always feel earned.

I will say no one here is egregiously bad or anything. We’re not talking terrible acting. But it also isn’t up to the caliber of the writing. With a different company of performers, this could have been an elite movie.

-The supernatural elements basically vanish for the second act before they come back in the third, and it leaves you genuinely wondering: would this flick have been better off without them? You could still tell this exact same story, more-or-less, without the seance and the subsequent paranormal goings-on. Might that have been better?

That said, late in the movie where the spookiness gets dialed up, there are more doubts raised as to what you may believe actually happened, so ultimately they may be an overall boon. But I’m not going to lie: when the spookiness kicked back in, I almost said aloud, “Oh right, they botched a seance earlier, yeah”. So it felt a little forced.

OVERALL

How much “fun” can a story about soldiers and generals and spies dealing with their trauma (both shared and individual) really be? Well, this movie has enough twists and turns and powerful themes that I was invested throughout. So pretty fun, I guess! Add that pretty ballsy ending into the mix, and I dug this!