I love me a good ghost and human love story. Just Like Heaven, Julie and the Phantoms – I guess all that longing and tragedy makes for just really good romance. This is the premise of Girl Haunts Boy, which begins simply with a girl meeting a boy, and develops into a thoughtful film about the past and its continued impact on us in the present.
On a field trip, Bea (Peyton List) goes exploring a forbidden section of the museum and ends up with one half of a pair of rings. She dies a horrible death immediately after. The narrative turns to modern day, where Bea ends up meeting Cole (Michael Cimino), the guy who’s just moved into her old house, and is living in her former room. He’s able to see her when he wears the ring, and though things are rocky and Cole’s in denial in the beginning – as one should be when they meet a ghost – the pair strike up an easy friendship.
Their relationship is all sweet and saccharine, and I had the best time watching their friendship develop into something quite substantial. They’re both music lovers, Cole helps Bea catch up on what she’s missed for the past 100 years, and Bea’s presence in Cole’s life helps him feel less alone. Cole’s still reeling from his father’s sudden death, and with Bea lighting up his life with her curious questions and bubbly personality, the emotional walls he’s bound so tightly to himself start to come down a little.
Cimino is honestly so underrated. He does incredible work in the TV series Love, Victor, which unfortunately never got a third season, and even when he’s in a nothing role, like playing the bad boy in Never Have I Ever, he still makes the narratives he’s a part of engaging. Cimino also sings in Girl Haunts Boy, and while the songs are fairly generic – he even sings about a shoe at one point – Cimino emotes beautifully through his singing. List is great as well. In lesser hands, Bea would have just been a mere Daisy to Cole’s infatuated Gatsby, but List makes her feel real and relatable, especially since she was part of an era where women were gradually starting to gain autonomy and independence.
Where the film falls short a little is Cole’s relationship with his mom Catarina (Andrea Navedo). Navedo and Cimino have no mother-son chemistry. She feels more like an aunt that adopted Cole after he lost his parents. All their scenes together are thus bereft of that emotional weight, which is detrimental to the film since they’ve gone through this tremendous loss together. While Cimino does his best to make us feel Cole’s heartache and loneliness, some flashback scenes with the father and mother would have gone a long way in making the familial relationships feel less hollow.
I like that the film uses the themes inherent to The Great Gatsby and makes them relevant to its unfolding narrative. In the novel, Gatsby refuses to allow Daisy to acknowledge the past she spent without him, wanting her to negate the love and life she shared with her husband Tom. His failure to accept the past’s weight in the present is ultimately his downfall. Cole does not make the same mistake, and while loss is inevitably part of the equation, it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all – yes?
Review screener provided.
REVIEW SCORE – 3.5/5
