Halloween is a weird time for movies. If you like really, really scary, often gory flicks, you thrive. Finding something to watch is anything but a chore. If you, however, like your scary movies less scary and more heartwarming, you often end up rewatching the same four or five movies, because there’s nothing else that will hit just the right spot. Girl Haunts Boy attempts to be a new addition to the list, and it mostly succeeds in delivering a story that’s less about ghosts and more about moving on.
The reality of grief is a complicated thing, and ironically, ghost movies don’t always actually touch on it. However you feel or whatever you believe about ghosts, there’s an inherent sadness, a feeling of unfinished business tied to the idea of ghosts existing in the first place. Why would a ghost remain? What ties it to a place, to a person? There are no actual answers to this question, just more questions – and perhaps, some guesses. But entertainment doesn’t actually explore it as much as it could. Often ghosts are played for either laughs or a cheap scare.
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Girl Haunts Boy, however, is a story about friendship, connections, and what you sometimes need to come out on the other side. There are, of course, no easy answers. The movie doesn’t pretend to provide one. But sometimes, there are answers if you keep pushing forward. It’s also a story about losing the things that make you you to grief, and finding them again not in the absence of grief but in the understanding that grief doesn’t have to define you, even if you always carry it around with you.
Directed by Emily Ting and starring Peyton List and Michael Cimino, the movie is less a romance and more a treaty on the power of connection. I wouldn’t have minded a full-on romance, either, but as it stands, the movie works at what it is – a story of the ways some people come into your life, help you heal, and then sometimes don’t get to stay in the way you want them to, for whatever reason.
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Sure, there’s a supernatural element to the reason here, but at times it’s easy to forget we’re dealing with ghosts. Human emotions are very much the same, apparently, no matter if you are alive or not. And there is no healing from grief, not really. You cannot fill the void one person left with another. But you can, however, find healing and understanding and dare I say it, sometimes even peace, in the fact that you are not alone in what you’re going through.
Ghost stories are a dime a dozen. Ghost stories that are actually about grief, about love, and about the joy that can be found, even in dark times, when someone else really, truly sees you, are very rare indeed. If what you’re looking for Halloween is to get a little emotional, then you probably don’t need an empty scare or two. Maybe what you need is Girl Haunts Boy. Even if your heart might ache a little bit as you watch.
Girl Haunts Boy is now streaming on Netflix.
