★★★ ☆ ☆
Claire (Michelle Krusiec) works in child protection, surely an emotionally straining job at the best of times, but one that’s made all the worse when you live in the universe of a horror film – just look at Andi Osho’s character in Lights Out and Shazam!. Still, you can’t deny that the job, while never easy, has its challenges mitigated to an extent when you have psychic powers. Yes, like Counsellor Troi of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Claire’s sort of cheating through the use of her powers. Fear not; she’ll get her comeuppance when she finds herself pursued by angry fucking ghosts.
So far, so standard, and it isn’t like They Live in the Grey seeks to be remembered among the great ghost films of all time. That being said, it mines a rich seam of classics in which the real horror is not the ambiguously-present ghosties, but the spectres of grief, depression, abuse and madness, from The Innocents through Don’t Look Now and The Shining to The Others, The Babadook and 2020’s Relic. To adequately present such emotional extremities – real-world horrors more potent and more, well, real, than anything cooked up in the movies – demands a masterful skill in both writing and acting, and They Live in the Grey here falls somewhat short of its ambitions. Indeed, writer/directors the Vang Brothers (Bedeviled) may well have underestimated the trickiness of the task they were trying to accomplish; however, the sheer verve with which they pull off scare sequences – always positioning and moving, or not moving, the camera just so for maximum tension – mean the picture is nonetheless more than watchable, and while Michelle Krusiec is no Toni Collette in Hereditary, she has no trouble carrying this entertaining, if slightly overlong and stilted, little picture.