A Magnificent Haunting

A new home can bring any number of inconveniences: rising damp, dodgy wiring, the restless shades of a 1940s theatre company… In the Italian film ‘A Magnificent Haunting’, daydreaming baker and aspiring actor Pietro (Elio Germano) thinks he’s lucked out when he finds a swanky apartment going cheap. The catch, it turns out, is the troupe of resident ghosts – a spirited bunch, impeccably dressed and more given to dishing out unsolicited advice than supernatural scares. As in many of director Ferzan Ozpetek’s pictures (‘Facing Windows’, ‘Loose Cannons’), the local brouhaha is the peg for a story about a character in transition: Pietro yearns for both creative expression and emotional stability while navigating work, family and romantic obstacles. The tension between fantasy and reality, idealism and pragmatism, is at the heart of the story, and explored with some complexity; but the dramatic stakes of the story, Pietro’s emotional journey and the mechanics of the haunting itself are too sketchy to satisfy.