Directed by Nick Murphy. Starring Rebecca Hall, Dominic West, Imelda Staunton, John Shrapnel, Richard Durden, Joseph Mawie 15A cert, limited release, 106 min

FORGET YOUR low-budget viscera. This is a scary film of the old school. Echoing corridors hide shadowy secrets. Pseudo-Freudian urges colour the characters’ sombre imaginings.

For his first feature, Nick Murphy has elected to ape the literary rhythms of haunted house classics such as The Hauntingand The Innocents.He just about pulls it off. The Awakeninghas a lovely build and features genuinely fleshy characters. Sadly, the massed scramble to tie up ends in the final act lets it down somewhat.

The film makes good use of the craze for spiritualism that, inspired by so many untimely deaths, overtook England in the years following the first World War.

Impressive, versatile Rebecca Hall plays Florence, a contemporaneous – more sceptically inclined – version of those maniacs who now staff TV programmes called Ghost Huntersand Spook Commandos. After exposing the earthly mechanics behind an urban medium, she is approached by a senior teacher (Dominic West) at a public school. A spirit seems to be lurking in the corridors.

Scattering capacitors and trip- wires about the place, Florence appears to prove that naughty boys engineered the haunting. But we’ve seen the film’s poster and we know better. Soon she is seeing inexplicable visions among blackboard dusters.

There are some gorgeously insidious jolts on route to the denouement. A dolls’ house appears to mirror events in the building that contains it. Something sordid lurks in the school’s pond. As grim realisation of the truth sets in, Hall offers a convincing impersonation of a committed rationalist forced to reconsider her values.

Then, disappointingly, The Awakeningdares to spring one of the creakiest, most over-used twists in supernatural fiction. The final 15 minutes are taken up with furious, fruitless efforts to explain every nuance of every preceding plot development. By the close, one feels one's just been told a ghost story by a more than usually frenetic James Ellroy.