D: Nick Murphy. S: Stephen Volk, Nick Murphy. P: David M.Thompson. Cast: Rebecca Hall, Dominic West, Imelda Staunton, Isaac Hempstead-Wright. UK dist (Blu-ray/DVD): Lions Gate Home Entertainment.

No, not the feeble remake of Hammer’s Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971); that’s one barrel that can stay unscraped. This new Awakening is not half bad: a solid, Beeb-funded British ghost story, directed by first-timer Nick Murphy with a pleasing eye for period detail and only a few (acceptable) concessions to the computer age. The year is 1921, “a time for ghosts”, and the mood in post-war England remains sombre. Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall) is a frightfully posh ghost-debunker, author of a bestseller mingling autobiography with spiritualism-bashing, whose hard-headed rationalism and religious denial masks deep personal tragedy (orphan, wartime sweetheart; you do the arith). She’s visited one day by a troubled schoolmaster, Robert Mallory (Dominic West), an ex-soldier clearly mired in post-traumatic stress, who has read her book but is far from being a fan. You see, his pupils have reported a ghostly child walking the corridors of their boarding school – and one of the boys has died after seeing it. This ghost is no fake, Mallory insists – and he’d like Florence to catch it.

Her reluctance swayed by a little moral blackmail, Florence travels with Mallory to the school, a former stately home newly converted to educational purposes. It’s a forbidding place: a stone mausoleum in a bleak landscape. The school is about to break up for the holidays, leaving Florence and Mallory free to pursue their ghost-hunting unhindered, but even before the kids have gone Florence is haunted by a spectral presence – a little boy with a distorted blur instead of a face. Calmly, methodically, she sets her traps: electrical tripwires connected to box-Brownies, newspaper sprinkled with chemically-sensitive powder, all the paraphernalia of modern science. And soon she has her culprit: it’s one of the pupils, bullied into impersonating the ghost by peer group pressure. Believing the case solved, Mallory is surprised when Florence insists on remaining at the school during the holidays; most unscientifically, she has a hunch that there is still something left unexplained, some other presence in the school which cannot be discounted as a practical joke. Once the children have been collected by their parents, an intrepid band of ghostbusters stays on in the school: Florence, Mallory, the governess (Imelda Staunton) and one of the pupils, Tom. And Florence soon realises that the supernatural cannot be dismissed so readily as she once thought…

When it comes to ghost stories, this reviewer will admit to having the fortitude of an 8-year-old girl. That said, this one is quite the cracker: grown-up, unsensational, and put together with the care and sensitivity normally reserved for BBC period drama. The mood, as previously stated, is sombre: the colour palette is subdued, a lone piano picking out solitary notes on the soundtrack. Quietly, the atmosphere of loss and melancholy builds. And the nocturnal wanderings through the empty school are nail-bitingly tense, the camera casually revealing the silhouetted figure of a small boy as it prowls the halls. The expected “BOOM!” scares are present and correct, as a grotesquely-distorted ghost-face looms suddenly into the lens, but the film is at its best in a sequence where Rebecca Hall explores the deserted rooms and comes across a large doll’s house facsimile of the school. Peering into the windows, she sees the rooms inside are all empty; but later in her wanderings, she revisits the model and is chilled to see miniature furniture has been added, with tiny figurines representing her and the others. Each of the tiny rooms she peers into depicts a previous scene in the film, with the final room containing a miniature effigy of herself, peering into a doll’s house…and behind her stands the model figure of a little boy. She turns –

Great stuff. Since every horror film these days must apparently contain at least two Big Twists, The Awakening is bound to respect the convention; but the surprises are good, and the overall impression is of a tightly-controlled drama aimed at the more discriminating end of the market. If the film has a flaw, it’s that it sticks rather too closely to Auntie Beeb’s Rulebook of Regional Archetypes (1973 Edition); you know, where all heroes belong safely to the upper middle class and yokels are all drooling, cowardly rapists. This reservation aside, however, The Awakening should tick all the boxes for horror fans who like to think as well as scream – and fans of Rebecca Hall, too, should be more than pleased. ‘Nuff said, surely?