In short: The Ghostmaker (2012)

aka Box of Shadows

Warning: some spoilers ahead!

On his house clearing job, Kyle (Aaron Dean Eisenberg) stumbles upon a curious device. At first glance, the thing looks like a coffin with a whole load of clockwork added to it, as well as coming with a nice, creepy Christopher Young melody. In actuality, it’s a device developed by a 15th Century occultist/inventor that separates a person’s spirit from its body for a while. The spirit is able to roam free, walk through walls and invisibly spy on whatever it wants. Using the device may also awaken the interest of forces one might not want to be noticed by.

Of course, even without that particular problem, Kyle and the friends he’s using the coffin with are not ideal material for even this tiny amount of power. Kyle’s quite far on his way to becoming a proper meth head, which puts a lot of strain on his relationship to his girlfriend Julie (Liz Fenning), and even minor superpowers are not a great idea in a case like his. Kyle’s wheelchair bound friend and roommate Sutton (J. Walter Holland) is an even worse candidate, seeing as he uses the opportunity to now finally be able to better stalk Julie. Obviously, things will escalate.

Mauro Borrelli’s The Ghostmaker is an interesting variation on elements of Flatliners, with a much more interesting background to the occult experiments and a quite a bit more screwed up cast of characters. It does suffer visibly under its tight budget, though, with effects that work better as ideas than as what you actually see on screen, and the usual pitfall of many lower budget films made in the last decades of scenes generally going on much longer than they need to or should.

For a character-based piece of horror, the writing’s a bit too broad as well: I absolutely appreciate where the film wants to go, but it is not really making the right moves for me to be able to follow.