Anton Bitel | On 05, Sep 2022

Director: Francesco Cinquemani
Cast: Mark Huberman, Marianna Rosset, Kristina Godunova, Flavia Watson
Certificate: 15

“Look, over three seasons, we never found any evidence of paranormal activity,” TV presenter Bruce (Julian Sands) tells his director, Eric (Mark Huberman), in Francesco Cinquemani’s The Ghosts of Monday. “It’s time to find something different.”

Eric and Bruce are in the long abandoned Grand Hotel Gula, Cyprus, with a small crew, including Eric’s estranged wife – and Bruce’s adopted daughter – Sofia (Marianna Rosset), PA Anna (Kristina Godunova), camera operator Jennifer (Flavia Watson) and sound recordist Christine (Elva Trill). There, on 31st December 1990 (an unusual 53rd Monday of the year), a party of 100 elite guests all died from the rat poison placed in their New Year’s Eve party feast – and ever since, or perhaps even long before, the place has been said to be haunted. Now a guest of couple Frank (Anthony Skordi) and Rosemary (Maria Ioannou), who are refurbishing the hotel and plan to reopen it, Eric is hoping to capture the resident spirits on film and rescue his flagging career.

Bruce has other ideas, and is proposing that the team should resort to some fakery and special effects – some “old-style carny showmanship” – to win back viewers. The very idea is an affront to Eric’s ethical principles as a documentarian – until, that is, his financiers Dom (Loris Curci) and Pat (Joanna Fyllidou) make it clear that he has no choice, and that fabricating local ghost stories might help put Frank and Rosemary’s hotel back on the map. Yet even as Eric enters this Faustian pact, there does seem to be something lurking the hallways and galleries of this elegant edifice, its disembodied POV mimicked by the handheld camerawork that spies on these characters from various angles. “There is always someone – something watching us,” Sofia comments, even as she succumbs to an unnatural lethargy and vivid half-dreams/half-memories of her own childhood connection with the building.

“Right now I’m just intrigued by the ghost stories that made this place so unpopular,” says Eric, no doubt mirroring the feelings and expectations of a viewer drawn by the promise of a film called The Ghosts of Monday. But perhaps, amid talk of local cults and sacrificial rites and an ancient god worshipped for millennia on the site where the hotel was built, there may really be something different wandering the shadows of these hallowed grounds. Cinquemani’s feature certainly looks back to that grandest of hotel ghost stories, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, as drinks are had and deals made in a deserted barroom, as twins (Elizabeth and Margaret Losikova) appear in the corridors, as a lift is bloodied, as an axe is taken up by the male protagonist, and as a very old photo impossibly features characters from the present day within its sepia-toned imagery.

Yet perhaps all these revenants from the past are a mere red herring, as something of a more mysterious, Lovecraftian nature lies dormant, just waiting for Eric and Sophia to meet with a timeless destiny of entrapment and eternal return. Eric’s refusal to play his part in this production and to do exactly what the masters of the house require may be his – and the world’s – apocalyptic undoing. Meanwhile, The Ghosts of Monday keeps renegotiating its own form and genre – Haunted house! Giallo! Found footage! Paranormal investigation! Cult conspiracy! – all in an attempt to “find something different” in the deep layers of a hotel’s foundations, and in the contested grounds of a country with a long history of colonisation, annexation and division.

This review was originally published during FrightFest 2022.

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