Review by John Packman.

Vancouver has served as on-screen body double for so many American cities that it's a breath of fresh air when it actually plays itself as it does in Ernie Barbarash's scare flick They Wait. What's more, Barbarash and writer Trevor Markwart don't just let Lotusland sit there and look pretty, but attempt to integrate the city's complex racial history into what is an otherwise standard post-Ring ghost story. Sarah (a surprisingly capable Jaime King) returns home to Vancouver from her adopted home of Shanghai with her husband Jason (Terry Chen) and young son Sammy (Regan Oey) in tow. They stay with Jason's aunt at one of the Chinese benevolent societies that populates the Downtown East Side. What follows is a pretty standard variation on the "Ghosts That Only You Can See Are Pissed Off And You Have To Make Them Happy Again" horror template, so in vogue since the success of The Sixth Sense.

The film is at its most intriguing when alluding to Vancouver's immigrant history, suggesting that exploited Chinese workers in the '40s were essentially living their own kind of horror story. When Barbarash's attention shifts from exploring this subtext to provoking cheap scares, the film suffers; too often They Wait relies on frantic cross-cutting and extremely loud foley work for quick jolts rather than sustaining genuine suspense. Barbarash shows promise as a horror director, though; several hallucinatory sequences are chillingly effective, and it's sort of a kick to see the figurative demons of the East Side transformed into real ones. If you watch this, look for a brief supporting turn by Terminator star Michael Biehn, who is apparently still alive.

They Wait
Ernie Barbarash | Canada | 2007 | 95min

Sun. Oct. 7 | 9:30pm | Empire Granville Theatre
Wed. Oct. 10 | 3:00pm | Empire Granville Theatre