Girl Haunts Boy: Good Ideas Lurk Under All the Fluff
By Liz Braun
Rating: C
Girl Haunts Boy is a YA movie about love and loss starring Michael Cimino and Peyton List. It’s just fluff about a high school senior falling in love with a pretty ghost. On the other hand, it’s also a subversive little gem, because under that dopey storyline there’s a strong feminist message about self-determination.
Directed by Emily Ting, Girl Haunts Boy opens in the 1920s with Bea Jenkins (List) on a high school field trip with her classmates. Bea is curious and adventurous, and she slips away from her classmates to enter a part of the museum that’s closed to the public. Bea impulsively opens a display case and takes out an ancient ring that glows with magic powers. That’s just about the last thing she does on this earth.
The action then moves into present time. Cole (Cimino) and his mother (Andrea Navedo) move to a new house in the New Jersey town of Spectral Valley(!). Cole is sad and withdrawn, as his father has recently died.
At the new house, he discovers that Bea, now a ghost forever aged 17, is haunting his bedroom.
Talk about meet cute.
That ancient ring Bea picked up in the opening scenes is the magic item that allows Cole to see Bea and talk to her. Among other things, he has to explain to Bea that she’s been haunting the house for a century — news that astonishes and dismays her. Bea has seen other families come and go in the house but had no idea so much time had passed. She’s trapped.
She gets Cole to bring her up to speed on the world. What follows are obvious exchanges about selfies and drones, but also a sweet segment in which he catches her up on popular music over the last 100 years.
Cole is falling in love with Bea, and maybe vice versa.
An opportunity comes up that will liberate Bea from being a ghost and free her spirit, allowing her to finally move on to the next realm. Cole doesn’t act on that opportunity because he wants to keep Bea around, and she is furious when she finds out — making it clear that she’s not a ghost for his amusement or to make him feel less lonely. You go, ghost!
In the end, it’s really girl power that helps Bea get out of ghosthood. She bonds with Cole’s classmate, Lydia (Phoebe Holden), who fancies herself a specialist in supernatural matters. It’s Lydia who figures out the situation.
Just as he mourns his late father, Cole has to likewise let go of Bea and allow her to move on. As well he should — Bea is a free spirit of the 1920s, the era in which women finally won the right to vote. She is bright and brave and interested in the world around her and is overall a strong role model.
Girl Haunts Boy quietly switches the focus of the story from Cole to Bea, although fans of Michael Cimino will be mollified by the fact that he sings a couple of new songs in the film.
It’s interesting that Bea is the far more interesting character here, and yet, she’s a ghost — not really real.
Maybe ghosts are a new storytelling device for our new repressive era, the same way Iranian films use children’s stories to slide grown-up ideas past the state censors. Or maybe Girl Haunts Boy really is just fluff about a high school senior falling in love with a pretty ghost, what do I know.
A novel based on the film Girl Haunts Boy will be released at the end of October.
Girl Haunts Boy. Directed by Emily Ting, written by Dustin Ellis and Cesar Vitale. Starring Peyton List, Michael Cimino, Phoebe Holden, Andrea Navedo. Available now on Prime Video in Canada (and Netflix in the U.S.).