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Haunted house stories are one of the oldest forms of horror in existence. The style is saturated, and it’s extremely easy for filmmakers to create hackneyed ghost stories that we’ve seen a thousand times over. The Canal (2014) tells a ghost story that may or may not be a ghost story. It depicts the possession of a man who may or may not be possessed by anything other than his own grief. And it’s that ambiguity that separates The Canal from the frequent triteness of the genre it’s in. The Canal develops a slow-burning, tension-filled horror success.

As The Dissolve notes, “What David (Rupert Evans) saw on the night he followed his wife is filmed in such a completely hallucinatory, nightmarish manner that it calls into question the reality of what is onscreen, as well as David’s sanity. Is he having a fever-dream? Playing out a revenge fantasy? Or is it really happening? Kavanagh allows that ambiguity to blossom, poisonously. David knows something weird is inside his house, behind the walls, maybe, and he thinks it’s connected to that 1902 murder. But who will believe him? Rupert Evans’ performance is heart-wrenching in its portrayal of a man’s accelerated emotional disintegration.”

The film does nothing to suggest that the demons David is seeing couldn’t be manifestations of his own mind. On the night his wife Alice (Hannah Hoekstra) is murdered, David is bent over on the stall floor in a horrible public restroom when he’s greeted by a nefarious demon. But is he? Or did he just murder his own wife and send his mind into a world of self-induced trauma? We spend the entire film wondering this and flipping back and forth. The power of The Canal’s story comes from the dubious nature of the film’s source of villainy. We become just as confused and tortured as David in an attempt to figure out what’s going on.