The Haunting in Connecticut is no breakthrough when it comes to ghost stories, though it occasionally threatens to be. Its most chilling parts are not about the supernatural, but about hospitals and illness. The Campbells are an ordinary family, struggling to make ends meet in hard times: teenage son Matt (Kyle Gallner) has cancer, and the hospital where he’s being treated is far from the family’s home, so, in spite of the economic strain, they decide to rent a house near the hospital. Peter (Martin Donovan) worries about making ends meet, but when his wife, Sara (Virginia Madsen), says, “We’re gonna make it, right honey?” he warmly answers, “Absolutely.”

They weren’t counting on moving into a HAUNTED HOUSE, though! Muhahahahahaha!

Seriously, though. There are some things you can’t count on, and this movie is hyper-aware of that. A haunted house allows for a lot of ambiguity and confusion, a fact which this movie takes great advantage of. Soon after moving into the house, Matt wakes up in the middle of the night, feeling sick. While he throws up in the bathroom, he hears creepy noises coming from the basement. Is something down there, or is it just his sickness playing with him? We, of course, are aware that something is probably down there (in this HAUNTED HOUSE), but it’s still deeply chilling to watch Matt descend uncertainly into the pitch-dark basement. Anything could be in that darkness.

The movie has two sides that interact in unnerving ways. The first side is the real one: the world of a struggling family and a severely sick teenage boy.  This world seems to have a kind of stability, security; Sara and Peter will always be there to reassure each other, Sara will always be there to tell Matt how much she loves him and drive him to the hospital, there will always be doctors to help explain things. But doctors can’t explain everything—and the more inexplicable, the less they want to do with it.

That brings us to the second side: the haunted house. We know that the house has a “history”—it used to be a funeral home with some shady practices—but only Matt is really “haunted” by the place at first.  He has decided, strangely, to sleep in the basement, where there are black, mysterious, unopenable doors, and every night he seems to pass through them into a horrible world. But Matt has been told that if he has hallucinations, he will most likely be taken off the cancer treatment he has just started, so for a while he soaks in his weird visions, and everyone else in the family starts to fear him. Gallner gives an unusually interesting performance, blending the shame and self-loathing of illness with a kind of gothic freak quality. In this context, his visits to the hospital take on a singularly uneasy feeling. Matt is inserted into big rotating machines and waits hours in bright, quiet waiting rooms with happy TV programs, where something is clearly desperate and evil beneath the surface. Obviously, the film is not criticizing hospitals on aesthetic grounds, but it navigates the relationship between supernatural and realistic horror in a potent way.

Unfortunately, if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that these kinds of paranormal horror movies will generally become over-literal, and boy does that happen here. Matt’s visions are identified and explained too quickly, and once they are, the movie forgets about their anarchy and confusion, the things that made them unpredictable and scary in the first place. Evocative developments that suggest ways of re-enlivening the ghoulies are passed over for the sake of explaining everything and moving the plot ahead. For an exciting moment, the search for the truth about the house becomes a quest into history; Matt’s sister Wendy (Amanda Crew) tells him, “Don’t tell anyone, but there are these places all over the country where secret knowledge is kept.  They’re called libraries.” That’s kind of neat! But then, after a five-second montage of old newspaper clippings, Wendy is explaining everything to Matt. Oh, it’s over.

In its hurry-let’s-resolve-everything phase, the movie also loses sight of what makes its characters appealing and interesting. The Scary Matt who grins weirdly, as if he knows something no one else does, disappears, leaving a sporadically possessed but generally sympathetic young man. Likewise, when Peter stumbles home late, drunk, and rampages through the house, there is an opportunity for character-driven fear, something to reconnect the real with the unreal. Instead, Peter’s rampage quickly subsides, Sara scolds him, and he leaves sheepishly, to return later on in reformed condition. Madsen is fine, but her God-fearing, emotionally protective mother simply isn’t fierce enough to contend with the special-effects barrage that takes over. The movie is too content to let its characters stand outside the horror; we stop believing the darkness is alive.

There are chilling and mysterious moments to the very end, to be sure. Though I wish it were treated less literally, the movie’s fixation on the shady boundary between life and death is genuinely spiritual. Sometimes, the simplest, most enigmatic images—an old fireplace, a motionless man with charred skin, a cloud of ashes blowing through the open doors of a car at night—are suddenly, unexpectedly stirring.  And then there’s Matt’s fellow cancer patient, the Reverend Popescu, who happens to be an expert on the paranormal and is played by the ever-graceful Elias Koteas (who’s shown up in a bunch of movies lately).  Popescu is soft-spoken, knowledgeable but uncertain, strong but always cautious and a little in awe.  And, like this movie at its best, he delights in the mystical.  When Sara asks him if he’ll be okay driving home, he replies, “We’re all in God’s hands.”  That’s the spirit.