We Have a Ghost (2023)

Cold open: a massive estate, gorgeous, but abandoned.
A family down on their luck move in to said massive estate, only to find out it’s also the residence of a ghost. Said ghost is only visible to some people, and only wants to socialize, not haunt. The living inhabitants of the house then make it their goal to help the ghost fulfil their post-mortal needs and move into the afterlife; whacky hijinks ensue.

If you’re looking for a good show, I’ve just described “Ghosts” (2021+)

If you’re looking for a bad movie, I’ve just described “We Have a Ghost” (2023)

One of the worst things that a studio can do to their movie is misrepresent it to audiences.
For example: Netflix advertised this flick with the genre tags “family friendly” and “comedy” and included Jennifer Coolidge on the poster – an actress known for her kooky roles, even in serious shows like “White Lotus” (2021+).
So I, as the audience, assumed that the movie was a family-friendly comedy that had Coolidge playing a large part and being kooky.

Instead, the movie was a supernatural horror (a genre tag that didn’t appear until I looked it up on IMDB) that had only a few jokes and some very not-family-friendly scenes.

You’ll notice that the image I picked for this review is a screenshot of a thumbnail and not my regular poster choice – that’s because the above image is how Netflix advertised the movie to me. The actual poster is one of these. Note how NONE of them are the same as the image that Netflix showed me.

To the plot:

Failed entrepreneur/implied con-man Frank Presley (Anthony Mackie) moved his wife Melanie (Erica Ash) and sons Fulton (Niles Fitch) and Kevin (Jahi Di’Allo Winston) into an unspecified suburb of Chicago, spending the last of their savings to buy the abandoned mansion with the intent of getting a “new start.”

From the get-go, Frank was shown to be a fairly bad father who didn’t really redeem himself by the finale. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the intent of director Christopher Landon, but that’s what was on the screen. Frank was entirely unsympathetic to constantly moving his family around and mitigating any family stability that his actions were causing. His prior business ventures were never explicitly described, but the dialogue around said jobs and his behavior in the mansion painted a picture of something sketchy at best. 

One day, while wandering through their massive new house, Kevin came face-to-face with Ernest (David Harbour), a mute ghost who couldn’t remember why he was in the house or how he died.
Kevin caught Ernest’s appearance via his phone’s camera, and when Frank saw it, Frank posted it to YouTube.

Unfortunately for suspension of belief, this movie came out in 2023, which means that there’s already a gazillion filters for apps like Instagram and TikTok (I’m sure some of which are ‘ghost’) and high-grade movie editing software has been available to consumers for decades.
So of course, when Frank posted the video to YouTube, the entire world immediately accepted it as real and decided they loved Ernest the ghost and there was not a single dissenting voice claiming it was just special effects.

Judy Romano, the “Medium of West Bay” (Coolidge) had a total of five minutes of screen time as an entirely disinterested ghost-whisperer who clearly didn’t believe in ghosts. When she went to the Presley household with her production crew, Ernest appeared and went full Paranormal Activity on Romano and her crew to scare them: he ‘melted’ his face off, grabbed Romano by the throat with his intestines, and did some deeply unsettling contortionist movements.
Romano ran out of the house screaming and that was the last we saw of her.
Absolutely not family friendly. Megan actually covered her eyes.

Word of mouth brought all of this to the attention to defamed researcher Dr. Leslie Monroe (Tig Notaro), who already believed in the paranormal, so she immediately believed the videos of Ernest too. It was also revealed that she used to work for the top-secret “Wizard Clip” program in the CIA years ago. When the CIA failed to apprehend any ghosts, the program was shut down and Monroe was thrown under the bus as the sole crazy person wasting federal dollars.
Except… Ernest’s existence should have meant there were thousands (millions?) of ghosts just… everywhere. Kevin correctly deduced that Ernest was still on Earth because he had unfinished business; that meant that every other street corner in the United States should have had a ghost too – murder victims without closure, spirits seeking vengeance, people who simply refused to pass on, etc. There’s no reason that Ernest would have been the first and only ghost with an unresolved past who didn’t move on.
Considering that the Wizard Clip program never caught any ghosts, it’s hard to fathom what tools they were using to look for them, especially since a regular smartphone camera could record Ernest’s appearance, no special hardware required.

When Kevin started trying to help Ernest, memories would unlock whenever Ernest saw relevant items – a stuffed animal, an eagle sculpture, a merry-go-round, etc. – which helped reveal the secret of Ernest’s death.

Meanwhile, the CIA completely revitalized Wizard Clip and suddenly had new hardware that could shoot, capture, transport, and contain ghosts, despite everything about a ghost’s existence defying physics as we know it.

At one point Kevin stole the family car to try to get some answers. Ernest was in the car, which made it clear that ghosts in this world weren’t tied to any one particular location. Ernest could also, by choice, interact with certain physical objects in around him, which meant that a legion of ghosts could have absolutely been a threat to national security and the CIA was right to hunt them... except, again, the CIA had never caught nor even seen one, so there’s no way they could have known what powers the ghosts had.

Anyway: Kevin was driving and Ernest was wearing regular sunglasses. To an outside observer, an underage kid was driving a car and sunglasses were floating in the passenger seat. A cop saw and tried to question them, but Kevin stepped on the gas and sped away through small-town America and cornfields.

Also unfortunate for suspension of disbelief: Kevin was black, and while the Chicago and St. Louis metro areas are racially diverse, Illinois still has sundown towns, which pretty much means that Kevin would have been shot without question for driving a vehicle reported stolen, especially since a car chase was involved.

To not spoil the details of the ending: Monroe turned against the CIA, there was a murder, an attempted murder, and a manslaughter; eventually Kevin found the cause of Ernest’s mortal demise, which lets Ernest pass along into the afterlife.

The music was a non-item; I don’t remember any of the sound track for any given scene.

The special effects, however, were atrocious. Ernest looked like generic special effects, and one scene in the finale was so very clearly green-screened that you could see miss-matched shadows.

This entire production felt like a made-for-TV movie from 2005, with the quality to match. If you told me it was from 2005, I would have believed you… if it weren’t for the inclusion of modern iPhones and MacBooks and the fact that Anthony Mackie was the headliner, with Jennifer Coolidge and Tig Notaro as supporting actors.

And I love David Harbour, from the first time I saw him as Sherrif Hopper in “Stranger Things” (2006+) to Red Guardian in “Black Widow” (2021). Part of what I love about his acting is the timber and cadence of his voice, which makes it a particularly confusing choice to put him in a role where he could, at most, make haunting ghost sounds. His entire role required him to do facial expressions to convey his emotions, which he did with aplomb, but it was such an odd choice to pick him for the role of a mute specter.

I can’t recommend this, even if you go into it knowing that it’s supernatural horror.

Just watch the “Ghosts” TV show instead.