REVIEW: Mirvish’s Paranormal Activity summons real screams — but crashes into a cheap shock ending

How should a play handle horror? One option is trying to replicate movies: controlling the viewer’s gaze, building suspense, and then springing a jump scare. Another is to lean into what theatre can do better than film: turning the space into a haunted house, giving an unnerving sense of being in a dangerous room. Paranormal Activity, the touring play loosely adapted from the eponymous film franchise, tries to do a bit of both. Written by Levi Holloway and directed by Punchdrunk’s Felix Barret (of Sleep No More fame), the production arrives at Toronto’s CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre between its original U.K. run and its upcoming Broadway transfer. It’s a spooky, cleverly staged hoot — but audiences might be distracted by one glaring narrative spectre that could use an exorcism. 

Paranormal Activity opens in total darkness to a booming voice that instructs us to close our eyes, breathe, and forebodingly warms, “Places aren’t haunted. People are.” When the lights come up we meet James (Patrick Heusinger) and Lou (Melissa James), a sweet American couple with newlywed chemistry, who have just moved to the U.K. after leaving their house in Chicago to escape a spirit that had been haunting Lou. At first, the move across the pond seems like a relief. But quickly the demonic darkness that consumed Lou in the U.S. comes rushing back, causing her blackout-inducing headaches and the deeper distress of not being understood by James. 

Unlike the original found-footage movie where the couple employs a camera to catch evidence of spirits, in the stage production James instates an old-school bell — Chekhov’s bell, you might say. But the show isn’t without haunting technologies. An unruly Alexa blasts grunge of her own accord, an ill-behaved security system turns the home’s pot lights to strobes, and, most terrifyingly, James’ zealous Christian mom Carolanne (Pippa Winslow) appears on a small TV screen over FaceTime to chastise the couple’s lifestyle choices, including Lou’s use of antipsychotic medication. Taken together, the video, illusions, and lighting design — by Luke Halls, Chris Fisher, and Anna Watson respectively — turn the comforts of home into something unpredictable. 

One of the production’s most impressive feats is the two-storey set by Fly Davis. The double-decker cutaway of an English home allows the audience to see the kitchen, living room, bathroom, stairway, and bedroom all at once, giving the stage a split-screen effect and allowing us to catch what the characters miss. Gareth Fry’s sound design, too, imports a cinematic sensibility, with an eerie, nearly indecipherable drone that hums beneath the show. 

For a production whose main sell is genre camp, Heusinger’s performance as James contains surprisingly textured character work. James is a well-meaning midwesterner with a sense of humour, a workable ego, and enough tenderness to keep him from becoming merely the requisite gaslighting husband. Heusinger’s comic delivery gives James a goofy likability, and there’s a believable desperation in the way he tries to both understand and fix Lou’s torment.

For a while, the play seems like it might become a moving story about supporting a partner with chronic mental illness — the horror of not only being haunted, but of being unable to show someone else the shape of the suffering. None of the films in the franchise are particularly emotionally grounded, but briefly it feels like the stage production might take the opportunity to expand on horror beyond surface-level shock.

But no. As if suddenly remembering it has tropes to attend to, the second act leans into a more conventional plot packed with slamming doors, hysterical revelations, and a whole bunch of fun blood-and-trapdoor business. Reality begins to blur, and the play abandons the emotional groundwork and the logic of its plot in favour of these mechanical jolts, which, to be fair, are impressive if not to my personal preference of artful theatre.

When the first Paranormal Activity movie came out, the original ending was shown only at its film festival premiere. The ending was changed for its wide theatrical release, and when it became available for home viewing it offered yet another alternate ending. Even though the Paranormal Activity stage production is two years old, it could take a cue from the franchise’s history of revisions and swap in a stronger ending. The last 10 minutes of this production go for an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink twist with a confessional from James that’s at once unexpected, unearned, and excessively horrific — so much so that one audience member yelled “BOO!” twice. While a big turn is practically a rite of passage for the horror genre, this one feels like a hastily written panic move and despite having enjoyed the production’s first three quarters, I left soured on the entire thing. 

Even with its collapsing plot, Paranormal Activity offers an entertaining vehicle for easy chills and thrills, theatre tricks, and supernatural tropes — and, for much of its 130-minute running time, it does right by the series’ fans, many of whom howled in delight from the start and became downright rowdy by the end. The production’s script, too, has a dose of naturalistic humour and sincerity not often found in deliberately exaggerated horror, which makes it all the more frustrating that the finale manages to summon something scarier than demons: a slapdash ending that causes the theatrical magic to vanish.

Paranormal Activity runs at the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre until July 5. More information is available here.

Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.

WRITTEN BY

Lindsey King

Lindsey King is a Toronto-based freelance writer and editor with bylines in Toronto Life, Maclean’s, Canadian Business, Intermission, and The Creative Independent.

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