REVIEW: We Have a Ghost

In the long, storied history of ghost movies, one must face the question of how to present said specter. Are they like Casper the Friendly Ghost, or are they more in the vein of the spirits from Poltergeist? The best thing that can be said about Netflix's new film, We Have a Ghost, is that the spook at the center of an otherwise confused film is consistently endearing.

Ernest tries the more sinister act on the Presley family when they move in to his haunt of fifty years, but their youngest, Kevin, is non-plussed. "That probably worked on everyone else before," Kevin explains, "but my life is like 1,000 times scarier than this." We have no idea what he means when he says this, of course. Aside from some non-specific comments about the family having needed an undisclosed number of "fresh starts," we know nothing at this point about this mystery trauma plaguing Kevin. Even now I am struggling to remember. It may have had something to do with his dad throwing a temper tantrum in a bowling alley.

Kevin captures his first encounter with Ernest on video, and when it goes viral, Ernest becomes an internet sensation, attracting the attention of the neighbors, the media, and paranormal investigators. As the attention mounts, so does Kevin's determination to find out what happened to Ernest and help him to ease into the afterlife.

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the film's premise. We've seen plenty of stories about loveable haunts and misplaced youths at odds with their family. The problem is that We Have a Ghost borrows pieces from all of them but gives no thought how to make them all congeal. Its flavor is some awkward blending of E.T. and Warm Bodies.

David Harbour's ghost has all the frights of Goofy playing Jacob Marley in the Disney adaptation of "A Christmas Carol." Not an invalid choice, and here I think a deliberate one. This might read as perfectly viable within a film that is squarely for a family audience with a child protagonist, but played against a disillusioned high-schooler, the entire charade falls flat.

(For those curious about where such a confused movie does land for a family audience, know that there is a scene where the flesh on Ernest's face melts off in front of a lot of people--comically, but graphically. Take that as you will.)

For a film that lampoons the performativity of society, We Have a Ghost itself errs on the side of cynical. This is most noticeable in the final two thirds of the film when Ernest becomes an internet celebrity and we are treated to a train of Tik Toks showering him with hashtags and hot takes. (The best of these was easily the dude pontificating that "Just because you're not made of matter, doesn't mean you don't matter.") The film makes a bid for relevance by musing about the insincerity of the modern world, and this is where Ernest's story would have really benefited from a character or two who can match his heartfelt openness, not a teen who within five minutes of meeting him compares him to a stripper.

None of the cast particularly thrive in this setup, though Harbour shows an impressive versatility in a role that is almost entirely pantomime. Jahi Di'Allo Winston sells Kevin as a sullen teenager well enough, but I never bought into Anthony Mackie as a father caught between the love of his family and the love of ... social media? Capital? Again, despite his large carving of screentime, the father almost feels like less of a presence than the literal ghost. Perhaps that was meant as a deliberate commentary?

The film shows off a goofier side of Harbour, which many fans will delight in, and there are some fun set pieces with Ernest's ghostly antics that were probably fun to film, but otherwise the film's most notable talking point is probably the combover from purgatory.

--The Professor

Comments

PROFESSOR'S PICKS: Five Lessons Hollywood Ought to Learn from the Success of WICKED

That which has teased studios since the freak success of La La Land and The Greatest Showman has finally come to pass: Hollywood has finally launched a successful musical. Or rather, they've launched two. The musical is sort of like the golden idol at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark . It's valuable beyond imagination--but only if you know just how to retrieve it. There have been specific periods where the musical has yielded tremendous rewards for Hollywood, but for the greater part of the lifespan of feature-filmmaking, studios have been punished for reaching beyond their means. Yet after ages of dormancy, t he years leading up to the Wicked movies were lined with musicals, more than we'd seen in the previous decade. A few of them were quite well crafted. Others were ... learning experiences. None really became what we'd call "mainstream." But Wicked and Wicked: For Good have both seen rare success. I'm publishing ...

Elemental: Savoring Pixar's Fading Light

I’ve only been doing this writing thing for a short while. But in that space, I have been surprised at many of the developments I’ve gotten to witness unfolding in the popular film landscape. It was only five years ago, for example, that superhero movies were still thought to be unstoppable. Here in 2025, though, we know better. But the wheels coming off the Marvel machine accompanied a shift in their whole method of production and distribution, and it didn’t take long for the natural consequences to catch up with them as verifiable issues started appearing in their films. Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) No. The development that has most surprised me has been critics and their slow-motion break-up with Pixar. The only way I know how to describe what I’ve seen over the last five years … imagine that your roommate has been stuck for a long time dating a girl who was obviously bad for him, and after he finally breaks up with her he gets back into the dating ring. All the girls he takes out ...

REVIEW: ELIO

Here's a fact: the term "flying saucer" predates the term "UFO." The United States Air Force found the former description too limiting to describe the variety of potential aerial phenomena that might arise when discussing the possibility of life beyond earth. There may have to be a similar expansion of vocabulary within the alien lexicon with Pixar's latest film, Elio , turning the idea of an alien abduction into every kid's dream come true. The titular Elio is a displaced kid who recently moved in with his aunt after his parents died. She doesn't seem to understand him any better than his peers do. He can't imagine a place on planet earth where he feels he fits in. What's a kid to do except send a distress cry out into the great, big void of outer space? But m iracle of miracles: his cries into the universe are heard, and a band of benevolent aliens adopt him into their "communiverse" as the honorary ambassador o...

Year in Review: 2025

So, I guess I’ll start out by saying that … I wasn’t kidding last year when I said I was gonna do better with reviews, folks. This is the first time in three years that my review count landed in the double digits, and I reached that benchmark barely past the year’s halfway point. My total this year landed at 19. This breaks my previous record of 17 from 2021 and also outpaces the total haul from 2024 and 2023 combined. Once again, " WICKED " pulled through as the biggest contributor this year, and I wouldn't have had that any other way. These last two years of active anticipation have been some of the most gratifying I've ever had as a person who feels investment in moving pictures. I'm even more excited, though, for this duology to be folded into film history: that thing I really love writing about. I will always regret not reviewing The Holdovers (2023) In the past, I have let myself get away with checki...

Saying Goodbye to Stranger Things

There's a quote from critic Mark Caro that I think about a lot. I shared it back when I did my critical survey of Pixar movies . Writing about Finding Nemo , Caro wrote in the Chicago Tribune in 2003 , "Classic film eras tend to get recognized in retrospect while we take for granted timeless works passing before our eyes. So let's pause to appreciate what's been going on at Pixar Animation Studios." I think that captures the aspirations of all active-minded media consumers. Or at least, it ought to. "This good thing won't last forever, so savor it before the sun goes down." Modern Times (1936) But this is also a very hard mindset to access in an online culture that is always seeking to stamp labels and scores on a thing before we shove it on the conveyor belt and move on to the next parcel. It's something I have been thinking about for the last year or so as the completion of the Stranger ...

REVIEW: ZOOTOPIA 2

Any follow-up to the 2016 masterpiece, Zootopia , is going to be disadvantaged. Cinema was still a year ahead of Jordan Peele's "Get Out" when Disney released one of the most articulate explanations of race, allyship, and accountability ever put to film. Now that everyone knows how good, even "timely," a Disney pic can be, how do you surprise everyone a second time? The insights in this sequel won't spur any new chapters in your sociology 101 textbook. Though honestly, neither was the deflection of white saviourship that novel back in 2016. We more or less knew how racial profiling and biases played out in the landscape. What surprised many of us (and validated the rest of us) was the idea that these ideas could be articulated so eloquently in a children's film. It seems that the studio tried the same thing here with Zootopia 2 that it did with Frozen II six years ago. I think a lot of people wanted that m...

Do You Hear the People Sing?: "Les Miserables" and the Untrained Singer

Perhaps no film genre is as neglected in the 21 st century as the musical. With rare exception, the o nly offerings we get are the occasional Disney film, the occasional remake of a Disney film, and adaptations of Broadway stage shows. When we are graced with a proper musical film, the demand is high among musical fans for optimum musical performance, and when a musical film doesn’t deliver this, these fans are unforgiving. From the moment talking was introduced in cinema, the musical film has been a gathering place where vocal demigods assemble in kaleidoscopic dance numbers in a whirl of cinematic ecstasy too fantastical for this world. What motivation, then, could Tom Hooper possibly have for tethering this landmark of modern musical fandom in grounded, dirty reality? This movie’s claim to fame is the use of completely live-singing, detailed in this featurette, something no previous movie musical had attempted to...

Children of a Lesser God: Between Sound and Silence

So ... you all remember how I was really annoyed by The Power of the Dog ? Despite being an early prediction for the big trophy, I found that attempt rather shallow and self-congratulatory. I am more than perfectly fine that the Best Picture award went to the much better CODA . I thought it was much more enjoyable as a piece of film, and unlike The Power of the Dog , it did showed honest interest in the community it was reporting to champion. In the case of CODA , that was, of course, the deaf community. But it's actually not CODA I want to talk about in detail at this time. That movie's milestones exist along a timeline that extends ... further back than I can track today, but at least as far back as March 30, 1987, when Marlee Matlin became the first deaf actor to receive an Academy Award for her performance in Children of a Lesser God . Randa Haines’ 1986 film centers on the romance between a hearing man and a deaf woman a...

Edward G. Robinson: Patron Saint of Forgotten Men

I want to start off this essay by talking about one of my go-to movie stars, Chris Pratt. My first exposure to him was at the end of my freshmen summer term when he landed as Peter Quill/Star Lord in Guardians of the Galaxy , a film I very much enjoyed, as you all know. (I would also see The Lego Movie for the first time around here). And by the time he was up for Jurassic World the next summer, I was up to date with my Parks and Recreation viewing, and the world had accepted him as a household name. Like a lot of celebrities who came into prominence in the wake of social media, part of Pratt’s strengths lies in his supreme accessibility. But where someone like Ryan Reynolds found his market as being this cynical son-of-a-gun, Pratt’s appeal was his complete lack of pretense. His sincerity. Whe...

REVIEW: The Running Man

A lot of people have wanted to discuss Edgar Wright's new The Running Man outing as "the remake" of the 1987 film (with Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a very different Ben Richards). As for me, I find it more natural to think of it as "another adaptation of ..." Even so, my mind was also on action blockbusters of the 1980s watching this movie today. But my thoughts didn't linger so much on the Paul Michael Glaser film specifically so much as the general action scene of the day. The era of Bruce Willis and Kurt Russell and the he-men they brought to life. These machine-gun wielding, foul-mouthed anarchists who wanted to tear down the establishment fed a real need for men with a lot of directionless anger. This was, as it would turn out, the same era in which Stephen King first published The Running Man , telling the story of a down-on-his luck man who tries to rescue his wife and daughter from poverty by winning a telev...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog