The final chapter, murder mystery dedicated to the investigations of Kevin – and his very intelligent neighbor – on the traumatic past of Ernest they distance themselves from both the teen comedy and the family one to reconstruct a sad and painful storycruel and unjust illustrated as an episode of Criminal stories. This deadly turn is the most unsettling, and one wonders why Landon would want to give the film such a dark edge and then culminate in a tearful and ridiculous farewell. We Have a Ghost starts as Beetlejuice, proceeds as Ghostbusters**, true crime is forwarded and in the end it’s done again** Ghost. It’s not comical, sad, moving, dark, scary but all these things together in a disjointed and not at all cohesive way, with sudden changes bordering on psychiatric bipolarity.
We Have a Ghost it is, in short, a great mess for more than two hours: it starts as a comedy and then takes on oppressive and dark tones; initially aimed at a family audience, then teens, then adults and finally… it is aimed at anyone who has a fixation on the true crime of Real Time. The ghost of Harbour, alone, oblivious, unable to speak, betrayed in life and exploited in death is one of the saddest figures in the Netflix library and the look with the patch buckled on the actor deprives the film of a strong point (yes, David’s charm is an incentive for us). Criminally little exploited, is the real victim of the film. The chapter reserved for dad Frank’s attempts to monetize the presence of a ghost in the attic on social media and on TV remains the most indigestible but also the most incisive part but it is abandoned too quickly to seriously trigger a discussion on the exploitation of social media and visibility occasional.
