An Ambush of Ghosts

Ten years ago George witnessed an accident where his seven-year-old brother by mistake was killed by his mother Irene.
The family tries to get on with life, but Irene's denial of the loss of her youngest son pushes her closer and closer towards insanity. Although George tries to lead the normal life of a teenager he is incapable of escaping the frightening memories of his childhood. Like his mother, George withdraws into his own world. A world where he is able to protect his brother and where his mother is happy.
lost her grip and succumbed to madness.
I think one could call An Ambush of Ghosts a Rebel Without a Cause for the nineties. A subterranean orchestra of howls which improvises around the same theme - and here is also the friend who is a murder suspect and the girl who reconciliates with life. But the struggle, the will, the faith has ebbed away with the tide. Nothing remains, maybe except for a false sense of calm.
The expressions chosen by the director Everett Lewis for the script writer Quinton Peeples' story are hardly subtle. The whitenoise interference, factory noise and out of tune radios irritate, which of course is the point. The blackness of the picture occasionally hunts the main character George down towards the bottom corner, the movement of the camera captures the chaos and the composition of the pictures feels profoundly at home in an inner landscape.
As a kind of preface to the film there are a few lines by Emily Dickinson:
''One need not be a Chamber - to be Haunted
One need not be a House The Brain has Corridors
- surpassing Material Place''.
The relentless fate of physical reality and the perceived, known and denied, fights a battle about the perception of reality in itself. The terror demands victims of the truth. ':'
Helena von Zweigbergk