Production has wrapped on Do You See Ghosts?, a supernatural feature directed by Dominique van Olm. Calgary-based Kino Sum Productions is now taking meetings with sales agents at TIFF as the film moves through post-production.
The shoot took place in and around Calgary across two separate blocks running from March 5 through August 27. The long gap was deliberate, allowing the production to capture changing seasons across the Prairie setting.
Three stories share one very bad phone connection
Grace Glowicki stars in one strand as a butcher struggling against a violent impulse she believed she had buried. The premise already puts something unsettling inside an ordinary working life before the film even introduces its supernatural connective tissue.
A second storyline follows a young teenager who is haunted by the ghost of her best friend's father.
The third centers on a safety administrator beginning to collapse psychologically after being forced into retirement. The three narratives are tied together by a mysterious haunted hotline, though the production has not revealed exactly how that connection operates.
The characters are already cracking before the ghosts arrive
What makes the setup more interesting than a simple anthology hook is the condition of these characters before anything supernatural intervenes. Repressed violence, grief and the sudden loss of a professional identity give each story its own form of instability.
The hotline can then serve as more than a device for delivering scares. It is a literal connection between people dealing with very different forms of dislocation, with the film leaving open whether the force linking them is offering contact, exploiting weakness or doing something stranger.
Grace Glowicki is staying comfortably uncomfortable
Glowicki has become a particularly recognizable presence in Canadian independent genre cinema. She starred in Dead Lover, which played Sundance and Rotterdam, as well as the gothic thriller Honey Bunch.
She also wrote, directed and starred in Tito, her 2019 SXSW feature debut. Do You See Ghosts? gives her another character built around anxiety and unstable behavior, though the image of a butcher attempting to suppress a violent compulsion is unusually direct even by that standard.
The ensemble also includes Michelle Morgan, Chantal Perron and Telly James, along with newcomers Vivienne Guynn and Calix Miguel.
Now the film needs somewhere to go
Bryn Wiebe wrote the screenplay from a story developed with van Olm. Guillaume Carlier is producing for Kino Sum Productions alongside Grant Cooper of False Veil Film, while van Olm, Gillian McKercher and Michael Peterson serve as executive producers.
Kino Sum is using TIFF to meet potential sales partners. No international release date has been announced.
Until then, the central image is enough to do some work: three troubled lives, one haunted number, and the uncomfortable possibility that somebody eventually decides to answer.
