Metacritic reviews

For me, it’s the film to beat this year, easily taking the crown as my favorite scary movie of the last several years — even if all the scares come from the idea of what might happen when your closest friends turn on you.

If you’re lucky enough to feel the presence built by this film, you’ll find one of the most rewarding and impressive genre films of the year so far, and proof that Geoghegan has plenty more to offer us as a horror storyteller.

As in much modern horror, humor resides just under the surface of “Brooklyn 45,” except when it erupts like a punctured artery; the cast has to walk a fine line, though they do behave as people might under extraordinary and extraordinarily unnerving circumstances.

The risk for these kinds of stories––the best ranging from 12 Angry Men to One Night in Miami––is that they lose momentum after the initial setup. You need strong, convincing characters to make persuasive arguments and unearth deep-seated secrets. Brooklyn 45 supplies such.

Brooklyn 45 is a tragic fireside reminder about how easily good men and women can be corrupted, whether by propaganda rhetoric or the ghosts of miseries past.

It delivers supernatural and Earthly suspense in a period-piece package whose wit and personality help overshadow its rougher bump-in-the-night patches.

The cast's chemistry really sells what transpires here and without that, it's hard to see the film working. Luckily, Brooklyn 45's disparate pieces come together to make for a wholly unique film that feels rare to come across these days.

Geoghegan’s Brooklyn 45 is largely able to rise above its shortcomings and deliver a unique, chilling story about the horrors of war and unsettling depths of humanity.

Brooklyn 45 is overlong, repetitive and at times wearyingly stagy. The actors, though, can’t be faulted, convincingly turning unappetizing characters into broken people trying to move on from a war that keeps pulling them back in.

The cast does what it can with the material, but their big speeches rarely add up to a “big moment.”