The Vault movie review: where the money is haunted

by MaryAnn Johanson

The worst criminal gang ever — unprofessional, unprepared, and rife with in-fighting — is robbing a bank. A bank that turns out to be haunted. Which they might have learned if they’d bothered to do the slightest bit of research, because it’s pretty much all anyone at the bank will talk about given the tiniest provocation. Whatever entertaining possibilities that heisting a ghoul-infested bank vault might offer are entirely overlooked by writer (with Conal Byrne) and director Dan Bush (The Reconstruction of William Zero), who employs the minimal level of imagination required to shuffle his unappealing characters through 90 minutes of shouting at one another and then dying, often in ways that are completely unexplained and kinda don’t even make sense. The customers and employees caught up in the robbery and ensuing hostage situation are remarkably bland and undifferentiated, including James Franco’s (Alien: Covenant) bank manager and Q’orianka Kilcher’s head teller, but it’s the thieves who are truly shocking in both their watery nothingness as protagonist-villains and the awfulness of the performances behind them: Taryn Manning (Experimenter) and Francesca Eastwood (True Crime) as the sisters heading up the gang are completely incapable of exuding either the brains or the brawn the script asks of them, and derisive laughter is the only possible response when Eastwood tries to convince a hostage that she, too, is a victim here. And the film isn’t just psychologically risible but paranormally inconsistent, unable to commit to a set of supernatural rules for its spooks to follow. With not a single character to like or root for, nor even ones to cheer dying, and not much in the way of scares, what’s the point? To warn us not to rob haunted banks? Er, okay: got it.