Gil Kenan writes the first hour his franchise films deserve: a family, a building, and a dead man's equipment in the basement. Then the old owners come up the stairs, and twice now the script has let them have the house.
Fi1m perspective
Twice in a row, Gil Kenan has written a film that begins with a family moving into a building full of somebody else's things. In Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) it is a farmhouse in a dying Oklahoma town, and a clever girl working out, piece by piece, what the dead man who owned it was for. In Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024) it is the New York firehouse, and the same Spengler family trying to do the job for themselves. Both films spend their opening stretch on the family and are better for it. Both then open the door to the men from 1984, and the family is shown to the back of its own house.
He did not arrive as a writer for hire. He trained in animation at UCLA, and his short The Lark led Robert Zemeckis to hand him Monster House (2006), an animated horror comedy, as his first feature. City of Ember (2008) followed, then the Poltergeist remake (2015) and A Boy Called Christmas (2021); the reviews for Ember were mixed, and pacing was the word that kept coming up. The shape was set early: young people, a hidden world, a legacy in the walls, scares that are allowed to be funny. The Ghostbusters scripts, written with Jason Reitman across a partnership that now runs to four films, are that story with a famous name on the poster.
The family half of each is well written, which is what makes the second half so wearing. Reitman directs Afterlife and shares the script, and for about an hour it is a small, likeable film. We were fonder of Mckenna Grace's Phoebe than we expected to be, poking through a farmhouse full of old kit with nobody to show off to, and we minded when the script stopped watching her and started walking us through 1984 in order. Frozen Empire, which Kenan directs himself, has the same shape in a smaller building: twenty good minutes with the Spenglers, then the visitors, then James Acaster and Kumail Nanjiani and a sewer chase earning their keep while the family waits in the hall. We scored them 55 and 52, and the difference is mostly the size of the building.
Kenan has said of the two scripts: "We knew when we wrote Afterlife that the next story would come back to New York City, and that the story would need to grow." It grew. The people in it did not get any more room. Saturday Night (2024), also written with Reitman, is about the chaotic first episode of Saturday Night Live, a night when nobody involved was yet anyone's hero. We would like to see what Kenan writes when there is no 1984 to get back to.
Biography
Gil Kenan (born 16 October 1976) is a British–American film director, screenwriter and producer. He was born in London and later moved to Israel and then Los Angeles, where he studied film at the University of California, Los Angeles, receiving an MFA in animation in 2002.
Kenan made his feature debut directing the animated film Monster House (2006), which received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature. He has directed City of Ember (2008), Poltergeist (2015) and A Boy Called Christmas (2021), and co-wrote Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) with Jason Reitman. Kenan directed and co-wrote the sequel Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024), and co-wrote Saturday Night (2024).
