The past is doomed to continually repeat itself in Ted Geoghegan’s tremendous new feature film, a Twilight Zone-esqe examination of the way in which anger and hatred continues to divide us. For a film set in 1945, Brooklyn 45 feels painfully prescient of the current climate in the United States. Ted’s films always feel ambitious and do so much with so little, but Brooklyn 45 is probably his best feature because it takes the concept of 12 Angry Men, throws in some violence, a ghost or two, and some of the best character actors working in genre films. It’s also a smart condemnation of the way in which a lot of Americans look back at World War II with rose-colored glasses, painting an intriguing dissection of the simmering political and social tensions that continue to this day.

It opens with a newsreel proclaiming Hitler’s death and the return home of the men and women who fought in the devastating war. “Prosperity will follow,” the reel suggests as text tells us the time and place is Brooklyn, December 27th, 1945. Brooklyn 45 starts as if it were a lost film from that era of cinema, as a man and woman get out of a car in front of a beautiful Brownstone. The Christmas decor, the wintry look and the black and white, 4:3 aspect cinematography imagines a more romantic film than the one that follows. Two lovebirds meeting up with old friends for a Christmas get-together. Slowly the black and white fades into color as people begin to shuffle towards the home and into the parlor, the aspect ratio slyly and almost unnoticeably opens up into widescreen. It’s such a smart opening that quietly suggests that even though Brooklyn 45 transitions from the past to the present in terms of cinematography, the hate and the horror of the past continues to linger today.

The home belongs to Lt Col Clive “Hock” Hockstatter (a phenomenal Larry Fessenden), their commanding officer who has invited his closest friends to open up a doorway to the other side. The group includes interrogator Marla Sheridan (Anne Ramsay) and her milquetoast punching bag of a husband Bob (Ron E. Rains), accused war criminal Major Archibald “Archie” Stanton (Jeremy Holm) and Hock’s best friend Major Paul DiFranco (The Hills Have Eyes remake’s Ezra Buzzington). To say they saw some shit in the war would be an understatement and while Paul teases Archie’s queerness, the military members all seem to genuinely love each other. Unpleasant small talk about Archie’s upcoming trial (“corn-fed Nebraskan turns war criminal,” he scoffs) and how good Marla was as a de facto torturer (“she had a Kraut’s finger so far back he wouldn’t stop puking”) turns into even more unpleasant discussions about Hock’s recently deceased wife, Susan.

Turns out Hock hasn’t had the easiest time settling back home. His wife took her own life on Thanksgiving, after proclaiming that the next door neighbors were spying for the Nazis. No one, including Hock, believed her and it’s implied she became so paranoid and distraught that she eventually took her life. To make matters worse, in his time of grief Hock visited a reverend, who told him about the “glory of heaven” but that Susan would not be in heaven because she sinned.

By the time most of the people arrive at Hock’s home, he’s already two bottles of alcohol in with no plans of stopping. He tells them he wants to perform a seance. That his grief is too great and he wants to prove either that the reverend was wrong or that there is something waiting them on the other side. That the people who died in the war are still smiling out there, somewhere. Mostly, he says he wants the ability to talk to his wife one last time because, right now, he’s all out of faith.

Yes, they contact something. Yes, they get stuck in the parlor. Yes, this is a horror movie with the expected genre trappings. But what follows pulls more from the aforementioned 12 Angry Men as the soldiers and one civilian who’s never seen war have to go to battle with their own paranoia and the horrors of what they experienced during the war. These “heroes” aren’t great people. They're flawed humans who were faced with unprecedented horror. They’ve each done horrendous things during the war, mostly under the direction of Hock himself. And while they’ve brought a supernatural being into the room with them, it's their internal demons that they must actually vanquish…if that’s even possible. While Brooklyn 45 is mostly focused on a perceived enemy in their midst and the discussions that follow the seance, tension hangs just under the surface as if one wrong move will doom them all. I’m talking around what happens in the film because Ted’s movie is one best experienced fresh.

What I can say is that Ted has amassed a fantastic cast who all give such passionate and nuanced performances. From the war criminal Archie who did a horrific thing in the war to Marla’s regret over the tortures she oversaw, each of them bring such pathos to characters who history will see as heroes but are actually very flawed and haunted. At the center, though, is Larry Fessenden, who gives a career-best performance as Hock. An early monologue destroys with emotion and sets the events that follow on its careening path towards finding something in the world to hold onto in the face of the horrors of war. While these discussions and the splashes of supernatural spookiness makes a fantastic film, the single location and the focus on dialogue would also be perfectly suited to a play that I’d love to experience live.

Bigotry and nationalism simmer under the surface and suggest that while we might be through with the war, the war isn’t through with us. Hock obviously wants to find out if his wife is still out there somewhere, but the underlying fear in his question is whether their own horrific deeds will be punished in the afterlife. Does the horrible things they did in the name of their country quickly damn them to an eternity of suffering? That’s the question lingering, unspoken, on their tongues as the parlor becomes a microcosm of the world, grappling with its own horrors, be they a war or a pandemic or deep-seated hatred that continues to today.

On a more personal note, Brooklyn 45 got me thinking about my own family. Specifically, my grandfather who fought in World War II. Who stormed the beaches at Normandy. Who probably should have died in the war when shrapnel exploded around him, but was saved because of his helmet. I still remember him bringing my hand to his head to show the dent in his skull where the helmet bent inward. He never wanted to talk about the war and it hung over him in ways I never understood as a kid. I always wondered what he experienced that would give him that far-away look in his eye whenever WWII was mentioned.

World War II was the end of American naivete in a way, and the stains it left in the world and its people still exist today. Brooklyn 45 might tackle too many things in its runtime, muddying up some of its intentions and recycling a few arguments one too many times as it enters the third act, but it works both as a dissection of the way we discuss WWII and as a modern examination of xenophobia and fear that continues to destroy us. A must watch.