Tag: horror

Kindred

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Fiona Shaw is a national treasure. As the terrifying matriarch at the heart of Kindred, she shrieks and scowls, scoffs and shocks with venomous glee. Occupying a central space in this British pregnancy horror, she reminds us that she is one of the best actors working today.

An indication of her character Margaret’s entitlement comes quickly into the film. When she is told by her son Ben (Edward Holcroft) and girlfriend Charlotte (Tamara Lawrence) that they are moving to Australia, her reaction is of pure disgust. How can they leave her and her enormous manor behind? But why wouldn’t they want to leave? She is a dark and difficult woman, constantly doted upon by her “nice guy” stepson Thomas (an excellent Jack Lowdon).

Things suddenly change when veterinarian Ben dies in a horse-related accident. Charlotte, suddenly pregnant despite being on the pill, blacks out in the hospital and awakens in this large, ancestral home, replete with long corridors, creaky floorboards and various other Bric-à-brac. She wants to use her phone. It’s broken. She wants to go back to her home. It’s been foreclosed. She wants to go to a hospital? Thomas can take her… No matter the reason, Charlotte finds herself unable to get out or contact anyone.

Charlotte is black but her race is never mentioned in the film. Nonetheless, it seems to be an exploration of the well-documented ways Black women are more likely to be disbelieved than white women, especially in a medical setting. Charlotte is constantly being gaslighted, from the small things — like complaints about dizziness being waved away— to the large, like the amazing moment when she tells a nurse that she is being kidnapped to remarkable indifference. There is also the fact that these large legacy homes across the UK are notoriously white spaces, making Charlotte a constant stranger despite technically being part of the family.

While engaging in the odd symbol here and there — the reappearance of the horse shot like its come straight from a Lloyds commercial, and a flock of birds straight out of Hitchcock — this horror leans more family thriller than supernatural. And unlike many big theme horrors that have come out in recent years, which lean on metaphor and feeling more than good old-fashioned storytelling, debut director Joe Marcantonio has a great eye for set up and pay-off, making it a remarkably entertaining movie. A fair point can be made that the hereditary theme isn’t really explored at all, but it’s not much of a big deal when the film is just this much fun.

With constant twists and turns, delightful red herrings and moments of genuine suspense, Kindred has ounces of flair. Supported by three remarkable performances, including Tamara Lawrence’s steely resilience, Lowdon’s skin-crawling creep act, and Fiona Shaw’s scene-chewing monologues, and this is easily the best British horror of the year. Expect a warm reception back in Britain.

Kindred plays as out of competition in the First Feature strand at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.

Model Olimpia (Modell Olimpia)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Filled with elliptical storytelling, minimal dialogue and a strange, unsettling tone, Model Olimpia is a low-key German horror film filtered through an arthouse style. Presenting a mother-and-son relationship quite unlike any other, it announces Frédéric Hambalek as a director to watch.

Made for almost no-budget, the film only consists of a handful of players. At its centre is a young man (Alban Mondschein), a quiet and strange boy. He performs rituals at the behest of his mother (Anna Steffens) such as looking at pictures of strangers and imagining their secret lives, as well as masturbating to the audio of cringe-y erotic novels. It appears that she has created her own therapy technique, one that will go to dark places in order to “fix” her son.

What is the mother trying to achieve? Is she actually trying to help her son, or is she the reason he is so strange in the first place? This tension is brought to the test by the arrival of a new neighbour (Mathilde Bundschuh), a kind, well-adjusted student who offers the young man the chance for a more normal life.

Or does she? It’s hard to tell considering the weirdness of all the players. Characters move and act slowly, drained of any true emotion. There’s influences from Yorgos Lanthimos here, especially Dogtooth, with its hermetically sealed world of internal rules and symbols that keeps the viewer second guessing throughout. There’s also elements of Berliner Schule directors such as Christian Petzold and Angela Schanelec. Like these abrasive directors, the film moves at strange angles, forcing the viewer to constantly play catch-up.

The connective narrative tissue between scenes is almost completely omitted: showing us only the jagged parts instead of the whole. We are often dropped into the midst of scenes, giving the film a feeling of unpredictability. The camerawork is extremely precise, making use of unconventional, mostly static frames to create a controlled and unnerving atmosphere. The tone is so controlled that when there is a marked break with the films carefully created style, you stand up and notice, providing a masterclass in making and then disrupting a certain type of style.

In different hands the film may come across as overly crass or even misogynistic, but Model Olimpia is so matter-of-fact in its presentation it can be interpreted in multiple ways. This is stressed by the lack of a score, which provides the audience little guidance of how to feel. In fact, the most unsettling thing is not knowing what to feel rather than simply having a strong reaction one way or another.

There will probably be mixed reactions to this film. It’s likely to put a lot of viewers off. But for those who want to stick with it, there are plenty of rewards to be found in its intriguing approach. Some may find it bitterly comic; while others will be utterly horrified. To work on both levels on such a small budget is a fascinating achievement.

Model Olimpia plays as part of the First Feature competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.

The Final Wish

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

There’s a reason many couples – typically new and loved up – choose horror on a movie night; it is the genre most likely to draw them together, causing grips to tighten and heads to nestle. However, no such experience will be had watching The Final Wish, a scare-free effort that trades on Lin Shaye’s B-movie charisma.

Shaye’s schtick is a good fit for unhinged matriarch Kate Hammond, who she commands with a blend of psychosis, senility and the supernatural. Michael Welch also proves capable as her son Aaron, a bewildered everyman trying to make it as a lawyer. Regrettably, everyone else is a stock character – Jeremy the stoner friend, Derek the brutish local sheriff, Lisa the vapid love interest.

Even worse than the characters are the woefully constructed scares. It’s a reheated medley of creaky floorboards, possessed household items and characters’ reflections screaming at them in the mirror – all of which occur in a rickety old house with inexplicably poor lighting… why is it so dark in there?

And of course, this litany of tropes is amplified by a generic score that does two things: assaults you like a cattle prod during its irritating jump scares or counterfeits the tortured strings of The Shining. Even more annoying is the trailer, which uses that almost dubstep-inflected crescendo of synthetic drumbeats and screaming noises that audiences are just sick and tired of.

There is a plot, something about a haunted urn and seven wishes, but it’s so trite that it doesn’t bear repeating. Ultimately, this is just another rehashed horror movie. Aside from the competence of Shaye and Welch, the only praise one can eke out goes to the gaffers and set designers, who mock up some neon-kissed diners that have a charming air of Americana about them. Otherwise, there’s barely a shred of flair or creativity.

The Final Wish is on VoD from Monday, May 25th.

Tales from the Lodge

Posted on by victorfraga

In a quaint and remote lodge somewhere in the idyllic English countryside, a small group of friends meets up in order to scatter the ashes of their friend Jonesy, who tragically drowned in the local lake a few years earlier. Some of these people are facing some sort of painful predicament: Martha’s husband is terminally ill, while Emma is struggling with motherhood, and so on. The jaunty Paul, on the other hand, is in high spirits and wishes to party. He and his girlfriend Miki stir up the already existing tensions. Then a mysterious murderer appears. This is more or less how the story goes. Not that it makes much sense. I couldn’t make head or tail of the story. In fact, I had to read the press notes in order to write this introductory paragraph.

Tales from the Lodge is genuinely one of the most disjointed and unintentionally ridiculous films that I have seen in a long time. And I watch a lot of films. It works neither as a black comedy nor as a horror movie. There are no jump scares. The humour is tedious and trite. The jokes are hardly witty: ““It’s so peaceful in here that the kids would love it: there are no cars and no paedophiles”. The ashes of Jonesy fly on the eyes and mouth of one of the mourning friends as the wind blows the content of the urn. A fat character who looks like “Kiefer Sutherland” appears in a bizarre cutaway gag. The sex scene is cringeworthy. The zombie make-up and the special effects are awful. The plot twist at the end conjures up the three inevitable letters:” WTF?”. This is not slapstick. This is not wilfully preposterous. This is a combination of atrocious script writing, shambolic camerawork and clumsy acting.

The only frightening thing about Tales from the Lodge is that it could get a theatrical release. That is the real joke. It is in cinemas across the UK on Friday, November 1st. Scream and run away from it as fast as you can!

Ready or Not

Posted on by victorfraga

Each film festival will feature the proverbial “big-hitters”, which come with the question mark of whether they will sink or swim in the waters of the audience’s response. Surviving or not is a fitting analogy for a film centred around a game of hide and seek with deadly intentions. Ready or Not does not disappoint, and in the context of its own survival as a piece of filmmaking, it also goes so far as to protect the interests of studio horror in a line-up surrounded by independent genre films.

Grace (Samara Weaving) is not only marrying fiancé Alex (Mark O’ Brien), but is becoming a part of the rich and eccentric Le Domus family, owners of a grand old games company. Fittingly, the family have a traditional ritual when someone new marries into the family – they play a game chosen by chance. Unfortunately for Grace, the card she picks is hide and seek, and soon whether ready or not, the bride learns that the rules of this game are far from harmless.

Ready or Not belongs to a rich heritage of storytelling, of an individual in a life and death struggle, films that include Hard Target (Joh Woo, 1993), Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000) and You’re Next (Adam Wingard, 2012), as well as Beyond the Reach (Jean-Baptiste Léonetti, 2015), based on Robb White’s 1972 novel Deathwatch of man hunting man after the one witnesses the other commit murder in the Mojave Desert.

Comparisons can also be drawn to the Western genre that centres around a violent and adversarial confrontation – the hero or villain exerting his will by mastering the other one’s propensity for violence. Not dissimilar to the Western hero, Grace conforms to a traditional concept of the hero who tempers her own propensity, while those around her embrace theirs with narcissistic indifference. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s film features shades of the Western, while the base plot of whether Grace survive a violent situation is in keeping with the spectacle of violence in action and horror genre cinema.

Weaving is perfectly cast, who in her wedding dress and make-up looks in one respect dainty and fragile, yet her attitude and words show a less lady-like edge to her personality. With expressive eyes, Weaving conveys her emotions without a reliance on words, and in a story driven by action and not conversation, this is to her character’s benefit. What makes her character so compelling is not juxtaposing her vulnerability and strength, but more the childlike moments at play before understanding her peril. Grace’s look and journey offer up comparisons to the culling of innocence in the fairy tale, accentuated by the bride in white as a symbol of innocence. This forges a visceral meeting between innocence and maturity, while her in-laws resemble adolescents, who with an air of farcical superstitious fear that lies behind the game of hide and seek, lust not after sex, but bloodshed.

Directors Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett show an appreciation for the value of humour. Whether the focus is on hunters or prey, there is a comedic heartbeat to the film. Humour can make a film both memorable and re-watchable, and the directors intertwine the spectacle of violence with frequent beats of humour. On a meta level, the humour becomes a communicative language that breaks the fourth wall because the film does not either try to, or ask us to suspend our belief entirely.

By now, the language of a film such as Ready or Not has bled into the characters. There is a conscious awareness transmitted by the filmmakers and the cast, or rather here we can sense a playful warmth of the familiar beats struck to the humorous interrogation of the rules of its own world, that leans towards self-consciousness and flirts with becoming a spoof. This is at the very heart of the pleasurable experience that is Ready or Not, where the humour becomes the proverbial wink from storytellers and characters, acknowledged by our smiles and laughter.

Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett know the film they want to create. The two directors make no apologies for leaning towards the spectacle of superficial pleasure. Character back stories such as Alex’s self-exile from his family, his brother Daniel’s (Adam Brody) cynical feelings towards his dynastic family, and his sister-in-law Charity’s (Elyse Levesque) determination that she will not return to her impoverished past, all offer something of value. The ideas of the family as a source of one’s identity, what people are able to live with knowing about themselves and our drive for self-preservation are all introduced, while Grace’s desire to become a part of a family speaks of our inclination to belong.

These may only be passing thoughts that are never developed on a thematic level, and yet we nonetheless perceive these doorways to themes even if they remain sealed. These passing thoughts amidst a plot-driven reverie of violence and comedy speaks to films such as this being repressive acts – repressing the natural inclination of story and characters to not only be superficial. Ready or Not stimulates its audience on an experiential level, and while knowing how to play with a humorous self-awareness that effectively flirts with spoofing, even if a repressive act, it does not diminish the pleasure it evokes and its success as a commercial genre filmmaking.

Arrow Video FrightFest hosted the UK premiere of Ready or Not. The film will be released theatrically by Twentieth Century Fox on Wednesday, September 25th. On VoD in April!

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

Posted on by victorfraga

This brand new fantasy-horror movie – showcased with much fanfare at the Bankside Vaults – struck me as a combination of The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1993) and It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2015) by way of Goosebumps (Rob Letterman, 2016). An interesting set of influences, you may think, but the result is narratively and thematically trite – haunted houses, cursed books. Even triter is the character work. It’s all geeks and jocks. How many times have we seen bookish girls and bespectacled boys get tormented by douchebags in a varsity jackets? Too many.

However, the most disappointing thing is the utter dearth of scares. This is cattle prod cinema at its most formulaic; so easy to read that even its most earnest attempts to spoil your underwear barely register. All it succeeds in doing is a spot of heart flutter and a touch of ear damage – decidedly unimpressive.

There’s no denying its technical proficiency, though. It has a deft blend of the practical and the digital, which is no surprise given the Guillermo del Toro’s influence, although this counts for little when the subjects, their dialogue and their circumstances which are impossible to remember.

The problem is that director Andre Ovredal and producer/writer del Toro appear to be far more interested in Stephen Gammel’s macabre illustrations than Schwartz’s writing. There’s period detail and a slim satire of the Nixon era – represented by the bigoted, authoritarian police chief – but any substance is sidelined in favour of ghoulish set pieces, which may be exciting to its loyal fan base but are too random and episodic to anyone else.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, August 23rd. Special screenings will be held across gloomy locations such as the Bankside Vaults of London. Available on VoD in April!

Don’t Look Now

Posted on by victorfraga

Warning: this review contains spoilers

Cinema, perhaps better than any other medium, has the ability to completely collapse time through the power of editing. Think the epic transition between the prehistoric era and space travel in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), the non-linear structures of Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), allowing viewers to experience cinema in terms of thematic connection and not simply A-to-B storytelling. Don’t Look Now is another classic example of how editing can transform material into something truly haunting and marvellous. Yet here, instead of freeing the story, Don’t Look Now’s editing chokes it, creating a sense of dread that is palpable from the very first frame to the last.

Nicolas Roeg had experimented with fragmented storytelling techniques before with editor Antony Gibbs with Performance (1970) and Walkabout (1971), yet this collaboration with Graeme Clifford represented a major step up in form; its use of fast-forwards, flashbacks and frequent, sometimes lightning-quick insert shots a true masterclass in form.

Everything is set from the very first frame, entombed in stone like Venice’s churches. While John (Donald Sutherland) and Laura Baxter’s (Julie Christie) daughter — clad in an iconic red mackintosh — is playing with a red ball outside a pond, John is working through some slides. As he spills water on the slide of a church, the scene turns completely red, linking his daughter’s drowning with his own eventual bloody demise.

They move to Venice, where John works on restoring a church. The city is treated as one giant mausoleum, emptied out and shrouded in mist. It’s wintertime, everyone is wrapped up in hats, scarves and coats, and there are endless shadows emanating from its tiny, winding alleyways. As the psychic blind woman says, expressing her sister’s view: “it’s like a city in aspic, wrapped over from a dinner party, where all the guests are dead or gone.” It’s a place, like John and Laura, stuck in time, seemingly unable to move forwards or backwards.

Their relationship suffers, as demonstrated by its now iconic sex scene. It is still rare to see a film use sex as a thematic point rather than simply plot advancement, Laura and John desperately writhing together as a means to cling on to the little spark of life they have left. Intercut with scenes of them getting dressed afterwards, it stresses both their togetherness and estrangement, showing the difficulty of maintaining passion after suffering such a momentous loss. Grief has this power to rent people apart, giving them little to cling onto other than the memory of their daughter.

When Laura meets fellow British tourists Heather (Hilary Mason) and Wendy (Clelia Matania) and Heather explains how she can communicate with her daughter, she is naturally intrigued by these odd yet mystical duo. In a common horror theme from Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polasnki, 1968) to Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018), her husband doesn’t believe a word she says. But when he starts seeing a little hooded figure in a red mackintosh who looks just like his daughter, mysterious happenings start to question his grounded and skeptical beliefs. Perhaps he has the ability to see things too.

The technicolour cinematography allows the red of his daughter’s jacket to really pop out, contrasting violently with all the other muted colours. It is perhaps one of the most famous uses of the colour in cinematic history, alongside the little girl in a red coat in the otherwise black-and-white Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993). To stress the murderous aspect of the colour, Roeg often uses dissolves, allowing red objects to bleed into one another with nightmarish regularity.

Things double and double, the use of repetition and doppelgängers constricting the narrative to its deadly eventuality. John’s hubris is in thinking he can make sense of what he sees in front of him. With bodies fished out of the river at regular intervals, and a sighting of his wife on a boat with the two women, John frantically searches for his wife despite the fact she has gone back to England to see her son, who has had a mysterious accident. What he has in fact seen is a premonition of his own funeral. The ending — which is either haunting or oddly bathetic depending on who you ask — then reveals that the red cloaked figure is not a phantom but a murderous dwarf, who quickly dispatches him with a knife. Then in a remarkably edited sequence, the whole film seems to pass before his eyes, revealing its narrative to be almost completely circuitous.

There is a religious component to the dazzling editing. If God exists, then He would not see the world in a linear fashion, but everything that has ever happened and everything that will ever happen simultaneously. Everything is predetermined, nothing happens by chance. This is the true horror: not jump scares or bloody mutilations, but the idea that nothing you can do can ever change your fate. Only the gifted such as Heather and John can see parts of the future, but this doesn’t mean they can do anything about it. A truly terrifying prospect indeed.

A 4k restoration of Don’t Look Now hits UK cinemas on Friday, July 5th (nearly half a century after its original release in 1973)

In Fabric

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

A wildly inventive and unashamedly British affair, Strickland’s latest film mixes tacky 1970s aesthetics with several workplaces – a large clothing store, a personal loans company and a washing machine repair firm. Clothing emporium Dentley & Soper is run on a series of arcane regulations, obedience to the seemingly arbitrary rules for conduct of personnel at Waingel’s Bank is encouraged by smarmy middle management types Stash and Clive (Julian Barrett and Steve Oram) while washing machine repair firm Slaverton’s Wash insists any personnel who mend their own machines must do so on the firm’s books.

Although the film is constructed on the portmanteau template used in many horror films, whether it’s a horror movie as such rather than a very strange and stylish arthouse movie is open to debate. Loosely linked narratives are woven around serial characters – Waingel’s employee Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), Slaverton’s repair man Reg Speaks (Leo Bill) and his fiancée Babs (Hayley Squires). Each of them one way or another in turn acquires the dress. Sheila is a middle-aged wife whose husband has left her and whose adult son is living at home. She wants the dress to impress potential blind dates. Reg is given the item to wear on his drunken stag night and Babs stumbles upon the garment in their home.

The dress seems to possess a life of its own, moving along floors, slinking under doors, hovering in domestic spaces, causing washing machines to break down when it’s put in a load and occasionally even hurling itself at people. It also appears in some bizarre dreams and causes its wearers to develop nasty chest rashes.

Yet, except at the most perfunctory level. Strickland’s interest doesn’t lie exclusively with the the mechanics of the horror movie. The director is fascinated by petty corporate rules and regulations, and their verbal manifestations. Dentley & Soper shop assistant Miss Luckmoore (Fatma Mohamed from director Strickland’s earlier The Duke Of Burgundy, 2014, Berberian Sound Studio, 2012 and Katalin Varga, 2009) spouts her own esoteric sales patter scarcely comprehensible to the average shopper. Stash and Clive constantly refer to Waingel’s rules on employee conduct while Reg appears to go into a trance state whenever he starts to talk in detailed technical language about issues with specific washing machines, as if reciting a pre-written speech from an unseen technical manual.

A further fascination with surface is evident throughout the piece. Little sequences comprise runs of static photos shot on film, announcing that the sales season has started or a newspaper page informing us that the woman who originally modelled the offending dress for the Dentley & Soper catalogue has met an untimely end. The whole thing has a 1970s feel: people have telephone landlines and leave messages on each others’ answerphones, while some of the store’s shop floor graphics and promo ads couldn’t have come from any other decade. And the fastidious and highly mannered Miss Luckmoore who initially sells the dress to Sheila, is straight out of that decade.

Strangest of all is the ritual of Miss Luckmoore and several colleagues, seen in the Dentley & Soper TV promo ad, which seems to consist of a group dance luring customers into the store like a coven of witches in pursuit of some nefarious purpose. At night, Luckmoore removes a wig to reveal a bald head then crawls foetus position-like into a dumb waiter and descends, only to ascend back to the same room the following morning. The store and its highly cultured staff seems like a distant cousin to the malevolent witches’ coven running the dance school in the Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977) and given Strickland’s early essay on Italian giallo horror film making Berberian Sound Studio (2012), that connection may be no accident, underlined by Cavern of Anti-Matter’s highly eclectic musical score. Incidentally, the lower echelons of the cast include sometime David Lynch soundtrack composer Barry Adamson (as Zach, one of Shelia’s dates) and improvisational musician and Strickland alumnus Adam Bohman.

There’s much here to satisfy a variety of tastes – whether you admire classic giallo horror, lurid seventies material or arthouse movies in general. Critical favourite Strickland is slowly developing a fascinating body of work. In Fabric, odd and off-kilter though it may be, is as impressive as anything else he’s done. Don’t miss.

In Fabric is out in the UK on Friday, June 28th. On Curzon Home Cinema in August.

The Prodigy

Posted on by victorfraga

Eight-year-old Miles Blume (Jackson Robert Scott) is an adorable little boy. Born with fascinating eyes of different colours, with a huge intelligence and winning looks, he is the pride and joy of his mommy and daddy. He is so bright that mommy and daddy send him to a special school for bright little girls and boys like him. But there’s something rather unusual about Miles.

The trouble is that he has some rather strange habits. He mutters fluently in his sleep in a Hungarian dialect found only near the Romanian border; when another little boy won’t give up his place in the classroom, he beats him with a heavy spanner; he leaves broken glass on the stairway into the basement so that his babysitter cuts herself badly; he chops the family doggie up with specially sharpened scissors and the way he looks at his poor mother (Taylor Schilling) is something frightful. Whatever is the matter with poor little Miles?

At the time of his birth, his soul was possessed by a very nasty man, who lived in rural Ohio, called Edward Scarka (Paul Fauteux), whose family came from Hungary near the Romanian border and had different coloured eyes. Mr. Scarka also liked cutting ladies’ hands and was shot dead by police just as Miles was being born. A nice man called Mr. Jacobson (Paul Fauteux) will regress Miles back to when he was born and discover why Edward Scarka has possessed him. Scarka has come back to life in Miles to finish off some business he hadn’t settled in this life. We don’t know what it is, but we are about to find out. This is as much as I will tell you without spoiling the movie.

This film is trailing the success of religious-themed horror classics with child protagonists, such as The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976). It has a number of good “jump out of your seat” moments. The performance of young Robert Jackson Scott is very creditable. I look forward to his future work. Taylor Schilling represents the concerned, conscientious mommy, and she is quite convincing. At the end of the day, however, this is another formulaic Hollywood horror. It will do perfectly good business. It will be eagerly watched by many after a hard day at the office. But that is about it. There isn’t too much dirt waiting to be unearthed.

The Prodigy is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, March 15th. On Netflix in January.

The Hole in the Ground

Posted on by victorfraga

Sarah (Seána Kerslake) and her young son Chris (James Quinn Markey) move to a very rural Ireland seeking to break away from a recent past of unfortunate events. Their large and creepy house is as remote as it gets, completely isolated in the middle of the woods. And there’s plenty of renovation work to be carried out, and Sarah looks determined to do it on her own. One evening, Chris disappears into the woods. Sarah attempts to fetch him but instead comes across a giant hole in ground. Given its shape, one would assume it was caused by a meteor crash. Despite its enormous dimensions, the titular hole remains hidden amongst the dense vegetation, and other human beings seen unaware of it.

Chris eventually returns home on his own, but is behaviour has changed. He has become distant and cold. Sarah begins to believe that the boy who returned isn’t her son at all. An eerie old lady called Mareen had a similar experience with her son decades earlier, and he ended up dead. As a consequence, Noreen lost her sanity and is now found aimlessly wandering the countryside roas most of the time. Her figure is scarier than most paranormal entities. Could Sarah’s fate be the same? Will Chris end up dead, and Sarah deranged and catatonic?

The Hole in the Ground uses a very conventional suspense formula. Borderline supernatural events (such as Noreen’s bizarre appearances in the middle of the road) take place, repeatedly raising the question: is our protagonist going mad or is something truly supernatural taking place? Females are historically associated with hypersensitivity, hysteria and madness. They are the perfect victims of gaslighting. Plus, females are inherently ambiguous. The narrative arc of Hole in the Ground is effectively constructed upon this ambivalence (madness versus reason).

In the second half of the movie, the apparently supernatural events escalate. Chris has become so strong that he’s able to throw his mother across the kitchen. But did that really happen or was Sarah just dreaming? The director skilfully blends reality, dream and allegory in order to avoid answering this question and many others too soon. As you result, you will remain at the edge of the seat until the final resolution is unveiled. The film ending might raise some eyebrows and it certainly won’t answer all questions, but it’s worth sitting through the 90 minutes in order to find out what it is.

The excellent sound engineering and montage deserve a mention. The climaxes are cut just at the right point to something very trivial such as Chris slurping pasta and a cup of coffee being stirred, bringing your adrenaline level constantly up and down. The cinematography is quite impressive, and the sequences in the woods are particularly sombre and elegant.

The Hole in the Ground premiered at Sundance on Friday, January 25th. It is in cinemas across the UK on Friday, March 1st.

Apostle

Posted on by victorfraga

When discussing his latest feature, writer-director Gareth Evans has expressed his desire to “make something that fits within [the] British folk horror tradition”. With Apostle, a grisly story of an opiate-addicted former missionary sent to a secluded Welsh island to rescue his sister from the fanatical inhabitants who have kidnapped her, Evans’s desire has been thoroughly realised.

The premise brings Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man to mind, though if you thought Hardy’s film was shocking, wait until you’ve seen Evans’s. Gone are the bizarre folk music interludes of the 1973 classic, in their place extended scenes of blood-letting and skull-boring. In some ways, Apostle is more akin to the Hostel series than the comparatively quaint world of British folk horror, but what it does retain of its The Wicker Man-influence is a sense of mystery, human sacrifice for the Earth and creepy masks!

Even before he arrives on Erisden, Thomas Richardson (Dan Stevens) is forced to decipher clues as to how to survive and navigate the island. His mission, as a drugged-up, faithless Neil Howie, continues in this vein for at least half the film’s runtime before turning more to the supernatural and the savage.

In this way, Apostle also recalls Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011), beginning as one beast before morphing into another bloody and brutal creature entirely. Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General (1968) and Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) round out Evans’s confirmed influences, though the barn-like dwelling of Her (Sharon Morgan) evokes the thorny labyrinthine maze of Carcosa from True Detective season one.

To Evans’s credit, the mythology of Her, a perverse personification of Mother Nature, is never over-explained, though what is revealed bears similarities to the abduction of Persephone, the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, by Hades: infatuated with his niece, Hades abducted Persephone (with the despicable Zeus’s aid, it must be noted) before tricking her into returning to the underworld each year by feeding her blood-red pomegranate seeds. Whilst Persephone was gone, Demeter neglected the Earth to search for her daughter, causing Greece’s crops to perish and leaving its people on the brink of starvation.

Like Hades, Prophet Malcolm and his right-hand man Quinn (Michael Sheen and Mark Lewis Jones, respectively) abduct Her after discovering her on the Utopian Erisden. They imprison her and force her to consume the blood of animals (and later humans), which they figure begets the island’s vegetation to grow. When this fails, leaving Erisden’s inhabitants hungry and broken, Quinn ousts Prophet Malcolm as the leader of the commune, his plan to keep Her sustained involving not pomegranate seeds but seed of another very different kind.

Evans and long-time collaborator Matt Flannery capture some majestic imagery amongst the broken bones and bloodshed, and in wholly inventive ways. During a flashback to Thomas’s missionary work in Peking, Flannery’s camera begins upside down, inverting a burning cross as Thomas’s world is flipped on its head and his faith in God is shattered. One point-of-view shot, as a man’s skull cracks in a vice and semi-transparent crimson blotches the screen, is nauseating and horrific in equal measure.

Bill Milner and Kristine Froseth’s performances aren’t quite up to the same standard as those given by Dan Stevens, Michael Sheen, and Mark Lewis Jones, but Sebastian McCheyne as The Grinder is Apostle’s standout star. A beehive-like mask covering his entire head and face, McCheyne hobbles around his house of horrors like a murderous Quasimodo or deranged ape. He’s perhaps not an instant horror icon, but is possibly Apostle’s most memorable aspect, alongside its sheer amount of violence and gore. Likewise, Apostle isn’t an instant horror classic, but will probably go down as an underrated and underseen gem.

Apostle is available to view exclusively on Netflix from Friday, October 12th.