Review by Ben Bussey
Ever watch a horror movie that felt like it just got that bit too close to the bone? Cheap scares are ten-a-penny; for horror to really have an impact, sometimes it has to come and get you where you live. It has to present a fantasy scenario that the audience can truly relate to, put its characters through circumstances that the viewer can easily imagine going through themselves. Then more than ever, a horror movie can force you to contemplate how you would truly fare in such a situation.
Citadel does this for me in a way few other horror movies have in some time. For one such as myself – a husband and father living on a limited income – the set-up of this movie presents a scenario which is all too easy to envisage.
Moderate spoilers to follow.
To put it a bit crudely, what writer/director Ciaron Foy (making his feature debut) has given us here is a horror equivalent of Kevin Smith’s Jersey Girl. I’m not sure if enough people have even seen Jersey Girl for that reference point to really resonate, so I’d better elaborate: it’s a basic nightmare scenario for any new father for his loved one to die in childbirth, leaving him not only having to cope with life without her, but also to raise their child alone. However, where Smith’s film saw Ben Affleck mosey on to his cosy old suburban home with papa George Carlin, Foy’s film plunges new single parent Aneurin Barnard into a living hell of poverty and paranoia.
Crippled with agoraphobia, Barnard’s Tommy is plagued by the feeling that he and his baby daughter are still being targeted by the same gang of hoodies whose seemingly motiveless attack left his wife comatose. He’s torn between a quite understandable desperation to get the hell out of town, and an underlying suspicion that there’s something more to the situation than meets the eye, a feeling intensified by the suggestion that the gruff local Priest (a nice turn by James Cosmo) knows more than he’s letting on. But if Tommy really wants to find the truth, it will mean facing his terror head-on, and returning to the dismal tower block that he and his wife once called home, where the attack took place.
Straight away we’re faced with a plethora of mundane horrors that so many of us must deal with on a daily basis. The constant cries of an inconsolable child. Squalid living conditions. Unreliable power supply. Unhelpful office staff. Bus drivers who clearly see you but drive on regardless. And the perpetual sense of threat from strangers on the street.
But even if this representation of working class existence does not necessarily ring true to everyone, Citadel is a very effective fright flick, for the simple reason that it really is about fear. Tommy is a central protagonist whose defining characteristic is that he is constantly afraid; it is this seemingly insurmountable obstacle he must find a way to overcome, and Foy and Barnard are both to be commended for their thoroughly sympathetic portrayal of a traumatised man struggling to get by in day to day existence.
Where Citadel is liable to prove more divisive is in its midway revelation as to the nature of the threat. Diverging from its hoodie horror forebears – Ils, Eden Lake (or even F, which implied but never explicitly stated that its hooded antagonists were not in fact human) – Citadel reveals that there are bona fide monsters, not just disaffected youths, underneath those sweatshirts. Doubtless this will raise some questions as to just what the film is saying about lower working class children, particularly given the ultimate course of action Tommy and the Priest take to overcome them. Nor is this the only thing likely to bother some viewers, as there are some rather glaring inconsistencies in the behaviour of these phantom chavs – notably regarding the question of how and why they attack.
Blending gritty kitchen sink realism with more fantastical Gothic thrills is always going to be a tricky proposition, and some may feel that Citadel sells itself short by taking that route. Even so, for sheer nightmarish atmosphere, it really can’t be faulted. It’s beautifully shot and edited with a haunting musical score, and the tension barely lets up from start to finish.
All in all, I’m not sure I can say I really enjoyed Citadel – for, as I said, the core conceit just cut a little too close for comfort. But then, great horror isn’t generally too concerned with respecting the viewer’s comfort zone. If you’re anything like me and you feel like your own comfort zone could do with a little challenging, Citadel may well do the trick. It’s the best performance yet on the already respectable CV of Aneurin Barnard, and it definitely marks out Ciaron Foy as a writer-director worth looking out for in the future.
Citadel is released to Region 2 DVD on 30th September 2013 from Metrodome. For another take on the movie, here’s Tristan’s review from Abertoir 2012.