Review by Tristan Bishop
Watching a lot of low budget films can be a testing, if occasionally rewarding experience. For every hidden gem you stumble across that leaves you wide-eyed and eulogising its greatness to your friends, there are a least fifteen titles that you could happily sleep through, and a few more that make you want to throw the disc out the window (hard to do in these increasingly digital times). Low budget film-making and the attendant struggles are certainly laudable activities, but so often the art and craft are subsumed in unimaginative storylines, duff scripts, amateur acting and snooze-inducing pacing. Plus, when focussing on the horror genre, there is a dispiriting tendency towards bandwagon-jumping, commercial considerations being what they are – so it’s always nice to come across something which takes you by surprise.
Emulsion isn’t a horror film in a traditional sense, however – the term ‘psychological thriller’ seems to have fallen out of use these days, but I can’t think of a better way to describe Emulsion. In fact, the plot set-up, a man searching for his lost wife, put me in mind of a couple of classics of the genre: Polanski’s Frantic (1988) and George Sluizer’s Spoorloos/The Vanishing (also 1988). Ronny (played by Sam Heughan) is an obsessed man – his wife Isabella vanished in a multi-storey car park, and he spends his days searching for her. The film places us a year after the event, and Ronny has taken a job in the car park where she disappeared, desperately searching for any clue he can find. But Ronny doesn’t seem like your average kind of guy – he dresses like Berlin-era David Bowie starring in a Fritz Lang noir, and spends his evenings watching and re-watching home movie footage of Isabella on a 16mm film projector. He’s a man literally out of time, doomed to repeat himself day after day. He even tries to leave town, but is unable to pass the bridge on which he proposed to his wife. Then, out of nowhere, clues to Isabella’s whereabouts start to appear, and Ronny begins to unravel the mystery. But will he like what he finds?
First things first – Emulsion looks great. I mean, really great. Deep, rich colours and nice compositions (including some exterior long shots that put one in mind of Rian Johnson’s cracking teen noir Brick) go towards making the film look like something you’d be proud to have on your living room wall. Singh’s pedigree as a working director of commercials has obviously given him the skill to pull off something which looks like it came straight out of the Hollywood A-list. Speaking of which, there’s an obvious comparison here – David Lynch. The eagle-eyed among you will have spotted that the previously mentioned Frantic and The Vanishing both came from 1988, and, both, visually and script-wise, more than a few cues have been taken from Lynch’s work of the period – especially 1987’s Blue Velvet. Things aren’t all great, however. Despite a capable turn by Heughan in the lead, many of the supporting actors seem a little hesitant. Whereas Lynch uses unnatural performances to unnerve the audience, here it just seems like the cast sometimes just don’t know what to do with the portentous dialogue they’ve been given. Singh wrote the script as well as directing – very common practice these days, despite increasing evidence that even a great director is not necessarily a good writer, and, although it’s certainly nowhere near the worst example I’ve come across in recent times, it tends towards the clunky on several occasions.
In fact, I’ll be honest – for the first half of the film I wasn’t too impressed. Sure, the visuals were beautiful, but jarring elements like Ronny’s archaic sense of style, and moments such as a group of gangsters watching an angel-winged woman sing opera, put me off slightly. Thankfully, come the plot revelations at the hour mark I was taken by surprise. This is actually a film that ties up loose ends, and what I assumed at first were irritating stylistic flourishes were actually clues in Ronny’s mystery. In fact, I want to watch the film again just to see how much I didn’t pick up on the first viewing – and it’s not often I can say that.
Emulsion is not perfect by any means, but it is different, and impressive and intriguing enough for me to flag up Singh as a name to watch in future, and stands out like a beacon amidst a sea of low budget dross.
Emulsion has theatrical screenings lined up across the UK in January; find out more at the official Emulsion website, and on Facebook.