A woman awakes, alone, in a woodland clearing. She notices she has some injuries on her bare feet, suggesting she was walking for a while; however, she clearly can’t remember how she got there. Limping to the nearest main road, she is able to get her bearings, following the route back to what appears to be home.
She cleans herself up, her mind wandering back to easier times – the time before her husband Paul (director Paul Bickert) became ill. He’s at home too, and he needs his wife’s care: he’s on oxygen, and seems to be too unwell to speak or otherwise to communicate. She – Raya (Raya Miles) really wants to discuss the small matter of waking up in the woods – but he’s unable. If Paul can hear her, he doesn’t really act like it. Raya can talk to her best friend Amy (Tracie Thoms), but only on FaceTime, and Amy’s a little distracted by her own life. It feels an awful lot like Raya’s inability to talk this situation through is going to lead it to recur – which it duly does. But is there something more going on here than just sleepwalking? Raya is also plagued by nightmares (a moment of potential peril for any filmmaker, but my god, these nightmares really are unpleasant). Given these dreams, it feels entirely fitting that, the next time Raya wakes up outside, there’s a shovel wedged into the ground beside her. And the next time, she’s lying in a partly-dug grave.
Our Happy Place (2024) was written and directed by Paul Bickert, who also co-stars: it’s his first feature. Raya Miles appears here in her first role, let alone her first starring role. Shot during the Covid pandemic, there are a lot of ways this film could have gone off the rails: inexperience, quarantine, restrictions, budget, ideas. Happily, if the word ‘happily’ can in any way be attached to this brilliantly claustrophobic Slough of Despond, this doesn’t feel like a film made in spite of Covid; plenty of those have come out, and plenty more may yet be out there. Our Happy Place is unusual because it uses Covid in a meaningful way. It’s a plausible reason for Raya’s isolation; it’s why Amy – the occasionally distracted voice of reason – can’t just rock up at Raya’s place. It’s why Raya can’t take Paul, in his condition, to a hotel when she wants to leave their home. It makes sense, and in fact it’s one of the few tangible realistic elements in the film when everything else slowly spirals: at least the pandemic, we know, is real. It also helps to shape Raya’s pervading loneliness – a carer with no local friends, no other family or support network. Under this sort of pressure, this cabin in the woods and the woods themselves could have become dark enough places. But, to come back to the earlier question: there’s more at play here.
If by the midway point of the film you may have an inkling of what’s happening, this doesn’t detract from the storytelling, nor from the central ideas. This film makes you hyper-vigilant: there seems to be a mystery to uncover, so you begin to look for clues, symbols. The hatchet. The shovel. Characters’ facial expressions – or is that paranoia, spreading from film to viewer? Something dreadful certainly feels as though it’s lurking on the periphery of the everyday and Bickert has a keen instinct for what makes a thrilling horror sequence, with several scenes proving that point. These are not doled out liberally, but when they occur, they’re very effective, and the use of edits is also integral to the ways in which this film comes together, past meeting present, particularly in the final act. Miles’s performance is also key to the film’s success: it’s an intense, demanding role, building vulnerability and sympathy without recourse to simplistic ‘damsel in distress’ tropes. Raya is a woman fighting for her old happiness but being presented with impossible, terrifying obstacles.
Whilst in places Our Happy Place calls to mind an earlier film, The Pact (2012), it’s still refreshingly done, an unsettling meld of psychological and supernatural horror. With an 85-min runtime, it has the right amount of time and space to create a highly effective study of trauma, shifting its perspectives amongst different characters to do so – and all without overstaying its welcome. Maybe there’s a little fracturing of the storyline right at the end, but it’s absolutely not enough to do real harm to this well made, well edited and thoughtful introspective horror.
Our Happy Place (2024) features at this year’s Raindance Film Festival: look out for it on 20th June.
