An Irish marital body horror? Why not? A Hand to Hold is a highly entertaining short film which melds a recognisably lilting sense of humour with some outrageous practical gore effects.
We start with an older couple, Moira (Frances Barber) and Patrick (Murray McArthur). Patrick is in ill-health – rigged up to a morphine drip, the lot – but they are spending the evening reminiscing over old times, as well as avoiding the promise of a murkier future. Patrick is too ill to finish the game of chess they’ve started, and as it turns out it’ll remain incomplete: Patrick passes away the following morning, as confirmed by the local doctor (Frank Bourke) and the undertakers, who have been parked up at the bottom of the lane for a couple of weeks, just in case. You get the impression that word travels fast in this small, coastal community.
But is all it seems? When Moira, by now grieving, tries to let go of her husband’s hand, she finds she can’t. She’s trapped in his grip – and although the doctor assures her that it’s a case of rigor mortis which will pass in ‘seventy-two hours or so’ (long enough to be stuck at the bedside of a corpse, all the same), it doesn’t pass at all. Patrick is still clinging on, and as the proposed solutions get weirder and weirder, so does the situation. Physically severing the hand only seems to trigger something bizarre and very, very grisly to begin growing from the hand itself…
This is a fun film, and it knows exactly the length, style and level of detail needed to match its premise, ensuring a film that doesn’t get sidetracked by explaining absolutely everything or worse, trying to pad out what it has to feature-length. Instead, we get enough characterisation to understand the dynamics at play and a great blend between gentle humour and a ridiculous, but incredibly impressive array of gory, practical SFX. A Hand to Hold – as well as exploring the idiom very, very literally – plays with attitudes to marriage and the ‘man of the house’ idea, too, though again, without pushing a moral message too heavily: we know enough, and that’s that, at core, there’s a ‘miserable old fecker’ who wants it all his own way.
Just to reiterate, the decision to showcase practical effects here was absolutely the right one, and it looks fantastic on screen: there’s no shying away from filling the frame with it, and the contrast between bloody gore and the cosy practicalities of domestic rural life is another boon. A Hand to Hold is a charming, pithy short film which takes a simple enough idea and explodes it (no typo). Oh, and you don’t get to say this often as a predominantly horror reviewer, but: Jimmy Tarbuck is in this!