Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Most horror fans who have delved beyond the physical jerk-invoking shitfests being screened every Halloween will probably have an idea who Debbie Rochon is; add in a soft spot for low budget indie cinema, and chances are you’ll have seen more than a few offerings from her very extensive CV, especially if you’ve ever sat through a Troma movie or two. As of yet, however, despite many years in the business, she hasn’t been on the other side of the camera. Model Hunger (2016) is Rochon’s directorial debut, then – and it’s not more than a few frames before you can safely say that the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree…

In that rather Troma-esque, overblown but twee style, all over-pronounced lines and omnipresent musical score, we start off with a troupe (correct plural?) of cheerleaders at practice, working hard to conceal the fact that they’re all actually and as-standard in their twenties. At the end of their session, their head honcho sends them out to ‘raise more money than last year’ for their charity of choice. The neighbourhood they head to is not much cop: the first guy to open his door seems to be hard of hearing, ha ha, but then they try a door down the street and meet Ginny (Lynn Lowry).

At first Ginny seems sweet, if the rather unlikely ‘little old lady’ that she’s apparently meant to present: t’isn’t long, though, before we can hear her inner thoughts (a staple of this film) and they are none too complimentary to the young ladies sat in her lounge now laughing at her ‘favourite show’, one of the film’s most baffling inclusions and something which features throughout – a shopping channel show where scream queen Suzi Lorraine, wearing a fat suit, rails against the indignities heaped upon ‘real women’ and tries to sell plus size clothes via a glamorous model, or rather an obese man in drag – an obese man who continually eats, as does Suzi, obviously. Hmm. Anyway, come some internal monologue about the shallowness of youth and beauty, it’s then time for the girls to be drugged, kidnapped and very soon afterwards hacked up for chow. As all of this happens in the first few minutes, I think I’m safe on the spoilers front: the film very much shows its trump hand early, albeit it then making us wait for anything much else in terms of plot.

However, another familiar indie horror face is moving into the area – step up one Deb (Tiffany Shepis) and her husband Sal (Carmine Capobianco), who have just taken a house on the street. Debbie is depressed and, after a fashion, recuperating – mainly by calling her husband an asshole repeatedly, and having traumatic dreams of family, though beyond this, very little context for Deb’s character is offered – a waste, and the reason for something of an imbalance between the two female leads.

Where Shepis is kept on the down-low, with very little to do for large parts of the film, there’s an attempt made to position Lowry as many things all at once. Whilst Ginny as a character definitely has some entertainingly deranged, sneering moments, though some of this may be due to recalling her understated performance in arguably one of her best-known roles in Shivers, overall her role in Model Hunger is confused, alternating between dear old lady (both being called this by others, and calling herself such), then hey presto! She’s a bat-wielding maniac, and then also an increasingly irate mouthpiece for the indignities of the beauty industry. Oh, and she has a sexy lingerie scene too. These latter elements, I think, would all have been easier to believe if we weren’t first asked to see Ginnie as an infirm old dear, which, despite being nearly seventy in real life, she doesn’t appear to be, whatever chintz she’s given to wear here.

As for the press release’s feted showdown between Shepis and Lowry, this largely consists of Deb growing ever more suspicious of her prim-and-proper neighbour, especially when people seem to be forever going into Ginny’s house but never resurfacing, before later – much, much later – deciding to investigate. If the film has a central core, it seems to be Ginny, trying to come to terms with her former life as a model and the fact that her body shape was just slightly too curvy for the fashion of the day. This translates to a hatred of other women, it seems, though the cannibal element is never explained. Presumably we’re entitled, even invited to join the dots and see it as a literal representation of how adverse beauty norms chew us women up and spit us out, or something – and certainly, other reviewers have praised the film for its commentary on the ‘male gaze’ and ‘unrealistic body expectations’, maybe because they don’t feel confident to contradict it. Well, all I’ll say is that this is an effective a critique of Western beauty standards as Redneck Zombies is of the North/South divide in modern America. There’s a lot here I can’t buy, basically, something which comes from the risk indie horror takes when it pays lip service to a serious theme like body image.

Your best bet, should you find yourself watching Model Hunger, is to leave any expectations of social commentary at the door. To focus on the positives: the SFX are practical, with plenty here for those who come out in a cold sweat at the thought of CGI; there’s some splatter, some flesh-eating, some recognisable indie movie faces, and that rough-and-ready feel which will be just as recognisable and familiar to plenty of viewers. Beyond that, however, like the body type being rejected over and over in the movie, this is all just a bit thin.

Model Hunger is available from July 12th 2016.

By Keri O’Shea

‘Based on an idea by Franck Khalfoun’: these are surely words to warm the heart for many horror fans, albeit based on rather little. But his remake of Maniac in 2012 was stylish and redemptive, and his subsequent absence from what I’m reluctant to call ‘the scene’ has no doubt been noted. So here we are, several years later, with a new offering – i-Lived – a film he also directed and edited. So far, so good.

It’s very early indeed in the film that we’re able to work out that Khalfoun has a talent for representing rather unlikable young men on our screens: oh, I know that’s based on an unrepresentative sample, but if you can make Elijah Wood into a terrifying creep, then you’ve clearly got form. With that in mind, we meet Josh (comedian Jeremiah Watkins), a young man whose personality is an unpalatable blend of dude-bro, frustrated geek and infantile Gen-Xer: when him and his friends aren’t wondering aloud how they can bang hot bitches, Josh hosts an online video channel, where his focus is reviewing phone apps. He lives for his follower count: this rather gets in the way of him paying his rent, pleasing his parents (who paid a lot of money to see him through college) or holding down a relationship, but for Josh, that’s always a set of issues for the next day. Well, one day he reviews an app called ‘i-Lived’. It’s meant to be a motivational application which helps you towards your life goals – Josh chooses ‘getting a six pack’ so he can attract women – but it falls flat, so he pans it online and thinks no more about it. That is, until the app kicks back into life while he’s at a party and, in a roundabout way, gets him a girl he thinks is out of his league.

Based on that small victory, Josh decides to keep on following the app’s advice, getting what he wants in return for uploading video ‘proof’ of his progress to the app’s website. From a country mile you could probably guess that the app’s requests would get sinister, and this duly happens. Whilst finding time for irrelevant sex scenes with a character-free girlfriend because boobs still sell, the plot thickens…

Well, to an extent. I like the idea of linking supernatural goings-on to modern technology, really I do – Unfriended was better than I ever expected – but i-Lived really does fail in what it tries to do here, i.e. to bring us a very modern spin on a parable of greed, with all the otherworldly fallout you’d possibly expect. The film badly lacks polish, and no small part of the fault must be laid at the door of the script, which could have used a lot more crafting to really make these characters work. When you have a sequence consisting of nothing much more than ‘Calm down!’ ‘No, YOU calm down!’ then what you have on screen is wasted time. I also felt like I was having the plot spelled out to me very, very carefully in places – as if I’d been given a bunch of tranquilisers and then asked to land a plane. Genre fans don’t need this, they’ve seen a thousand horror films and they can fathom what’s going on without the letters being writ ten feet high (read also: the big reveal ‘hidden’ in the app’s name. For shame.)

Adding to that, there are some surprisingly clumsy oversights during the film which, in their way, also detract from any sense of dread which may have been allowed to build. One of the app’s instructions to Josh makes little grammatical sense (oh I know, it’s pedantry, but would you obey a malign entity which couldn’t even master the lingo? I bloody wouldn’t.) – Josh gets a new tattoo when the app tells him to ‘be a rebel’, but it’s clearly not a new tattoo; the lights keep going out as a kind of convenient and cost-effective short-cut for ‘bad things going on’, and the whole ‘just a dream’ shtick seems to be used several times to pad the film out, which is pretty unforgivable. Yes, the film warms up somewhat, but it’s rather too little too late to redeem a plot which comes across as cartoon strip, so the gusto of the last few minutes is wasted, even if they’re some of the most attractive scenes in the film.

I think that i-Lived sets out to weave a horror story from the way that, yeah, many people live and die by their online presence these days – possibly thinking that it wouldn’t be too much of a leap to link this phenomenon to something of more standard horror fare. Sadly, i-Lived isn’t the indictment of how we live now which it might have been, and nor is it quite the update to an age-old yarn which Khalfoun might’ve imagined or hoped. This is a shame. Khalfoun is clearly capable of good things, far better things than this, and so ultimately it’s still the success of Maniac which could draw me towards his upcoming Amityville project – but goodwill and good memories can only carry a director so far.

i-Lived will be available to download on 27th June 2016, and available to buy on DVD on 11th July. The i-Lived app, which syncs with the film, will also be available to buy from iTunes and Google.

By Keri O’Shea

Casting an eye over the upcoming cover art for Intruders, I found myself thinking two things: firstly, oh god, that Cabin in the Woods artwork has a lot to answer for, and secondly, hmm – there are a lot of household tools being showcased here; please don’t let this home invasion movie turn out to be yet another showreel for B&Q. Happily, although the odd trusty hammer does show up along the way, Intruders does rather different things with its subject matter overall and as such, raises itself high above the worst offenders of this sub-genre. In fact it often steps outside the sub-genre altogether, though without departing from ‘home’ as a source of horror, and this, too, is very much to its credit.

From the very first instance, our female lead, Anna (Beth Riesgraf) is depicted as a vulnerable, contested character – and hardly surprisingly is this the case, as she’s been nursing her terminally ill brother Conrad, whilst also battling with the double-whammy of severe agoraphobia. Whatever’s plagued them both in their lives, it’s clearly serious, and it leaves Anna wide open to additional trauma when her beloved brother’s expected, but still hard-hitting death occurs. Hey, and I should add that all of this happens before the opening credits roll.

For all this – a tour through torment which could have come off feeling brusque and insincere – I felt a lot of immediate sympathy for Anna. Whether the subtle style of acting which Riesgraf brings to these events, or else the unflinching portrayal of disease and death we’re shown (platitudes about Conrad ‘going to a better place’ are either not forthcoming at all or are rendered implausible) the film makes itself instantly engaging. You also can’t help but feel from the get-go that this environment, the white-picket fence homestead which is nonetheless cluttered and littered with the detritus of defiantly not coping for ten years, is a powder keg, and one which may explode in ways other than the instantly obvious (because the film’s promo materials are pretty obvious about the fact that someone’s coming in…)

Sure enough, expecting Anna to be at her brother’s funeral (clue: she ain’t) here come some guys looking to find the hard cash they’ve heard is hidden in the ramshackle property somewhere. And the film’s plus points continue with these new players: rather than some amalgamous, super-human whole, the intruders are also characters, from your more standard issue, nogoodnik hick through to a pair of brothers who seem to think better of the whole thing a few moments after getting through the door. I mean, how would anyone feel when faced with a woman who’s desperate not to escape? Some sense of a lull ensues as the film takes us through a few back stories, sure, and there are some weaker moments in the plot as Anna plays multiple games of hide-and-seek in order to showcase her insider knowledge of the old place, but all of this winds up feeling necessary as it all gives way to what feels like a very different film altogether. There are also lots of interesting developments of the sets being used – some of which reminded me of The Seasoning House in aspects – and the possible context of all these surprising spaces isn’t any more seemly, either, although not the same by any stretch.

Intruders effectively changes tack throughout, ending up a long way from where it starts and yeah, in some ways which won’t be to everyone’s tastes, but what the film does very effectively is to keep the victim/villain dynamic shifting. It does this within the confines of the characters we have in front of us, and also by reaching out beyond the narrative itself, calling into question the behaviour of people who aren’t participating in the events on screen. That’s no small thing. Even if some aspects of the ending are a little frilly (though thinking of a way to wrap this up were always going to be tricky) then what you can definitely say here is that the film is an interesting look at those messy human impulses which people have, but rationalise differently – be this the desire for money, the desire for vengeance, guilt, lust, or even to make the world a better place; it all goes way beyond your traditional invasion movie, kept me gripped, and deserves credit as such. Kudos also to the stylish photography and editing throughout the film, and a foreboding musical score which fits the bill very well indeed.

Intruders is available via Studiocanal on 6th June 2016.

By Keri O’Shea

You’d think God and Satan wouldn’t have a great deal in common, what with being timeless adversaries and all, but they do: they each seem to have an unreasonable obsession with human fertility. One side thinks Onanism is a sin because it wants arses on pews and the other, well – most of Old Scratch’s plans for taking over the earth seem to involve getting women pregnant. It’s now something of an assumption, in horror cinema, that if you see a coven, there’ll be some edict about a ‘special child’ on its way soon after.

When you read the back story to Cherry Tree (2015), you won’t see much deviation from this. We’re told that, back in the day, the town of Orchard had a coven which believed that if a woman could bear a child to Satan, then they could use this to become all powerful. One witch tried to best Beelzebub at this time and the coven was destroyed – hence, a legend was born, a legend of the Orchard Coven and its association with a mysterious cherry tree…

After telling us this on-screen, kudos to the film for then getting a lesbian kiss into proceedings before much more than ten seconds of modern-day footage pass by. After snogging Sissy (Anna Walton), an old pal gets all embarrassed and beats a hasty retreat from the bar where they’d met – running smack bang into a horde of hood-wearing occultists, who spirit her away for some ritualistic goings-on near what we can assume is the self-same tree mentioned earlier. Unless there’s an orchard in Orchard, but that would probably be silly. Actually, we then segue to a classroom presentation about the legend of the tree, allowing us to combine these two different worlds in one fell swoop. Sissy has just become the hockey coach at this school; one member of the school hockey team is a troubled teen called Faith (Naomi Battrick – who in true cinematic tradition is more like twenty-five) and it soon becomes clear that this is our key character. Faith’s father is very ill, and when his prognosis worsens, she finds it very difficult to bear. Luckily, the soporific hockey mistress is there to be a shoulder to cry on, after a fashion at least. Faith is offered a deal, one which draws her in to a world of malign magic and – bingo! – pregnancy. Why aren’t women ever given anything else to do in demonology than have babies or trick other women into having them? #EverydaySexism

I am, after having watched (and slyly enjoyed) Cherry Tree, still not quite sure just how much we are supposed to take the film seriously; I’m not even really sure how seriously the writer and director are taking this: certainly, director David Keating also brought us Wake Wood, and certain similarities between the plots of both films can be gleaned, but it’s fair to say that the tone is rather different here, and it’s not a good idea to come to a viewing of the newer film expecting the atmospheres to be comparable. This is where I think the blurb will work against the film, as throwing around well-beloved titles like ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ as comparisons will, in my opinion, lead to disappointment. But, look, if you go in for lowest common denominator character and place names, then people will chuckle, rather than get a sense of dark forces at work, bringing all people and things together (‘Faith’? The ‘evil tree’ town called Orchard? And don’t get me started on that literal cherry-taking during the sex scene.) Cherry Tree also seems to be channeling Lord of Salem in some places, meaning that the film can sway from realistically-lit urban scenes to flashing unnatural lights during its occult shenanigans – again, whilst this can feel tonally odd, it perhaps underlines in my mind that this is an occult-lite take on the subject matter and that we’re meant to be diverted, but not necessarily ever scared. Of course, I could be way out on all of this, in which case I’ve seen humour where there isn’t any. That’s all rather worse as an outcome for the filmmakers, I guess…

And then, the film seems to court controversy in some areas, whilst covering its own back in others. Firstly, although the girls at the school are probably all well over the age of consent, they’re represented to us as fifteen year olds, so throwing the shower scene in there might raise an eyebrow – this sort of thing is a red rag to the BBFC bull, and speaking of them, what’s all this with having Anna Walton slitting her wrist on screen again, after all that furore about her doing the same thing in Soulmate? Perhaps it’s okay when it’s to do with raising Satan because this is less likely to be emulated by us weaker vessels, but the fact that they’ve used this very image in the press release, again, seems designed to cause a stir. But, after doing this, it then makes damn sure to declare that Faith is (just) over sixteen before anything sexual is permitted; it also excuses the old ‘pregnancy test which works the day after sex’ because occult. It’s pushing the envelope on one hand, and well aware of the limits on the other.

Ultimately, whatever the thinking behind what’s going on here, what you’ll get out of this film is entirely dependent on what you expect. If you’re hoping for a subtle, brooding folk horror then forget it, folks, you won’t be best pleased. However, if you accept this as pacy, piecemeal but entertaining occult schlock, then it’ll all wash over you nicely. Ultimately, Cherry Tree is far more comic book than grimoire.

Cherry Tree is available from Studiocanal now.

By Keri O’Shea

Crazed acolytes! That’s always a good start to a film, be in a golden oldie or a modern piece of cinema – and that’s just how we get going in Craze, a lesser-known horror movie from the oeuvre of British director Freddie Francis (a man with a distinguished filmography to his name, including many classics from Hammer and Amicus). The opening reels show us a group of people gathered in a darkened basement, offering fealty to an entity called Chiku – an African deity rather than good Ol’ Scratch then, but in the great scheme of things, it doesn’t seem to matter greatly. We’re immediately shown robes, boobs and blood; this could be any malign deity, anywhere. And at the head of proceedings is a man by the name of Neal Mottram.

The film feels incredibly British from the outset as, when the ritual is ended, Mottram (Jack Palance) has a cigarette and does a spot of tidying up. It’s important to keep up appearances, see, as by day he’s a somewhat dodgy antiques seller, aided and abetted by a younger assistant, Ronnie (Martin Potter). The arrival of an irate ex-Priestess, demanding to take the idol of Chiku away with her, barely makes an impression on Mottram and after a struggle she is soon dispatched – for good – on the prongs of Chiku’s weapon. This, to Mottram, is the reason for a sudden change in his fortunes. The following day, as he begins to empty an antique desk ready for sale, he uncovers a hidden drawer which is full of gold coins, thus ending his money worries – problems we are led to gather have been going on for some time. He reasons that this must be because of the sacrifice which fate saw him make to Chiku; by the same logic, then, he decides he has to continue worshipping Chiku in this same grisly manner.

And the film is grisly, at certain moments, though many of the worst excesses are implied rather than shown. For instance, in an early scene where Mottram kills, we don’t actually see a great deal, but it still feels rather unpleasant, even from the decidedly low-key footage we get of a panicked scream and later, a burned female hand. After a punchy beginning, however, the film settles into something far more sedate: really speaking, it is Palance’s performance which carries the film through what feels like a long lull in the middle, although of course as the majority of the film is at this pace, it’s the way in which it’s bookended with stronger fare which deviates, not the other way around. Palance feels like an odd choice in a British film to an extent (though he had worked with Francis previously via Amicus) but this is far from the only occasion when an American actor has been shoehorned into a British production, as I understand happened on this project: fact is, however he came to be cast, he makes rather a good bastard, and kept me engaged throughout. Smiling wryly through a number of convoluted plans and watertight alibis, Mottram is good fun, and when the script calls for something more unhinged, Palance can certainly do that too. Any scenery-chewing is entirely in keeping with the character, in my opinion…

After all, it’s left rather more abstract as to whether Mottram is really under the thrall of a mysterious god, or simply takes his change in fortunes as a sign that Chiku is a real supernatural force and begins killing accordingly. I don’t feel that this chicken/egg aspect derails the film per se, but I also feel like a bigger budget and more time spent might have led to the coven we see at the beginning resurfacing and maybe spelling it out for us a bit more – I can’t help but feel like this was the original intention. It’s rather odd really – and when that force of nature Diana Dors (as the character Dollie Newman) recounts stories of covens meeting in the woods, and fire, and blood rites and so on, it’s hard not to feel somewhat cheated that none of this made it to camera!

Still, cop-out or otherwise, there is plenty here to entertain. Fans of 70s British horror could do far worse pick this up, and not just for the reasons I’ve already given: this film is an interesting roll-call of British acting talent, with even a young David Warbeck popping up as a police officer, and as you might expect, all the glories of 70s Britain are present and correct (nightclubs and bars in horror films are a special source of enjoyment, I always find). Certainly, if you enjoy Freddie Francis’s work elsewhere in the horror canon, then why not add to that with this modest offering? Yes, it’s weak in places, and lacks pace in others, but it’s still modestly enjoyable, and I’m not sorry I gave it an hour and a half of my time.

Nucleus Films have tried hard to bring us a complete version of this rarity, meaning some short, unavoidable minor dips in quality: entirely reasonable, given how hard they’ve worked to put this together in the first place. The release is chaptered, has a trailer, and an enjoyable Freddie Francis trailer reel is included too.

Craze (1974) was released by Nucleus Films on 4th April 2016.

By Keri O’Shea

Frantic, clumsy, urgent, the first thing we see in 10 Cloverfield Lane is a young woman who turns out to be named Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) throwing several of her personal possessions into a box, before hurrying to her car with them and driving away at top speed. This act is not, as you may assume based on the monster movie connections of the title Cloverfield, due to some impending invasion or disaster, and as such it’s also the first of a range of moments in the film where you’re made to second-guess your perceptions, questioning what you might otherwise feel safe to assume. Furthermore, it’s the start of a long process for Michelle: in her quest for personal agency, something which runs throughout the film, we see that she’s first fleeing an unhappy relationship – and even before further events even happen, she seems spooked, looking distrustfully around her, anxious about her decision.

But I said this was just the start of things; right at the point where Michelle seems to have found the fortitude to ignore yet another phonecall from her jilted ex and is ready to go on her way – BAM. A serious car accident flings her car off a bridge and renders her unconscious, badly injured. The next thing she’s aware of, she’s waking up in what appears to be a cell – hooked up to a drip, leg in a brace, with no idea who has put her there. Soon thereafter, she meets Howard (John Goodman), the captor who claims to have saved her after the accident.

Howard’s what you’d call a ‘prepper’, someone convinced that they need to stockpile food and resources, as well as building or adapting some sort of shelter, ready for the potentially worst to happen. Here, in an instant, it seems like his paranoid preparations for Doomsday have finally been worthwhile. Hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, yes? Or, maybe not? Michelle’s initial rebellion against being held in Howard’s underground bunker – alongside one other inmate, Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.) who got a pass to get inside because he helped Howard to build the place – starts loud and overt but soon, she changes tack – she’s wise enough to adapt. However, she never does shake her suspicions about Howard’s story, and she’s given ample reason for this as the narrative progresses. How does he know for sure what’s out there and what it could do to them, if he hasn’t seen anything himself? Does his back story really check out?

In common with Michelle, you’ll veer between thinking Howard is a dangerous individual, then a decent guy, then right back to start again: kept at arm’s length from any semblance of The Truth, 10 Cloverfield Lane compels us to remain on a level with Michelle throughout, as vulnerable and as conflicted as she. And, actually, the context of the film – as in, whatever is or isn’t outside the surprisingly cosy bunker – is a complicating factor, but the utter dread, the relentless tension offered by the movie – none of that relies on the outside world, because we’re not permitted the omniscience needed to know what’s there in the first place. The real Hitchcock-esque terror here is eight tenths psychological and it works brilliantly well.

I can go no further without mentioning the central performance offered by John Goodman here – and the sizeable impact it has on the film as a whole. Goodman is best-known as a bumbling dad figure, a kind of Homer Simpson made flesh, if I’m permitted to say so; a lot of us who grew up in the 80s will probably first recall him as the dad in Roseanne, and he’s pretty much stuck with it – affable, down-to-earth, practical. The thing here in 10 Cloverfield Lane is that, hey, that bumbling dad persona hasn’t gone. Not quite. Whatever Howard is or isn’t, he can sustain the father figure thing just as much as he can turn on something far darker, and the way in which a tight script and pace wrings the most out of Goodman in his performance here is largely due to the way in which the most intimidating, alarming people are the plausible guys, the normal folk, the ones you’d wave to across the street. That’s Howard. And we wind up second-guessing the guy throughout, even whilst enjoying – if that’s the right word – a number of well-pitched comedic moments, many of which involve him. (A few such examples of light relief showcase some nice echoes of more shocking scenes in later, more banal episodes, but to name ’em is to spoil ’em, I’m afraid.) The warped, possibly paternal dynamic which comes to settle on life underground is inherently disturbing; it’s refreshing, again if that’s the right word, not to have sexually-motivated dominance added in as the default motivational factor here, but then I don’t feel that the film is entirely allowed to go free of that, either. For a film with a very small cast (of largely only three) and a modest running time, there is a hell of a lot going on.

So much so, in fact, that if the film has any weak link whatsoever, it’s where it lobs yet another curveball at us, clearing up for once and all whether or not Howard is right or wrong about the new-found risks beyond. When Michelle gets her answers, when the plot shifts seismically, I can see how another sequence of surprised may cause some viewers to buckle under its weight. Personally, I think it’s a pay-off which more than pays off for Dan Trachtenberg and his team – Trachtenberg, a man with surprisingly limited directorial experience, but god knows if there is any justice, he’ll now be fending off offers of work left, right and centre from here on in.

The narrative arc here never lets us down in 10 Cloverfield Lane, never slumps into a ‘that was it?’ sense of disappointment, and certainly never, never feels boring. An ominous soundtrack, great camerawork and sterling performances throughout add to the overall impact – and prove, moreover, that filmmaking is and can always be rooted in a compelling sense of alienation, of risk, of forces bigger than us – in whatever form these forces might appear. Does Michelle find her personal agency? I advise you to watch the movie, pronto, and find out for yourselves. This is an absolute cert for one of the best films of the year.

10 Cloverfield Lane is on general UK release now.

By Tristan Bishop

Your teen years can be a scary place, what with all those possibilities and unknown quantities rubbing up against hormonal explosions – things can get weird and extreme quite quickly, so it’s unsurprising that filmmakers tend to keep mining the teenage experience for horror films. Of course, the vast majority don’t really tap into that hormonal confusion, preferring to dwell instead on teenage parties and a little adolescent skin – both of which are perfectly exploitable elements of course, but it tends to be the ones that channel the fear of coming into an adult world and its associated feelings that really hit the spot. The last film that pops into my mind that did this correctly is 2015’s It Follows, a film which, not coincidentally perhaps, scared the pants off this reviewer. I mention this because Anguish seems to have a lot in common with It Follows at first glance – it’s beautifully filmed, centres around a teenage girl, and, although it swaps the run-down suburban sprawl of Detroit for unnamed small-town America, has a similar sense of place.

Anguish certainly wastes no time in setting things up – we open on an argument between a mother and daughter in a car about whether or not the daughter is allowed to go on a camping trip with her schoolfriends. The mother isn’t so sure, and so the daughter gets out to angrily stomp home – unfortunately not noticing the truck coming in the other direction…flash forward an unspecified amount of time and teenage Tess (Ryan Simpkins)and her mother (Annika Marks) have moved to the area. Tess’s father is a soldier and has been away from home a long time (he keeps in touch by Skype) and Tess has been a troubled child since an early age, suffering from depression, anxiety, hallucinations and other mental disorders. Tess spends her time sitting out under the stars or skateboarding by herself, and one day stumbles across a roadside memorial to Lucy, the girl who was killed in the opening scene. And something happens – Tess is knocked backwards by some kind of mysterious force, and then starts to experience numerous strange occurrences – seeing dozens of hands on her bedroom window, mysterious figures trying to get into her house, and other strange apparitions. Her mother naturally believes that Tess’s mental disorders are getting on top of her, but the doctors seem unable to help. However, after a local priest gets involved, things get a little bit more complicated.

There are many things to like about Anguish. Ryan Simpkins’ performance is perfectly judged – she comes across as totally believable and relatable as the extremely troubled teen in a performance where lesser actors may have come off as just irritating, and she’s a real credit to the film, pulling us in and making us genuinely care about what happens to her. Whilst the spookiest moments are underscored by jump scare music, a tactic which normally turns me right off, they actually work surprisingly well when balanced against the autumnal colours and folksy score of the rest of the film. In fact, the unusual juxtaposition of style works entirely in the film’s favour – it’s part indie mumblecore drama and part Insidious, which works so well for the majority of the running time as we’re kept on our toes as to whether Tess’s experiences are supernatural or the result of her illnesses worsening – in fact, aside from It Follows, the other film that came to mind frequently during viewing was Polanski’s Repulsion – both in the theme of mental disintegration and also in at least one visual reference.

Sadly this doesn’t last – By the final act the film’s plot has solidified into something unambiguous and frankly, a little silly, and in doing so dissipates whatever unease had been built up in the first hour. In fact, the story ends up feeling less like a horror film and more a comforting tale about passing on and acceptance – which is all well and good, but when you’ve managed to creep out an audience effectively for 60 minutes, you’ve got to expect them to feel a little cheated out of a dramatic or horrific conclusion. I did find myself wondering if the last half hour was the film that the director wanted to make all along, and found he had to push in some horror tropes to make it ‘saleable’. Either way it’s a massive let-down, and a real shame because the first hour really is something different.

Whether you end up loving Anguish will entirely depend on your feelings about the final half hour (and possibly your tolerance for religious material – which, whilst not exactly overdone, is certainly foregrounded here more than your average horror flick). If you enjoyed Insidious et al then it’s certainly worth a go (and is guaranteed to give you a few scares) but otherwise you may find yourself yearning for something which hangs together a little better.

Anguish will be released (in the UK) on 1st April 2016.