Though screened at Frightfest in London back in 2006, this difficult but rewarding movie is only finally seeing the light of day in 2008 (with a US disc release set for March). Partly inspired by the three months that writer-director Simon Rumley spent looking after his dying, cancer-stricken mother, it isn’t a horror movie in any conventional sense, but it does venture into disorientating mind fuck territory and delivers many harrowing moments of personal horror as its bleak narrative unfolds in a non-linear fashion.
Reclusive Lord Roger Lloyd Pack (a well known sitcom star in the UK) has filed for bankruptcy and leaves his faded stately home to try and raise some money. His son (Leo Bill) is mentally disabled and heavily medicated, but he desperately wants to prove to his parents that he is “man” enough to look after terminally ill bed-ridden mother (Kate Fahy). To this end, he locks out Fahy’s nurse and strives to care for her himself, with devastating consequences. The essential meds they both need get mixed up and Bill’s already shaky grasp on reality slips away.
Superbly shot in and around a real Wiltshire stately home, and hardly ever leaving the main building, Rumley’s film is a complex, emotionally shattering study of a family torn apart by illness and grief. Part intense art house drama about the decline of an upper class family unit, and part cinematic psychological breakdown, it employs contrasting techniques to achieve its considerable impact. Rumley opens with a sedate, theatrical feel dominated by static, long takes (often from odd angles) and a melancholic piano-based score, before conveying Bill’s mental decline later on via hyper kinetic, sped-up film and a cacophonous soundtrack. The director’s remarkably vivid, intelligent screenplay largely takes the perspective of Bill’s character when it turns into a grim collision of the past, the apparent present, a possible future and surrealistic nightmares.
Key to this film’s power are three outstanding performances. Pack is painfully sad as the patriarch struggling to keep any sense of order to his crumbling existence, while Fahy is almost painful to watch as the deteriorating mother. The sequence in which Bill (in an award-caliber portrayal of an alternatively sympathetic and frightening character) discovers his mother has soiled her bed and has to change the sobbing, ashamed woman, is a distressing and brilliantly acted scene of all-too believable humiliation. There’s only one moment more upsetting in the movie, and it’s a visceral, horrifying one : Bill inserts four hypodermic needles into his arm and bloodily smashes the limb to the floor.
Defying genre parameters and refusing to condescend to the audience, Rumley’s film is the kind of brave, mature yet cinematically riveting movie too rarely produced in the UK. You’ll be hard pressed to find more authentically devastating performances in any movie this year, and great use is made of the decaying backdrop : a once grandiose house now mirroring the decline of the family within courtesy of peeling wallpaper, stained doors and discolored bath water.
-Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
