Tag Archives: British cinema

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Psychomania

psychomania
Psychomania

Format: Dual Format (DVD + Blu-ray)

Release date: 26 September 2016

Distributor: BFI

Director: Don Sharp

Writers: Julian Zimet, Arnaud d’Usseau

Cast: George Sanders, Beryl Reid, Nicky Henson

UK 1973

90 mins

The unlikely mix of black magic, undead bikers and Safeway makes this 70s British oddity endurably appealing.

‘Deep shame,’ was how Nicky Henson characterised his feelings about this suis generis exploitation weirdie, when quizzed by Matthew Sweet, but really, though the lovable thespian has obviously had great moments on stage, this is the one he’ll be remembered for. Witchfinder General is the superior film, but it’s not really a Nicky Henson film. Psychomania, God bless it, despite top-lining oldsters George Sanders and Beryl Reid, is Nicky Henson’s film, whether he wants it or not.

As if cobbled together from a fever dream about The Wild One and Polanski’s Macbeth, the film combines black magic and biker gangs, stone circles and juvenile delinquency. The script is by the same duo of blacklisted Americans who wrote Horror Express, and it has the same rather appealing mixture of strange, vaguely clever ideas, goofball nonsense and bizarrely naive exploitation elements. I wish the pair had written a whole bunch more horror films: they had a unique sensibility.

Genre specialist / all-rounder Don Sharp directs ably, starting the film rather brilliantly with slomo cyclists roving round a set of papier mâché megaliths on a misty morning, with John Cameron’s sonorous wacka-wacka score adding a kind of camp solemnity. Sharp had an affinity for overcranking, opening his Curse of the Fly (1965), a belated sequel to the Hollywood teleportation horror, with a surprisingly atmospheric, oneiric nocturnal chase, shot at around 48 fps. He’d also made Witchcraft (1964) with Lon Chaney Jnr. as an unlikely English warlock, and Hammer romps Kiss of the Vampire (1963) and Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966), as well as the first two of Christopher Lee’s Fu Manchu outings.

Henson plays the biker son of medium Beryl Reid who acquires the power to come back from the dead through a mysterious ritual involving a frog (don’t ask). Sanders plays a butler who might be Satan, or something (I wasn’t totally clear: see what you think). Soon, Henson, looking damned good in his leather trousers, is converting his whole gang to an afterlife of mayhem, running amok in a Walton-on-Thames branch of Safeway.
The film’s take on youth culture is wonderfully peculiar: the bikers bury their leader on his bike in the stone circle to the tune of a folk song strummed on acoustic guitar; the gang wear crocheted waistcoats; nobody smokes (the producers were afraid they wouldn’t be able to sell the film to TV); nobody swears. But they run over a baby in a pram, and that was considered perfectly OK.

The violence and criminality is still slightly shocking, maybe because all the surrounding action is so absurd. The bikers are the main characters, and they will keep killing people. Elsewhere, there is amusing dialogue: ‘Abby’s dead.’ ‘You must be very happy.’ ‘I’ve always fancied driving through a brick wall.’ But then the movie will alternate pathetic, puerile hi-jinks (spanking a young mother in a hot-pants one-piece) with cold-blooded murder. The two tones only come together as black comedy during the impressive stunt sequences where the bikers commit suicide in order to rise again.

Rumours that old pro Sanders killed himself in response to seeing a print of this, his final movie, are doubtless false. The old rogue had gotten himself involved in a crooked business venture, hilariously called Cadco, and was facing possible financial ruin and legal proceedings, a likelier motivation for suicide than either a bizarre horror film or boredom, the cause cited in his note. And after all, the man had already worked for Jess Franco.

Scattered throughout Psychomania are familiar faces from TV shows like All Creatures Great and Small, Eastenders and Dad’s Army, with everyone managing to appear perfectly earnest and, in Henson’s case, actually cool, even though his character is a colossal jerk. The leftist writers appear to have had some kind of critique of youth culture in mind: Henson’s undead cyclist espouses a plan to kill every policeman, judge and teacher in the land, but once back on his bike, he always seems to gravitate back to Safeway.

David Cairns

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Symptoms

Symptoms 1
Symptoms

Format: Dual Format (DVD + Blu-ray)

Release date: 25 April 2016

Distributor: BFI

Director: José Ramón Larraz

Writers: José Ramón Larraz, Stanley Miller, Thomas Owen

Cast: Angela Pleasance, Peter Vaughan, Lorna Heilbron

UK, Belgium 1974

92 mins

Spanish director José Larraz’s take on the English ghost story is beautifully atmospheric and subtly disturbing.

‘I know everything that goes on in these woods. Many things go on in these woods.’ So says Helen (Angela Pleasence), a delicate, vulnerable seeming young woman whose wide-eyed gaze seems indicative of an innocence bordering on mania. She is staying in a mansion with her friend Anne, played by Lorna Heilbron with a sharp Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby haircut. The other obvious Roman Polanski influence is Repulsion, as Helen’s feeble grip on reality begins to loosen and the story of a former friend Cora slowly unravels. All the while, Brady (Peter Vaughan), a beefy gamekeeper with Laurentian ambitions, lurks in the woods.

Spanish director José Larraz turns away from his earlier sexploitation style and produces that peculiarly English genre: the ghost story. Symptoms exists in the tradition of Don’t Look Now or, later, The Others, filled with painful memories, repressed desires and emotions and sudden messy violence. Like those films, it locates its core in human emotion and Larraz allows his characters time for their relationship to slowly evolve, as much through mutual quietness as dialogue. Both Helen and Anne need each other and there is genuine warmth, which never spends itself in lurid eroticism. This might be the beginning of a lesbian affair, or a deep friendship, or in fact both.

The gardens and woods, the river and pond are all filmed with a Kodachrome lustre, the sunlight glints from rivulets and river water dripping from dipping oars and through the branches of the trees that fragment it into shafts and yellow beams. The house itself is full of heavy furniture, but there are also mirrors that reflect the past as much as the present as well as knives and razors and an attic perfect for its very own Bertha Mason. There’s a kind of split personality to the way the camera moves as well. The meditative watching is constantly disturbed by the sudden cuts and movements, as if the eye must always search for something that just happened, a presence just departed.

As the denouement is reached, Larraz’s film confidently subverts without ever really surprising. There is a dread inevitability to the oddness that occurs and a sadness overlaying everything which mutes the horror, but also colours it effectively as if we are sleepwalking to our doom, destroying everything, including those we love, in our path. Although released as Britain’s entry to the Cannes Film Festival, Symptoms slipped away somehow and became a legendary lost film, on the BFI’s most wanted list of lost films as it happens, passed around by collectors in poor quality VHS versions. This new re-mastered print is deservedly pristine, highlighting the wonderful cinematography of Trevor Wrenn, who according to IMDb only photographed three films, all of them in 1974.

John Bleasdale

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Eureka

Eureka
Eureka

Format: Dual Format (DVD + Blu-ray)

Release date: 28 März 2016

Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Director: Nicolas Roeg

Writer: Paul Mayersberg

Based on the book Who Killed Sir Harry Oakes? by: Marshall Houts

Cast: Gene Hackman, Theresa Russell, Rutger Hauer

UK, USA 1983

130 mins

Nicolas Roeg’s overlooked saga about the spectacular rise and fall of a gold prospector is a rich and audacious masterwork.

English literature sprang from two works of the 17th century, the plays of William Shakespeare and the King James Bible. One tradition is opulent, chaotic, luxurious and indulgent; the other is disciplined, austere, skinny and sharp. One is a meadow; the other’s a lawn. And so it is with British cinema. We have the lawn cinema of David Lean, Merchant Ivory and The King’s Speech, and we have the wild flowers and nettle stings of Lindsay Anderson, Ken Russell and Ben Wheatley. The outstanding artist of the latter tradition is Nicolas Roeg, who from his collaboration on Performance in 1970 went on to direct a string of bizarre, crotchety, uncomfortable and fiercely odd masterpieces. Following the acknowledged brilliance of Walkabout, Don’t Look Now and The Man who Fell to Earth, Bad Timing saw Roeg entering the 80s with a fractured sexual relationship and a typically daring play on chronology. The obstinate insistence on originality was not well received in a decade that would prize muscles and franchises.

His follow-up Eureka in 1983 likewise sailed against the prevailing winds of capitalist triumphalism and nascent yuppiedom. Gene Hackman plays Jack McCann, a prospector in the frozen Yukon, battling against the elements and whose cussed stubbornness is finally rewarded with a gold strike. If things spill and smash in the dirty Venice of Don’t Look Now, here in Eureka everything bursts. It might be the back of a suicidal man’s head as the bullet smashes through it, or it could be the wall of a cave as it collapses and almost drowns Jack in a gold-laden torrent. The irreversible suddenness of the now is caught by the title – an instantaneous revelation of how the universe operates – and Roeg’s interests are a deep consideration on the hidden cogs and wires that pull at life and fate and the violence that can at any moment flare up.

With the gold found and riches won, Roeg and screenwriter Paul Mayersberg overleap Jack’s success and land once more in failure decades later. Now Jack is the richest man in the world, living on a Caribbean island surrounded by natives he holds in racist contempt, a wife he largely ignores and a sycophantic and untrustworthy friend Charles (Ed Lauter), who is conspiring against him. His one consolation might be his daughter Tracy (Theresa Russell) with whom he shares a close friendship, but her elopement and marriage to playboy Claude (Rutger Hauer) suggest that Jack is being destroyed by the gold that has made him rich. Mickey Rourke and Joe Pesci are two mobbed up accountants seeking, with the sneaky aid of Charles, to open a casino on the island and slowly realizing that Jack is an immoveable object with too much ‘fuck you’ money to be bought.

[SPOILER ALERT]
‘Once I had it all. Now I just have everything,’ Jack says. His self-mythologizing as the ultimate self-made man – ‘I never lived off the sweat of another man’s brow’ – and his Croesus-like wealth don’t however make him invulnerable and there is a weary acceptance to his fate as he, like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (Roeg would later make a TV movie adaptation of Heart of Darkness), welcomes his murderers into his lair either as a blessed relief or a longed-for challenge. But when it comes Jack’s murder is no soft euthanasia but one of the most brutal and violent slaughters ever put on screen. With the rain pouring outside and a blow torch brought into play, it is almost as if Jack is an ancient God who needs not simply to be killed, but to be cleansed, defaced and utterly destroyed. His murder is preceded by a black magic orgy that Claude participates in. Sex bursts through Eureka as a violent compulsion, an appetite to be assuaged, but also a link to life and death moments. Jack will be guided to the gold by a brothel-keeper/soothsayer and Claude’s orgy is an attempt to establish an alibi and also cleanse the would-be assassin.

The remaining court scenes are an extended coda as the legal formalities of blame and aftermath insufficiently wrap up the violent eruption while the money men sit at the back. It is now Tracy who shows that her father’s obstinate will has lived on in her, but now graced by her own continued zest for life and capacity to love.
[END OF SPOILER]

Eureka is a bold uncompromising work by a filmmaker at the height of his powers who seems intent on throwing it all away. Its influence can be seen throughout Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterpiece There Will Be Blood. Today more than ever it seems a prescient critique of a philosophy that places so much value on a rare but practically unaccomplished metal.

John Bleasdale

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The Legend of Barney Thomson

The Legend of Barney Thomson
The Legend of Barney Thomson

Format: Cinema

Release date: 24 July 2015

Distributor: Icon

Director: Robert Carlyle

Writers: Richard Cowan, Colin McLaren

Cast: Robert Carlyle, Emma Thompson, Ray Winstone

Canada, UK 2015

96 mins

Barney Thomson (Robert Carlyle) is, in his 50s, wifeless, childless and largely friendless, his only social life revolving around the occasional chat with local loser Charlie (Brian Pettifer) and the strained relationship with his harridan of a mother Cemolina (Emma Thompson), who views him as a free taxi service and unwelcome distraction from bingo. All he has to cling to is his loyalty and professionalism in his decades-old position as barber in a small family concern. But even here, his status is slipping, as his lack of ‘patter’ with the customers means that he is being moved further and further away from his old prestige position in the window. His anger and frustration lead him to a fatal blunder, and soon dogged copper Inspector Holdall (Ray Winstone) is on his trail, as Barney finds himself a suspect in an ongoing serial killer case.

Robert Carlyle’s directorial debut is the kind of low/mid-budget black farce that the British film industry seems determined to flog to the general public (think Deadly Advice, The Young Poisoner’s Handbook), kind of like a Brian Rix number with frozen body parts. It’s too comically broad to work along the lines of Shallow Grave, too dark to work as broad comedy and just never really flies. Part of the problem is that it’s built around a character who, the script reminds us, is devoid of charm, and, as played by Carlyle, exudes a kind of whining ‘why me?’aura. So while the plot contrives to elaborately humiliate and persecute Mr Thomson, it’s still hard to feel too much sympathy for a man who doesn’t seem to care much about anybody else, or indeed, whether he is liked, which is not an accusation that could be levelled at The Legend of Barney Thomson, the film. On the contrary, TLOBT exudes a certain desperation to be liked, it’s full of outré bits of ‘funny’ business, sweary old ladies and vivisection humour. We’re barely started on the voice-over-heavy opening sequence before we get a severed cock on screen, to be followed later with a scene built around an arse on the chief inspector’s desk. Likewise, Ray Winstone’s cockney rozzer schtick seems to be here because people like his cockney rozzer schtick, and regardless of whether it belongs in this film. Which I’m not entirely convinced it does. And there’s an increasing unreality about the plotting, which becomes more and more contrived as the coincidental serial murders and unlikely accidental deaths start to pile up, which would be fine, if it didn’t undermine all the Woman’s Realm and fag butt verisimilitude that much of the dialogue and production design is straining for.

On the plus side you have Emma Thompson having a ball as the foul Cemolina, surrounded by a great cast of solid character players. Glasgow is smartly used as a backdrop, and it’s beautifully framed and lit, with a well-achieved shabby, seen-better-days aesthetic. On the whole, though, it’s frustrating. There’s a fair few nice lines here and there, and I wonder how the source novel reads, because a scene at a funfair where Charlie (who has witnessed Barney trying to dispose of a body) uses this leverage to try to get a free hot dog and coke out of him in the most pathetic blackmail bid ever, gives a hint towards a sorrier, sadder film, one that used all these fine performers and crumbling urban detail to so something a bit more aching and singular, away from all these coppers with shooters and bagged bits of bum.

Mark Stafford

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Hyena

Hyena
Hyena

Format: Cinema

Release date: 6 March 2015

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Gerard Johnson

Writer: Gerard Johnson

Cast: Peter Ferdinando, Stephen Graham, Neil Maskell, MyAnna Buring, Elisa Lasowski

UK 2014

112 mins

Opening the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2014, Hyena divided opinion, though most were favourably impressed by its moody, pounding soundtrack by The The. Since director Gerard Johnson is brother of that band’s frontman Matt (really the only consistent member, as well as the songwriter), it makes sense that film and score are such a good fit. Albums such as Infected and Soul Bomb covered a similar territory: male angst and self-laceration, violence and bodily fluids.

The film benefits from boasting very few familiar faces, so its hyped-up, steroidal realism is unimpeded by recognition. Peter Ferdinando is suitably tortured as a corrupt drug squad cop whose covert deals and coke habit start him on a road to destruction when he comes under investigation, and a pair of psychopathic Albanian brothers move violently into his turf.

Admittedly, the story boasts plot holes its fat sweaty coppers could march through four abreast: at one point, plot points are revealed by a tape recorder on which an enemy has recorded things that, for some reason incriminate himself; and scenes in which a man taunts somebody training a pistol on him never really convince me. But part of what I like about the movie is the way it bursts the constraints of realism in favour of a gross, emotive and infernal feeling of nightmare.

Unlike a lot of commercial crime films, Hyena doesn’t try to be ingratiating: when it errs, it does so by being too stridently unpleasant. For the first half of the film, Ferdinando is in every scene, except for a few cutaways showing a woman being abused. They didn’t need to be there for narrative reasons, since what happens to her is recapped later. And they dilute the first-person tunnel-vision quality of the rest of the filmmaking. In particular, an explicit rape scene with the woman unconscious seeks to gross us out with a hairy and overweight (and swarthy) assailant, in a manner not seen since Michael Winner’s Dirty Weekend. It’s offensive not because of his visible erection, but because it’s using his less-than-ideal body shape to disgust us. Since the victim is unconscious, what he looks like is irrelevant. It’s her powerlessness that should be the source of our discomfort.

If you can forgive the film the excesses that don’t work, the excesses that do work make for a pretty pungent experience. You may need a shower afterwards.

This review is part of our EIFF 2014 coverage.

David Cairns

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The Double

The Double
The Double

Format: Cinema

Release date: 4 April 2014

Distributor: Studiocanal

Director: Richard Ayoade

Writers: Richard Ayoade, Avi Korine

Based on the novella by: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Jesse Eisenberg, Sally Hawkins, Chris O’Dowd

UK 2013

93 mins

Richard Ayoade’s second feature film is a very mannered affair, taking pace in its own transatlantic nocturnal bubble, where the architecture is utilitarian, charmless and shrouded in Lynchian gloom, the jukeboxes play old Japanese pop tunes, and mobile phones are significant by their absence. Based on Dostoyevsky’s novel, it follows Simon (Jesse Eisenberg), an office drone whose life is a series of frustrations. Nobody notices him, his contributions are ignored, his transgressions are seized upon, and he can barely function when attempting to interact with fellow worker, and romantic obsession, Hannah (Mia Wasikowska). So far so depressing, but then one day Simon’s exact double turns up at work, and immediately begins to climb the corporate ladder. This new version is confident and dynamic, a hit with the bosses and a wow with the ladies; he seems to be a better Simon than Simon could hope to be, and slowly begins to edge the original out of his own existence…

The Double eschews any kitchen-sink naturalism (the default setting for many British filmmakers) for a highly stylised, intricately planned and executed aesthetic. There’s more than a hint of Gilliam’s Brazil here, in its office politics and romantic frustration. Each scene is framed, timed and sound designed to create the maximum humiliation for Simon, and there’s a lot of physical comedy here at his expense (automatic doors particularly seem to have it in for him), while his plight is accentuated by staging that leaves him locked out and blocked off from where he wants to be.

This review was first published as part of our LFF 2013 coverage.

Also adding to the ‘movie movie’ experience is the casting, or, what I believe is known in the trade as ‘overcasting’: Ayoade has clearly called in a few favours to fill out his film, and as a result we have most of the actors from his first film Submarine turning up here, as well as a couple of his I.T. Crowd co-stars, and apparently everybody else with a resume he could get hold of. I’m in two minds about the effect of all this on the viewing experience. On one level it’s like another design element (I was reminded of John Waters’s stated ambition to make a film where everybody who appears on screen is a celebrity of some kind, and the sets are deliberately fake). On the other hand, it is undeniably distracting to have familiar face after familiar face pop up in the tiniest roles (Chris Morris! Chris O’Dowd! Paddy Considine! Dinosaur Jr’s J. Mascis as a janitor, for Christ’s sake!) regardless of the quality of their contribution (loved Tim Key’s turn as a heroically unconcerned care home worker, though). I fear that all this stylisation seals the viewer off from total engagement somewhat, and while it plays on common nightmares, it plays as someone else’s.

Whatever… this is bold, intelligent filmmaking. Eisenberg does great work as both unter-Simon and über-Simon, suggesting two entirely different characters through body language and gesture, often acting against himself in scenes that must have been a technical nightmare. It gets interestingly dark and painful in places, I already want to see it again, and I await whatever Ayoade does next.

Mark Stafford

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Dead of Night (1945)

Dead of Night 1945
Dead of Night (1945)

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Release date: 24 February 2014

Distributor: Studiocanal

Directors: Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer

Writers: John Baines, Angus MacPhail, T.E.B. Clarke

Based on stories by: H.G. Wells, E.F. Benson, John Baines, Angus MacPhail

Cast: Mervyn Johns, Michael Redgrave, Roland Culver

UK 1945

103 mins

The history of horror has often been written up by people who don’t have a sense of humour. In some ways the commentary on this special edition DVD and Blu-ray release of Dead of Night (1945) strives to remedy this fact, but also falls into the same earnest, po-faced reverence. The inclusion of John Landis’s talking head notwithstanding, a familiar coterie of limey Brit pundits do tend to harp on about the film as though it’s the second coming, even though it has been canonised as a cult home-grown classic for well over a decade now, and even makes it to number 11 on Scorsese’s top 10 list of horror favourites.

Long before Ealing created their 1950s comedie humaine, studio top cheese Michael Balcon had intended to diversify the studio’s genre output. Though there are laughs here, some intentional, others not, what’s really horrific and terrifying is the British stiff upper lip, a patriotic condition suspicious of the occult and in denial of subtext and ambiguity – the mind is merely a puzzle that can be satisfactorily decoded. Mervyn Johns plays the slaphead everyman, an architect invited down to an isolated cottage, a pilgrim’s farmhouse in Kent, for the weekend with assembled guests to swap stories about their brushes with death. There’s even a Viennese psychologist at hand, to accommodate the then new and voguish fad for The Interpretation of Dreams, a little bit Freud, a little bit Jung… ‘Mother what did you do with that bottle of schnapps we got for Dr Van Stratten?’ This bridging device umbrellas a quintet of ghost stories – a child death, a haunted mirror, a grim reaper bus conductor – which, while now familiar and even clichéd, originated here.

Ealing Studios had apparently rejected the hierarchical structure of the cottage British Film Industry – over several pints in the Red Lion pub, leftist ideologies favoured a more communal and socialist environment, though the notion of the Auteur was far too suspect and continental. Ironically, Cavalcanti’s name looms largest, as the helmer of two of the five episodes – the English eccentricities have always been more acutely observed by European refugees. The most imitated story is the final one, with Michael Redgrave as a ventriloquist possessed by his demonic dummy, prone to misanthropic Tourrete-style public outbursts, slowly taking control of his master’s voice, a device that recurs in everything from The Twilight Zone to Bride of Chucky.

Stanley Pavey’s lighting is noir-ish, and visual consistency is provided by cameraman Douglas Slocombe. Overall, it’s a cyclical narrative that ends where it begins, and the dreams-within-a-dream portmanteau suggests that it’s all the imagination of our hapless protagonist, an architect of his own mind. The scariest element of the film might be that there’s no mention of the war, though the claustrophobia of the English countryside is fully realised. In his intro to the golfing story, the comedic stop gap, Roland Culver observes ‘…Jolly unpleasant when you come slap up against the supernatural’. For the bulk of the stories, the emotional levelness of the national character unsettles the most – ‘Do you take milk and sugar’ rarely sounded so unnerving, as if a quick snifter or ‘one for the road’ can keep the silly, wretched ghosts in their place.

Robert Chilcott

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The Innocents

The Innocents
The Innocents

Format: Cinema

Release date: 13 December 2013

Distributor: BFI

Director: Jack Clayton

Writers: Truman Capote, William Archibald, John Mortimer

Cast: Deborah Kerr, Pamela Franklin, Martin Stephens, Megs Jenkins, Peter Wyngarde, Clytie Jessop

UK, USA 1961

100 mins

Adapted in 1961 from Henry James’s masterpiece of ambiguity The Turn of the Screw, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents is one of the finest ghost stories in British cinema. With an intelligent screenplay by Truman Capote, William Archibald and John Mortimer; radiant cinematography by Freddie Francis (who went on to direct films for Hammer and Amicus, as well as the brilliant 70s oddity Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly); an eerie score by Georges Auric; and an extraordinary performance by Deborah Kerr, the film is a superbly crafted, subtle gem that remains deeply disturbing.

Read Robert Barry’s feature on the score and Daphne Oram’s electronic sound effects for the film here.

Kerr plays Miss Giddens, a repressed minister’s daughter, who has left the shelter of her father’s parish to seek employment as a governess. She is hired by a wealthy bachelor (Michael Redgrave) to look after his orphaned niece and nephew on his country estate. On arrival at Bly House, she is charmed by the delightful Flora (Pamela Franklin) and Miles (Martin Stephens), but a number of strange occurrences lead her to believe that the children are possessed by the spirits of the previous governess, Miss Jessel (Clytie Jessop), and former disreputable servant Quint (Peter Wyngarde), who died violent, mysterious deaths after a scandalous love affair.

Whether Miss Giddens is right, or whether the ghosts are simply a manifestation of her growing derangement, is left carefully undecided in the perfectly poised original story. Clayton’s film, and Kerr’s performance, seem to lean more towards the thesis of the governess’s insanity, although both beautifully maintain enough layers of ambiguity. Flora and Miles’s angelic features and apparent sweet natures are marred by unexplained behaviour, suggestive silences and intimations of cruelty, which could corroborate Miss Giddens’s fears. As for Kerr, she is both heartbreaking and frightening in the intensity of her need for love and human attachment, and her passionate desire to ‘save’ the children may well cause their destruction instead.

At the heart of the film (and of the short story) lies a deep, dark, tortured anxiety about the innocence of children and the corruption of sex. Flora and Miles may know more than they should, and it is this terrible suspicion that so troubles the inexperienced, straight-laced Miss Giddens. Nature is the symbol of that corrupting force, of the carnal urges and predatory instincts that intrude upon the civilised, polite world of tea, corsets and lace at Bly House. The idyllic garden that surrounds the house is spoiled by defilement and savagery: a cockroach comes out of the mouth of a cherubic statue, a spider eats a butterfly on the terrace and the singing of birds sometimes sounds deafeningly menacing. The ghosts of Quint and Miss Jessel are feral presences that lurk outside the domesticated house, waiting to ‘contaminate’ the children. When Miss Giddens demands that the kindly housekeeper, Mrs Grose (Megs Jenkins), reveal what she knows, the latter wonderfully obliquely explains that Quint and Jessel used the rooms on the upper floor of the house ‘as if they were woods’, confirming that the lovers belong to the world of the wild, of filthy, depraved sexuality – to Miss Giddens’s horror.

So much is suggested, and so little shown. An atmospheric tour de force, with a tremendous sense of restraint that gives the film its evocative power, The Innocents is all about hints of shameful secrets and intimations of improper desires, set among arches and vaults, dark wooden panels and spectral candle glow, with Deborah Kerr’s anguished, moving face so often the only spot of light in the darkness. And how haunting that face and its unresolved torments are.

Virginie Sélavy

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In Fear

In Fear
In Fear

Format: Cinema

Release date: 15 November 2013

Distributor: Studiocanal

Director: Jeremy Lovering

Writer: Jeremy Lovering

Cast: Iain De Caestecker, Alice Englert, Allen Leech

UK 2013

85 mins

TV veteran Jeremy Lovering’s feature film debut In Fear effectively draws on moody British landscapes to construct a flawed, but chilling study of primal terror. On their way to a music festival, new young couple Lucy (Alice Englert) and Tom (Iain De Caestecker) plan to spend a romantic night at a countryside hotel. But misleading signs pointing in contradictory directions lead them in circles, and as night falls they seem unable to find their way back to the main road. Lost in an infernal maze in pitch-black darkness, they begin to believe that there is someone out there threatening them. Unbalanced by frustration, fear and paranoia, Tom and Lucy are pushed to their limits by the taunts of their invisible tormentor, and what they believe is their fight for survival.

In Fear is released in the UK on DVD + Blu-ray (R2/B) on 10 March 2014.

Lovering revealed as little of the script as he could to his two leads during shooting, which results in intense, raw performances, especially from Englert, who seems genuinely terrified. The minimal set-up explores the way in which the characters are manipulated into extreme behaviour by an enigmatic figure playing cruel games – interestingly, it is fear that is the trigger for violence here, rather than the other way around. Lovering skilfully creates a potent atmosphere of surreal dread, brilliantly supported by Roly Porter and Daniel Pemberton‘s excellent soundtrack. All in all, however, the film feels a little slight, requiring a fair amount of the audience’s good will in order to work, and the conclusion is an unsatisfactory unravelling of the tension that had been so tightly wound up.

This review was first published as part of our FrightFest 2013 coverage.

Virginie Sélavy

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A Field in England

A Fild in England
A Field in England

Format: Cinema, free TV, DVD, VOD

Release date: 5 July 2013

Distributor: Picturehouse Entertainment

Director: Ben Wheatley

Writers: Amy Jump, Ben Wheatley

Cast: Reese Shearsmith, Michael Smiley, Julian Barratt, Ryan Pope, Peter Ferdinando

UK 2013

90 mins

One of the most exciting directors in contemporary British cinema, Ben Wheatley keeps on surprising his audience. Not one to repeat himself, he refreshed the tired British crime-thriller genre with his brilliant 2009 debut Down Terrace, following it up with the acclaimed horror/gangster tale hybrid Kill List in 2011 and the hilarious black comedy Sightseers in 2012. With A Field in England, Wheatley explores new territory again, delivering an astonishing psychedelic period piece, while innovating in terms of distribution, with the film released simultaneously in cinemas and on TV, DVD and Video On Demand.

Set during the English Civil War, A Field in England follows the cowardly clerk Whitehead (Reese Shearsmith) as he runs away from the battlefield in the company of Cutler (Ryan Pope), Jacob (Peter Ferdinando) and Thrower (Julian Barratt). After consuming magic mushrooms, they come across Cutler’s master in the most unusual way (inspired by mushroom folklore, as Wheatley has explained). The master turns out to be the evil alchemist O’Neil (the splendidly sinister Michael Smiley), the man Whitehead’s own master sent him to hunt down after he stole precious documents from him. O’Neil is looking for a treasure buried in a field, and he and Cutler force the three deserters to help him find it.

Thereon follow surreal occurrences, strange transformations, unexplained resurrections, the intimation of dark deeds and a stunning hallucination sequence. Loose and experimental, the film is a little like a trip itself, with moments where nothing much happens making it feel like time is stretching, punctuated by startlingly visionary scenes. Wheatley conjures up horror out of pretty much nothing, with the unnerving sequence in which O’Neil subjects Whitehead to terrible unseen things inside his tent being the most astounding example.

Listen to Virginie Sélavy’s interview with Ben Wheatley on Resonance 104.4FM.

The use of black and white photography fits the film well, adding an unreal, ghostly quality to the bucolic landscape. Regular occurrences of frozen, live tableaux of the characters contribute to the experimental feel. The trippy weirdness is mixed with humour, a constant ingredient in Wheatley’s films, although it is of a bawdier kind here, maybe to fit with the 17th-century setting. Not much is seen of that period, and just like in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), the major event remains in the background, while the film focuses on marginal figures who play no part in the big historical drama unfolding nearby.

For all its wonderful inventiveness and thrilling moments, however, it has to be said that A Field in England is a film that requires patience and receptiveness on the part of the audience. There are longueurs and the film feels slight at times, not to mention that for those who know Wheatley’s previous films, it is hard not to hope for more horror and drama. Watching the trailer ‘They’re Over Here Devil!’, a sort of condensed orange-tinted distillation of A Field in England, you wish the whole film could have been as intense and demented as that. Despite its flaws, A Field in England is an original, adventurous, imaginative, compelling work, a rare enough thing in a British cinema stifled by formulaic scripts and timorous financing entities, to deserve being celebrated.

Virginie Sélavy

Watch the trailer: