Rory Kinnear in many guises plagues Jessie Buckley’s abuse survivor in this twisted country-house horror
), it’s a playfully twisted affair – not quite as profound as it seems to think, perhaps, but boasting enough squishy metaphorical slime to ensure that its musings upon textbook male characteristics are rarely dull, and sometimes deliciously disgusting.
Buckley is Harper, the survivor of an abusive relationship whose partner, James , tried to gaslight her into taking responsibility for his own urban self-destructiveness . Now she has escaped into verdant surroundings for a fortnight in “the dream country house” – with the emphasis on “dream”.
slips deftly between identities, variously donning the stereotypical cloaks of his gender. Imagine a minimalist, one-man production of Neil LaBute’sRegurgitated maleness gives birth to itself in an orgy of physical mutation The fact that Harper never acknowledges the similarities between these male characters signals that it’s a device – a dramatic contrivance that some audiences might not even notice at first, but which makes perfect emotional sense. I was reminded of Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s animated oddity, in which the central character is beset by the “Fregoli delusion”: that everyone else is the same person – blessed with the same puppet face, and voiced by the same actor, Tom Noonan.
by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow beautifully bridges the gap between the film’s modern British pastoral setting and timeless Euro-gothic chills, with human voices and unearthly noises dancing around earthy soundscapes that seem to be simultaneously internal and external – real and imagined. It may not be subtle but it’s endearingly unhinged, and serves as a timely reminder that the plastic realities of fantasy and horror remain a hearty primal soup for the cinema of ideas.
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