Rating: B
Dir: Joshua Sowden
Star: Krishna Smitha, Danny Parker-Lopes, Ali Williams, Ian Cardoni
With a small cast – barely a handful of speaking parts – and largely unfolding in an empty warehouse, this is clearly a film with limited resources. However, it manages to punch above its weight and deliver some effective chills, despite occasional missteps. Our protagonists are Victoria (Smitha) and August (Parker-Lopes), who share the security detail at a vacant industrial building. They’ve worked together for a while, and are united in their personal solitude. Victoria, however, has a plan to deal with that, having been researching reports of an immortal witch, who has used human sacrifice to prolong her life and resurrect the dead. The sorceress (Williams) is now living in the desert, a convenient bus-ride away for Victoria.
Victoria intends to pay her a visit, and swipe the occult tome which is the source of her power, in order to… Well, that’s one of the areas where the script could perhaps have used more decisiveness. It also feels the actual theft should have been harder – the witch clearly knows Victoria is after her, yet it’s largely a case of sneaking in and picking the book up off the table. From here, it’s not too difficult to work out where things are going to go, and who is going to be the human sacrifice necessary for Victoria to complete the ritual. But will she be able to go through with it? Especially since the previous owner of the volume is not exactly going to get a replacement on Temu.
What lifts the film up are the performances of Smitha and Parker-Lopes, in particular the former. From the moment we meet them, August and Victoria feel real people, in a way that far larger movies often fail to achieve. It is clear Victoria is at the end of her tether, and has been pushed into questionable actions as a result, but we never lose sympathy for her. Sowden has a good eye, especially for lighting, and the growling, electronic score by Brandon Lau does its share of lifting too. Less successful is the witch’s look, which seems to embody every black magic cliché, literally down to a pointy hat, and feels a bit as if it was costumed out of the “sexy Hogwarts” aisle at Party City.
It is one of the few occasions, however, where the low budget pokes through. It looks and, perhaps more importantly for me, sounds impressively like a a fully-funded production. Although the effects are limited, the story doesn’t require much to function, and what there are, prove perfectly serviceable. While I was able to predict the road down which this would travel, I was uncertain of the final destination until the very end – and just as critically, remained interested in the outcome. Again: that engagement is something not always sustained in this jaded horror fan. It’s imperfect, to be sure. Yet there was really nothing I couldn’t forgive, and was often able to forget, courtesy of the solid core elements.
The film is out now to rent/buy on Amazon Prime