Rating: B-
Dir: Bernard Rose
Star: Jeroen Krabbé, Lisa Enos, Alastair Mackenzie, Teri Harrison
I went into this, entirely unaware of its content – I knew and like the director’s work on Paperhouse, so wanted to see another piece from him. It’s a Gothic horror tale, reminiscent of Poe, about a dead wife who’s not actually de… No, wait, a group of psychos break into the director’s house and slaughter his pregnant wife and his friends: it’s a reworking of the Manson Family story. Hang on, it’s now 20 years later, and we’re watching a documentary, apparently made by real-life film-maker Nick Broomfield, along with a young couple (Enos + Mackenzie). The first is an aspiring actress, and becomes one of a group that the reclusive director (Krabbé) has gathered at his house for an audition.
Their character notes consist entirely of the word “PIG”, which would likely have me making my excuses and calling a cab. But the place is heavily wired with cameras and the event is being streamed live on the Internet. So is this a film, a film-within-a-film, Satanic ritual, a figment of the director’s apparent insanity or what? Particularly, I think, due to my lack of any expectations – in which cause, I guess the paragraph above has probably just ruined it for you! Sorry… – the first three-quarters of this are genuinely effective, forcing the viewer to re-adjust their perspective and expectations on multiple occasions, while offering sly prods at everything from Internet voyeurism to Stanley Kubrick’s huffy withdrawal of A Clockwork Orange.
Krabbe is the glue that holds proceedings together: the rest of the cast is a bit of a mixed bag, with some of the other “actors” apparently unable to find the exit from their paper-bag. Though given their intended roles, that may not matter too much. Unfortunately, near the end, things drift from intriguingly twisted into sloppily excessive – the estate, which has previously had only two people outside the actors, is suddenly host to hundreds. The resulting Wicker Man-esque ritual doesn’t fit with anything else, and is a jarring disconnect from what has gone before, which even a final twist cannot recover. It’s a shame, since there’s enough genuine inventiveness here to provoke thought, something sadly lacking in most genre entries.