HORROR; 1hr 43min
STARRING: Rose Riley, George Mason, Hayley McElhinney
Poor Clare! Riley
Clare (Riley, neck-deep in torment) is a non-practising doctor and recovering addict with a casebook of psychological issues. Given her stability level, she decidedly should not have taken on the clearing out of her late mother’s rural house in writer-director Miley Tunnecliffe’s pitch-dark feature debut.
Yet here we all are, with Clare heading back to her outwardly non-threatening childhood home in Western Australia. After an encounter with her handsome ex (Mason as Jerry), who she plainly still fancies, and his policewoman sister (McElhinney), for whom no love is lost, she briefly clocks an ominous vision or two. They’re hardly a reassuring look — plus, judging by the spooky snatches of soundtrack, this is one clean-up that Clare shouldn’t have started. Small towns tend to stay that way and her troubling past is omnipresent, both in the reminders of her and Jerry’s teenage selves (Chloe Brink and James Rock in flashbacks) and in Jerry today, with his soulful gaze and palpable longing.
Before you can scream “Oh no!” Jerry has signed on as Clare’s handyman and the two of them are sharing a dinner whose happy ending is kiboshed by one of Clare’s apparitions. When she and Jerry do subsequently reconnect, anybody can see they’re in for a hellacious ride since (a) that spooky soundtrack is back with a vengeance and (b) something dire and stealthy is plainly laying claim to Clare’s psyche.
Sure enough, in the blink of a fiend’s beady eye, a defenceless Clare has tumbled off the wagon, helping herself to Jerry’s vino while her inner and outer worlds devolve into chaos. “You seem a bit quiet,” Jerry observes after their reunion night in a humdinger of an understatement. Preyed upon by the burden of memory, Clare is ensnared in an hallucinogenic abyss where no demon is more malignant than the death grip of addiction.
