HORROR; 1hr 28min
STARRING: Joe Bird, Stacy Clausen, Mia Wasikowska
So near… From left, Bird and Clausen
Figuring out your adolescent sexuality is enough of a challenge without becoming the target of a judgy religious community. Seventeen-year-old Naim (Bird) is up against that very repressive thing, besotted as he is with a studly boy (Clausen as Ryan) who looks bound to break his heart. When the heartbreak duly happens, after a devastated Naim spots Ryan snogging another boy, he spills revenge beans to their churchy moral police, thereby unleashing a uniquely personal hell in the form of Naim and Ryan themselves. Craftily invisible otherwise, the shape-shifting demon is a love object seen only by those to whom it seeks to do murderous damage. If hell is other people, try mixing that sad reality up with an undead hottie stalker.
Like standout chillers before it (Flatliners, It Follows), writer-director Adrian Chiarella’s feature debut teeters on the precipice of apparent psychosis, although its blue moods never quite manage a hair-raising leap. The cast is uniformly solid all the same, with Bird’s plaintive face, in particular, seeming custom-made for the misery of captivity. There is literally nowhere for Naim to turn — his mother (Wasikowska) has her own depressing problems and no idea of what her cursed son is enduring by drably suburban degrees, since demon Ryan isn’t going anywhere.
As creepily persistent as he is, a teenage dude in jeans and a singlet is hardly a shoo-in as shock-horror. Still, the loneliness of a danger only you can see takes Chiarella’s concept of torment to an airless, ambiguous place.
