Set in Scotland, James Nesbitt plays a mysterious man guided by black magic to locate Kate Dickie and her son Niall Bruton for reasons only slowly revealed. Dickie, meanwhile, uses the dark arts to protect her beloved son. Hanna Stanbridge plays the pretty girl whom Bruton has started hanging out with, much to his overprotective mother’s disapproval. All the while a ferocious beast is terrorising the neighbourhood. Could there be a connection?
Directed by Colm McCarthy (who comes from a TV background) and scripted by he and his brother Tom, this film is quite slow-moving, but so positively barmy that I found it compelling throughout. It has a rainy and oppressive atmosphere and vaguely poetic dialogue that has one feeling on edge. It’s off-kilter and one is curious to see where it is heading.
The icky sound FX are marvellous, and although confronting, the last quarter in particular is really something. The creature FX are pretty good too, for something that probably didn’t have a huge budget. Others seem to disagree, but I honestly thought the combination of CGI and prosthetics was perfectly acceptable.
I wasn’t overly a fan of the shaky hand-held camerawork of Darran Tiernan, I must say, as he adopts it even in mere conversational scenes. All that does is alert me to the camera’s presence. I could also have done without the blatant visual cues from “The Shining”, with obviously similar camera angles in scenes of domestic terror, but it annoyed me that it would so clearly steal from another film. Some might call it homage, but until that scene I was enjoying the fact that the film was vaguely reminding me of lots of films (“Dust Devil”, “The Shout”, “The Prophecy”, “The Hidden”) without being blatant about it. The underlying themes in these scenes, however, are undeniably interesting.
The film is pretty well-acted across the board (James Nesbitt has been better, though), Hanna Stanbridge in particular is extremely charismatic. I would’ve liked more scenes with the wonderful James Cosmo, however. It must be said that Kate Dickie does really well with some pretty difficult dialogue.
OVERALL SUMMARY
This unusual film borders on Ken Russell self-indulgent arty weirdness at times, but is far more watchable and interesting than that. It’s slow, but so bizarre you can’t possibly be bored by it, surely.
