Rebirth of the Dead

DVD Review: WAKE WOOD
18 – 86mins – 2011
Story by: Brendan McCarthy
Screenplay by: Brendan McCarthy and David Keating
Directed by: David Keating
Starring: Aiden Gillen, Eva Birthistle, Timothy Spall, Ella Connolly, Ruth McCabe, Brian Gleeson, Amelia Crowley
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[SPOILERS] I couldn't help but smile at the irony that a film with a tagline warning “The Dead Should Not Be Woken” was the comeback feature of long-in-hiatus genre studio Hammer Films. 30 years after their last production, would the former masters of the macabre come to rue their very own reawakening?

Fortunately, The Wake Wood (as it was originally called before they dropped the definite article) garnered critical commendation upon its March release, even if that date was, rather worryingly, some 18months after it first premiered at a film festival (never a good sign). Overshadowed though it may have been by Matt Reeve's vamp remake Let Me In and the more star-studded (but similarly short-changed) The Resident, I was still eager to see what all the fuss was about with this low budget Irish resurrection chiller.

Relocating to the eponymous rural village (spelt, strangely, as one word rather than the two of the title), husband and wife Patrick (Gillen) and Louise (Birthistle) are still struggled to come to terms with the horrific death of their only child, Alice (Connolly), who was viciously mauled to death by a savage dog. After their car breaks down one night, they stumble upon Patrick's boss's remote cottage. Hoping for a phone, they are shocked to overhear a creepy pagan ritual taking place in his back yard; a ritual which brings the dead back to life. Wakewood, they have discovered, is not like other villages...

Patrick's uncanny boss, Arthur (Spall), offers the grieving couple an opportunity they cannot refuse: the chance to see their little girl again, alive and in the flesh – but only for three days, after which time she must “return to the wood”. Overjoyed at the chance to say a proper goodbye to their much-missed daughter, everything seems to be going fabulously – but happiness doesn't last forever, and Alice doesn't want to be left alone in the ground again...

There's more than a shade of Don't Look Now in Wake Wood's DNA, not only in the theme of premature death and grieving parents (and the fact that Alice wears a mac – albeit not a red one), but also in the quirky editing, with director David Keating borrowing Nicholas Roeg's iconic unchronological flitting technique to not only contrast the before, during and after of the tragic catalyst, but also during a sex scene. It's a rather unsublte homage to say the least.

Unfortunately that is where any comparisons to the 1973 Daphne Du Maurier adaptation end, as innocent little Alice develops a devilishly sinister side, which sees her disappear into the night with makeshift weapons in hand. If the Roeg riffing was unsublte, then Keating's overuse of the claret stuff is just plain indulgant. I was left with the suspicion that the producers were worried that without a bone-crunching groin crush here or a dog skinning there, Wake Wood wouldn't even qualify as a horror, so they took the gore to hyperbolic extremes and tagged on a permanently jangling musical score to give the film the impression of tension.

Don't get me wrong, it is an effective score (reminding me of the eerie library music in Ghostbusters - with added cowbells), but it was ultimately counteracted by Wake Wood's lowly budget, which shone through far too brightly in the tones of every shot; the whites too garish and the blacks not black enough. At times it looked like an amateur production.

Ella Connolly, too, didn't quite nail her crucial role as the resurrected Alice. She's only young, so I feel kinda bad for critiquing, but not once did she creep me out or give me the impression that she was ever truly a threat to the villagers. Her wide-eyed gaze looked wholly indifferent throughout whether she was hugging her mummy or impaling a poker through the neck of her neighbour.


In a CR@B Shell: The critics seemed to love it, but I failed to be impressed by this cheap-looking Don't Look Now for the noughties. Excessive money shots just added to Wake Wood's feeling of tacky desperation, and even Timothy Spall couldn't elevate this beyond straight-to-DVD status. So *that's* why they kept it on the shelf for 18months...
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Drowning Their Sorrows

DVD Review: DON'T LOOK NOW
15 – 106mins – 1973
Screenplay by: Allan Scott and Chris Bryant
Based on the short story by: Daphne Du Maurier
Directed by: Nicholas Roeg
Starring: Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie, Hilary Mason, Clelia Matania, Sharon Williams
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Savaged by grief at the loss of their young daughter (Williams) in a pond accident on their English estate, husband and wife John (Sutherland) and Laura Baxter (Christie) pack their son off to boarding school and up sticks to Venice, a temporary haven for them to clear their heads, soothe their hearts and attempt to reclaim some semblance of a life after tragedy. But while John is working on the restoration of a historic church, Laura is baited by a pair of elderly sisters (Mason, Matania), one of whom claims to be psychic and alleges to have seen the spirit of their deceased daughter...

When I was but a nipper, I can remember switching on the TV late one night and being quite creeped out by the snippet of Nicholas Roeg's seminal meditation on grief which was playing before my innocent eyes. That image of the figure in the red mac has forever stuck with me, much like how some people are plagued by Dracula or Freddie Kruger. However, after catching up with the film as an adult and watching it from start to finish, what struck me most about this psychological horror is how unhorrifying it actually is. And that isn't a derision.

Eerie and disturbing, certainly, but this is no typical cheap-thrills genre flick. Brit director Roeg is skilled at using many artistic and unconventional editing techniques to accumulate an ever-growing feeling of disorientation, pulling the viewer in then losing them amid the labyrinthine Venice boulevards and back streets. It's a much richer and more rewarding sensation to the lazy jump-scares made pedestrian by today's less visionary scaremongers, and it makes that climatic revelation all the more staggeringly unpredictable; the thing of nightmares.

From the colour red subtly haunting the screen and seeping into our subconscious, to juxtaposing scenes intertwined in a fragmentary orgy of time and sense, Roeg's experimental, playful camera work demands respect, truly brining to life Du Maurier's printed word. The uneasy atmosphere is also bolstered by the ingenious decision to not subtitle the native Venetian's natter; by Dino Donnagio's fabulously frantic stringwork on the score; and the growing paranoia of objects moving out of the corner of your eye.

The irony isn't lost on me that a couple wanting to escape the memories of a drowning incident would choose to move to a city which is half-flooded; it's no wonder the pair start to lose their grip on sanity as their vision lingers mournfully on the choppy and unfaithfully reflective water, their belief systems confused by the peculiar sister's comforting/creepy claims and their nerves heightened as a series of murders plague the gondola-strewn waterways. Logic or faith? Superstition or convenience? Acceptance or denial? Alive or dead? Sane or insane? What certainly isn't up for debate is Don't Look Now's status as a quintessential viewing experience for all lovers of the artform.


In a CR@B Shell: A cornucopia of filmic techniques are married together to spellbinding effect in this rich, macabre masterpiece of (dis)illusion, ambience and the fragility of human emotion. Even nearly 40 years on, today's film-makers will still gawp in awe at Roeg's sublime adaptation. Do look now!
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Spectral Healing

Book Review: THE WINTER GHOSTS
Written by: Kate Mosse
272 pages – Orion – 2009
www.katemosse.com
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Compressing her favoured novel-forming ingredients of historical globe-trotting mysteries and period-spanning dual protagonists into a much sparser work than we have come to expect from the British fiction writer, Kate Mosse’s The Winter Ghosts makes for a quick but unfulfilling read – its origins as a short story (The Cave) all too apparent.

It’s a source of great debate (in my mind, at least) as to whether the story of Post Traumatic Stress-sufferer Freddie Watson – long mourning the loss of his brother in the Great War, and his own peace of mind – is too short, or too long. Mosse spends such a great early chunk of the book pouring over this poor shell of a man, that by the time the eponymous paranormal activity takes place, the story is all-but-over.

On a head cleansing road trip through the French Pyrenees in 1928, the grief-stricken young man spins his car off the road and, stumbling through the woodland, finds sanctuary in the quaint village of Nulle, where over the course of a single night he meets (and falls in love with) a similarly tragic young woman called Fabrissa, who allows Freddie the chance to open up about his loss and find peace with the ghosts which have long haunted his soul.

"Without understanding, there can
be no redemption"

Fabrissa’s heart-breaking story of being chased out of the village by religious extremists proves that Mosse certainly does her research (a similar area of French history was covered in her breakout hit Labyrinth), and an effort has clearly been made to evoke an off-kilter atmosphere, but the paper-thin plot feels contrived and stumbling; unnatural, while Freddie is so (understandably) self-absorbed that it is hard to care for his plight, even when he finds an unexpected resolution.


In a CR@B Shell: Atmospheric but insubstantial, The Winter Ghosts requires more phantoms, lengthier prose, less depression and fewer space-wasting photos to be anything more than a between-tomes filler project for Kate Mosse addicts.
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