There are one or two enjoyable moments in this cheerfully ridiculous erotic horror from director and co-writer Iain Ross-McNamee; sadly it doesn’t quite work.
This is an old-school Brit chiller with nods to Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man. We get OTT acting and budget effects, people bursting into supernatural flames and an extended cod-Hitchcockian closeup on someone’s screaming face while they’re falling backwards through the air from a great height.
The setting is a creepy old manor house where earnest historian Isabelle (Katie Goldfinch) is investigating the discovery of what appears to be the lost half of an ancient druidical crucible. She is perhaps insufficiently concerned about the bad stuff that might happen when this is fitted back together with the other half.
The mansion’s owner Karl (Larry Rew) is a strange cove; so evidently is his super-sexy daughter Scarlet (Florence Cady). They both do their disturbing best to make Isabelle welcome as their overnight guest – again, incautious Isabelle might have been better off staying at the nearest Premier Inn and commuting in daily. One person who does seem reassuringly normal is the bluffly ordinary gardener Robert: a small role for Neil Morrissey.
The best thing about the film are the flashbacks to the creepy past – interludes from the 17th and 19th centuries that are staged with some conviction – and the weird dream sequences. But then we are back to happenings in the present day that look like a daytime soap.
Ross-McNamee gets his money’s worth from that weird old mansion and there’s some showmanship there, but it doesn’t quite deliver the shiver.
