This home-grown psychological chiller starts with an ultrasound image of an unborn baby’s face and a la-la-la theme which evokes Krzysztof Komeda’s lullaby from Rosemary’s Baby. The spirit of Polanski looms large as young middle-class couple Kate (Clémence Poésy) and Justin (Stephen Campbell Moore) find their expectant anxieties mirrored by the new couple in the downstairs flat, with whose barely repressed “otherness” they become inextricably, guiltily intertwined. Playwright and theatre director David Farr (who co-wrote Joe Wright’s Hanna and scripted TV’s The Night Manager) makes a solid fist of his big-screen debut as writer/director, generating some small-scale chills which are undiminished by the occasionally creaky dialogue. Cinematographer Ed Rutherford, who did such brilliant work for Joanna Hogg on Archipelago and Exhibition, uses woozy camera moves to capture the exhaustion and paranoia of parenthood, while the production design effectively counterposes order and chaos – inside and out, upstairs and down.
