7 Keys (2024)
This has a premise which could veer into rom-com/soap opera or suspense/horror … this being a FrightFest selection, it skews dark gradually as one freewheeling date on the old pattern of madcap girl gooses stuffy guy into larks (as seen, for instance, in Rye Lane) turns up nastier surprises behind a succession of doors. Lena (Emma McDonald), a single mum in fairly dire circumstances, spruces up for a blind date arranged over an app and finds herself stood up – only to get talking to a shy bloke, Daniel (Billy Postlethwaite), who is in the same situation.
Impulsively, they spend the evening chatting and Lena can’t take his hesitation to go further for an answer and tails him to his nearby flat – the hook is that Daniel has a big ring of (more than seven) keys since he’s one of those people who keep the keys to every address they’ve ever had. Lena proposes they spend the three-day weekend, when people are quite likely to be away from home, calling on every one of those addresses – which even she notices seem to be a bit out of the budget level of a bloke who says he scrapes a living gambling online. As they traipse about the city, sneaking in to have sex or just rearrange small items, the duo reveal more about their complicated backstories – neither of them have much of a home background and there’s some subliminal editorial about the insecurity and cost (in several ways) of living in middling-to-upscale London where few people notice their neighbours or ask questions.
Hints are dropped as to where this will go – and, yes, there are soon cracks in the love-at-first-stood-up-by-arseholes relationship and some incidental bursts of violence which leave a bit of a bloody wake across town. It’s as much study of loneliness and insecurity as it is suspense/horror and the two main performances carry it – flirting with characters becoming complete monsters but then going a different way with them. There’s one especially memorable bit of ingenuity in escaping from a torture porn dungeon scenario. A first feature from writer-director Joy Wilkinson, who has scripted episodes of Doctor Who and Lockwood & Co.
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