Fright (2024)
Shot in cool black and white widescreen, with a tiny cast and an impressive old dark house setting, Fright is an exercise in retro-melodrama with gothic overtones. It’s 1937 and Emily (Gwyneth Evans) has just turned eighteen. She suffers from crippling agoraphobia and can’t leave the isolated house she shares with her oddly secretive mother (Jill Priest), who refuses to tell her anything about her father but has brought her up on a home-made Babadook-like children’s book which has reinforced her neuroses. The clutching shadow of a hand reaches for her head whenever she even considers stepping outside. And she’s been raised to be useless – not even knowing how to make porridge, even as she has a side-obsession with sweeping and cleaning.
Writer-director Warren Dudley foreshadows key events – mother is worried about what will happen to Emily when she’s gone and is discreetly coughing blood, and father (Daniel Tuite – who turns out to be a towering presence) is due to arrive in perhaps monstrous form in a month’s time. Much of the film is lady-in-distress stuff dependent on Evans’ Repulsion-like collapsing sanity (and fright-face make-over) as the perhaps-imaginary, perhaps all-too-real ‘man with the hand’ impinges on her, with a side-order of Psycho as a rotting corpse is the heroine’s only companion and there are repeated references to something malevolent in the cellar … but there’s a flurry of exposition delivered via press cuttings and speeches in the last act, which pays off with a decent resolution of multiple plot-threads.
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