FrightFest Halloween review – Advent
Advent had its World Premiere at FrightFest Halloween 2024 and arrives on UK digital 25 November (iTunes, Amazon, Google Play)
A few years ago, FrightFest screened Le Calendrier (The Advent Calendar), a French film about a cursed advent calendar – which set wicked challenges for every opened window and escalated doom for the protagonist throughout December. Here’s a variation on that theme from Airell Anthony Hayles – following up Werewolf Santa with a found footage-ish krampus picture.
Academic Richard Hill (Nicholas Vince) gets the lions’ share of the ominous explanation-to-camera material, giving the impression that he’s in control of what we see and hear of the story of an ex-pupil’s run of bad vibes from December 1st to 24th … indeed, he goes on in eerily-lit gloom so much viewers might prefer he shut up and let us follow the story without so much underlining, which may be a creepy character point. The actual lead is Hayley (Rasin Pavlova), a sceptic vlogger compelled for personal reasons to buy a cursed krampus calendar on ‘the Deep Web’ and demonstrate that it doesn’t work by following its daily instructions … going against the advice of the camera guy (Cian Lorcan) who is clearly stuck on her but would be a lot less keen if he saw the footage of what she does to Brewster the Hamster when the calendar makes a particularly cruel demand of her. In the backstory, Hayley has a disturbed mother who is no longer around – and a drunk Dad (Cory Peterson) who’s not moved on from a family tragedy. All this motivates her to debunk myths, though – of course – this one comes to bite her.
Le Calendrier stressed the way the challenges ask for more and more immoral, antisocial behaviour … but this calendar sets for more apparently achievable tasks like going nights without sleep and walking round the Christmas tree several times, which add up to an assault on sanity and a sense of self-preservation along the lines of cult indoctrination. It’s a short movie, which means that despite the wittering teacher we get to follow Hayley’s character arc – which, literally, goes out of a high window – with a sense of inevitable doom without constantly tripping over the foregone conclusion factor which hobbles the involvement in too many curse movies. Pavlova and Lorcan are good, and Hayles’ script has plenty of relatable, credible little details which give the wilder stuff some grounding.
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