FrightFest Glasgow review – By the Throat

FrightFest Glasgow review – By the Throat

‘Some people will believe anything.’

Lizzy (Patricia Allison), a fragile young woman haunted by memories of a knife attack which did not turn out the way attacker or victim might have expected, takes a live-in job – though as soon as she starts, any number of omens suggest she ought to quit.  Arriving at an isolated home, she’s told by Alex Cummings (Rupert Young) that she’s to look after his wife Amy (Jeany Spark), often bedridden since the loss of their daughter in a car accident, but Alex takes off on a ‘business trip’ before introducing Lizzy to Amy … and for a few days, the invalid doesn’t show herself even as trays left outside her door are taken in and meals eaten.  Just when you might think there’s no real Amy, the woman makes herself known – suffering from night terrors and needing to be cared for like an infant.  A plausible doctor (Matthew Cottle) makes regular visits, and is smoothly reassuring in a manner calculated to further clang alarm bells.

Lizzy and Amy both have trauma-induced bad dreams.  And Lizzy sees people in the garden, sporting folk horror wooden masks or just generally lurking, while a Blair Witch twig charm turns up under her bed … these deployments of elements which have lately become overfamiliar in low-budget horror draw the protagonist towards a perhaps-expected doom, but director David Luke Rees – who also co-wrote with Madelaine Isaac – is playing a game of misdirection.  There’s a risk of literally leading a lead character down a garden path while the audience tags along of dawdling too long before the interesting twists start coming, but By the Throat is short and tight enough to get past that hump, making use of its relatively claustrophobic setting (it mostly sticks to the gloomy underlit house) and tiny cast.

It’s an hour of ominous rumblings, followed by a quarter of an hour of horrific climax – but the build-up grips thanks to good performances, especially from Allison and Spark as contrasting troubled women.  It benefits also from a set of unusual horror movie villains, who are working a clever racket inside the usual cult.