FrightFest Glasgow review – Rumpel Stilt Skin (2024)
Busy Andy Edwards has been visiting the darker side of already dark children’s tales in Punch, which melds the end-of-the-pier puppet show of domestic abuse with slasher film, and Cinderella’s Revenge, a gruesome spin on the fairy tale/pantomime. The Brothers Grimm’s Rumpelstiltskin is one of those kids’ stories which really is pretty horrific even without being done in horror film style – there was a Leprechaun-type version in 1995 which wasn’t much more disturbing than the straightish Amy Irving film from 1987.
After the manner of Oz Perkins’ Gretel and Hansel, this mostly sticks to the Grimms’ text but brings out the ghastly cruelty of all the players and sets it in a horribly oppressive past where the power structure of git-rapist king, who beheads queens who give birth to daughter, and woods-dwelling demon king, boss of the goblinish Rumpelstiltskin, are pretty much the same. The princess here is Evalina (Hannah Baxter-Eve), a promiscuous miller’s daughter, and it’s made plain that unless she spins straw into gold she and her father (Mark Cook) are for the chop – and, in the best line, she looks at a spinning wheel and a pile of straw and wails ‘I don’t even know how to fucking spin’.
Initially masked, Rumpelstiltskin (Joss Carter) shows up and offers to pull off the magic trick in exchange for a kiss … which leads of course to more misery as the King (Colin Malone) wants more gold thread, and Evalina has to promise an unborn child to the monster to seal the deal. It unfolds in three chapters – Daughter, Queen, Mother – and does the Grimm tale, then tries for a sequel as the principles clash again seven years on. Like most Edwards films, it’s gritty and tough, toning down the black humour in favour of a blunt depiction of a ruinously unfair world where horrible people are in charge. Baxter-Eve and Carter are good leads and it’s nicely decorated with folk art woods magic totems, with some thought put into the worldview and belief systems of this pagan fantasyworld.
Yes, the onscreen title is three words.
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