FrightFest review – Blockhead
Writer Will Mercer (Danny Horn) had a best-seller with a novel called Random Acts – not to be confused with Jack Womack’s excellent Random Acts of Senseless Violence, though anything that gets people to go out and read the Womack is a major positive – a while back, but is now a hollowed-out shell … rambling through lectures to creative writing students, spinning excuses for an agent who tells him Granta are holding a spot for an extract from his next (unwritten) book, simmering with jealousy when he finds his girlfriend Daisy (Hussina Raja) celebrating her birthday (which he’s forgotten) with unblocked writer Dax (Solomon Israel) and pouring out his woes to a therapist who was also once a writer (Michele Moran).
The shrink offers him a space to work at his laptop, in front of a blank wall he can paper with notes and scribbles, in an empty building … where he is accosted by Mikey (Joe Sims), a bald builder who encourages him to bring out his Mr Hyde self, is perhaps some sort of malign muse, and has his own creepy backstory. The pages start coming out, in a stutter, but Will is still haunted – by Josh (Jake Mavis), one of his writing students who is if anything even more intense and out there than he is, and by a human wraith (Simon Meacock) who has history with Mikey. Acts of directed violence take place, on and off screen, and the question of whether Mikey is real is set aside – it doesn’t really matter, because all the agony would be the same either way.
Like so many films about writers (cf: Morvern Caller), it doesn’t ring true on all sorts of small practical details about how the craft and business function – but gets the bigger picture down pat, with Will doppelganged not so much by the confident, fluent Dax or the West Country-accented genial id Mikey but his own previous self – it’s possible he didn’t even write his hit book, or is that just a manifestation of his imposter syndrome … or maybe a very meta notion that his next, horribly honest book will be a bogus confession of plagiarism to go with his owning up to all manner of crimes he may have committed himself or be responsible for because he didn’t stop his unleashed alter ego. Writer-director Matt Harlock makes a fiction feature debut after the documentary American: The Bill Hicks Story and several shorts which sketch the themes of Blockhead. The film has a spare, London-after-dark look – as if the world Will has to ignore to focus on his work just doesn’t exist.
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