FrightFest review – The Arborist

FrightFest review – The Arborist

First off, yes it is confusing that there are films called The Arbiter and The Arborist in the same festival – though they’re wildly different in genre and tone.  The Only Ones and The Other People are similarly asking to get doppelganged, though slightly more aptly since they’re both in the same paranoid contemporary American wheelhouse.

Written and directed by Andrew Mudge, The Arborist is a ghost story/mystery in the tradition of The Changeling or The Others … with, inevitably, overtones of The Turn of the Screw and its many manifestations.  The ingredients are a spooky old house in a great estate, an elderly eccentric single occupant of same, a traumatised woman coming to do a job (as a tree surgeon) and questioning what she starts to see around the place, and a mixed-up child (her son) who might be falling under a supernatural influence (and turning evil).  There are ghost children in folk horror animal costumes too, and one of Mudge’s achievements is in making this rather overused image creepy again – the kid-sized raven with human hands is especially alarming.  Ellie (Lucy Walters), numbed after the cot-death of her younger child, comes to the estate of Arthur Randolph (Will Lyman) to do a job which is far beneath her skill set – felling apparently healthy trees for firewood, when there are more suitable ailing trees nearer the house left standing.  The estate has a lake suitable for being nearly drowned in, which is the focus of one aspect of the haunting, and an abandoned natural amphitheatre which was once used by orphans to put on a show.  Young Wyatt (Hudson West) is resentful at being dragged along on the gig, and keeps getting into scrapes – though perhaps not as many as he takes the blame for, since there is a great deal of paranormal activity about the place … which turns out to be connected with some deep tragic backstory involving Arthur’s bad seed brother Victor, whom Wyatt greatly resembles.

Walters carries the film – individuating yet another troubled grieving single parent (a FF staple this year, cf: The Confession, The Other People, Redux Redux) – but Lyman, who has a long career as a voice-over guy, lends gravitas to the strange old man rattling around his impressive house and garden.  The central location – which is in Concord, Massachusetts – is splendid, and Mudge has a lot of shivery fun exploring the place.  The last reel goes full-on gothic in a succession of revelations and explanations, but also delivers an appropriately shuddery/melancholy finale.

Here’s the FrightFest listing.