FrightFest Halloween Review – Affection
Sarah (Jessica Rothe) is injured in a suspicious road incident … and wakes up in bed with a man she doesn’t know in an isolated home she doesn’t recognise. Bruce (Joseph Cross) tries to calm her down and she bludgeons him with a fireplace poker – which wakes up a little girl (Julianna Layne) who is horrified. Bruce tells Sarah that her name is Ellie and that after the accident she is not only suffering from amnesia about who she really is but has false memories of a previous life she’s only imagined from bits and pieces of stories she’s heard. For a while, Sarah/Ellie tries to go along with it, for the sake of her moppet daughter as much as to appease her mild-seeming, yet controlling ‘husband’. He tells her that her recovery depends on complete isolation – so no doctors or friends or other family members are around to add their viewpoint – and one or two details don’t add up, especially an odd wound on the back of her neck which is exactly like one the child has.
Of course, if this were a drama about a family healing from trauma with Rothe (of the Happy Death Day films) making a bid for awards by playing neurodysfunctional then it wouldn’t be a FrightFest selection. We twig early on that this is a classic Gaslight scenario, with an untrustworthy husband undermining a woman’s mental health – but writer-director BT Meza has two or three more twists, and a whole new genre, up his sleeve … with the heroine finding a mad science laboratory in a barn beyond the cornfield and handily-labelled tapes which fill in a fragmentary backstory. Later stages of the film feature a stumbling, zombie-like doppelganger – Rothe is an amazing physical performer – and grand guignol buried-in-the-fields-but-not-properly-dead business, not to mention some brain-scrambling computer hijinx and even gloopy, eyeball-stuffed sentient haggis things which are a particuarly weird visual.
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