FrightFest Glasgow review – Bury the Devil

FrightFest Glasgow review – Bury the Devil

This is an exercise in long-take horror, following either version of Silent House, Let’s Scare Julie and Home Sweet Home – Wo das Böse wohnt (Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives) – though it opens with a landscape shot of an old lakefront house in the woods on fire and a ‘umpty minutes earlier’ caption to get into drama which plays out in realtime but has a few not-entirely-invisible cuts in blackouts or moves from room to room.  Terminal care nurse Julia (Emmanuelle Lussier Martinez) arrives at the rambling, isolated house to look after dementia patient Evelyn (Dawn Wells), who shifts between seeming her old self (whoever that was), a paranoid certain that a nurse she met five minutes earlier is a hostile home invader and something approaching sly malice, with a few darker spells.  There’s little reassurance when Evelyn’s ex-husband Randall (Bill Rowat) shows up – at first he seems a calming influence, but Julia is disturbed when he starts ranting in semireligious fashion and throws him out.  He comes back with a gang of middle-aged vigilantes and a priest (Mark Antony Krupa).  Evelyn’s behaviour gets wilder, and Julia has to pick up on bits of the backstory among the documents, artifacts, clues and wrongnesses which catch the eye of the ever-prowling camera.

This isn’t the first horror film to make a connection between demonic possession and dementia – The Taking of Deborah Logan is a precursor – and it’s at once a striking metaphor and a borderline distasteful caricature of a more nuanced condition, but there’s no denying that Ford – who’s been in films since Meatballs III (1986) but mostly works as a voice-over actor – grabs every thespic opportunity, playing a character range from sweet nostalgic with an acid edge to full-on Mercedes McCambridge in extremis.  Like Julia, we have to catch up on the actual plot of the film – which plays nastier tricks as it goes along – without getting neckstrain from the camera moves.  Director Adam O’Brien has cinematographer Benoit Bealieu rush about the multi-level set so often that we get a real sense of where rooms are and how to get between them, pausing to admire the collection of owls on a ledge in the stairwell.  In most one-shot films, you worry about the actors going off book or dropping from exhaustion – here, you hope Beailieu didn’t sustain any injuries in the process of getting it all in the can.