Raindance Film Festival review – Modem
As an onscreen flash points out ‘modem’ is almost an anagram of ‘demon’, and this Anglo-Swedish horror film – written and directed by Tim James Brown – leans into paranoia about the digital age, the dark web, social media and phone addiction, though it turns out to be a much older brand of spook story featuring plague pits, a ‘penguin mother’, the slightly too-familiar image of a beaky plague doctor (which was already becoming a horror film trope before Covid), and a child who goes missing in deep dark folk horror woods. Plus you get a family who rent a summer home to get over recent troubled times only to find that things get worse.
Nora (Nika Tallroth), a sulky teenager, is incensed that her stepfather Michael Norris (Josh Burdett) has dragged her, her mother Johanna (Amanda Renberg) and asthmatic toddler brother Stig to a house in the middle of nowhere. The last straw is that there’s no WiFi – but under the floorboards is an antique modem, which starts causing trouble as soon as it’s plugged in. For a while, this plays with cyber-horror – self-writing social media posts alienate Nora’s friends, the baby monitor glitches sinisterly – but then Stig disappears, and we’re into a possibly supernatural child abduction tale (a rational explanation involving a broody backpacker doesn’t get much play). The cop on the case is suspiciously familiar with the house, but the film slightly dawdles while the audience make connections the haunted dimwits onscreen miss … though the performances are good and there’s a nice sense of the uncomfortable in the misaligned priorities of each family member which exacerbate any small issue into a crisis and are completely disastrous when something serious happens.
Its mythology is intricate if arbitrary – a military comms tower in the forest is important but it’s hard to see why a mediaeval ghost relies on it or has become so proficient at shit-posting. It’s comforting to see a few conventions which had seemed retired in the modern era – like the friendly librarian who gives the backstory of the haunting (rather than the internet) – rather than the expected desktop found footage type tropes.
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