FrightFest review – The Brook
The first fiction feature from director Paul Stainthorpe, who also co-wrote with Chris Watt, this is a pleasingly intricate exercise in small town horror with an odd, fantastical twist … it is roughly comparable with Dead Man’s Shoes and Hot Fuzz, but takes its own paths and establishes its own identity. It’s also nice to see a film tapping into the British phenomenon of the rural big cat local legend – in this case, a puma which has supposedly been picking off the most useless folk in the small town of Elmbrook for fifty years.
Teen Jacob (Connor Lawson) isn’t happy that his widowed mother (Jill Dellow) has moved back to her late father’s house in the backward backwoods of Elmbrook, but soon falls in with a relatively decent friend group who give him tips on how to negotiate the more dangerous residents. Since there’s not much to do in town – except attend a local college where Miss Darling (Rhiannon Jones) teaches art or go to a music venue where the bad boy dealer (Dan Salmon) threatens folk in the bogs with a stanley knife – so there’s a fairly sizeable drugs business, which attracts the attention of knowing local copper Grace (Kylie Ann Ford) and perhaps the vigilante puma. In the attic, Jacob finds his grandfather’s video camera, a Twilight Zone item which acts as a viewing portal to one hour in the past – and has apparently done a lot of harm in a previous generation, exacerbating a thorny relationship between Jacob’s mum and a sham-friendly neighbour (Meryl Griffiths).
The Brook has a nice low-key realism in its kids-hanging-about scenes, with the magic video camera working like something out of an ‘80s fantasy film – but also includes a masked serial killer who poses as an infirm old man to lure victims within slicing distance. Several connected mysteries play out over decades – with the time-viewer complicating as often as explaining things – and are knotted together by a densely-populated plot. Stainthorpe stresses the small town feel of everyone knowing everyone’s business – a mantra is ‘this town has eyes’ – but there are as many misunderstandings, miscommunications and mistakes as real revelations and connections. All this ups the body count too. Given the miserable git tendency of much contemporary indie Brit horror, it’s refreshing to come across a film which actually likes its kid characters, even the flawed ones, and doesn’t have the friend group spend all their time being pointlessly nasty to each other. Jacob’s mates – Helen Chong, Ainsley Fannen, Jamie-Leigh Price – are vivid, believable characters who are fun to spend time with and have nicely intricate history … and we’re genuinely concerned that they might fall prey to the puma or the slasher.
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