FrightFest review – The Latcher

FrightFest review – The Latcher

Midwife Alice (Lucy Lovegrove) – whose life, relationship and career have been body-slammed by her own miscarriage – moves into a spooky house in the middle of nowhere, knowing full well the local legend of the Latcher, a 19^th century witch who was hanged by a mob and is rumoured to steal babies and cause miscarriages.  Her friend Jess (Monique Fisher) is happily pregnant and her former partner Jason (Darcy Kent) feels shut out of her life by her grief.  Writer-director James Hunter’s Australian ghost story falls into the category of horror-by-default.  It’s mostly an interior, gloomy, angsty meditation on the trauma caused by the loss of a baby, with two or three spooky bits in the first hour and a perfunctory battle with a spook in the finale.  The mythology of the Latcher is bolted on to a story which is as hard to get on with as its heroine – Alice is a believable character and we feel her frustration with the people around her who just don’t understand, but it’s also pretty clear that she’s not easy to be around.  In many ways, she seems more a threat to her friend’s pregnancy than the literal baby-snatching demon – but the film holds back from melodrama, as if afraid to be scary.  It’s a moody, intense piece but could have done with more or less ghostliness.