FrightFest review – Snapshot (2026)
Director Joseph Archer and writer/actor Cathy Wippell take on a lot on their first feature – a ‘found footage’ film set at the dawn of the moving image, which offers a circular aspect ratio to reproduce the pinhole look of some early cameras and grainy black and white to evoke not just Victorian photography but the degraded look of images in old magazines.
Tamworth (Tom Stourton), the necessarily seldom-seen mediating character, is an inventor who has come up with a device which records moving images on film and sound on cylinders – it’s a little like the not-actually-workable-when-the-book-was-written dictaphone which features in Dracula … tech that was conceivable and maybe even possible in 1888 but didn’t actually exist. Some of the more apparently far-fetched elements are credible – Edison’s first experiments with moving pictures c 1890 also featured synchronised sound. Whether the ‘box’ could be toted about like a modern mobile phone camera is another question, but there’s an advantage in getting round a frequent issue with found footage of people doing things on camera they’d prefer to keep off the record … the characters here don’t know what the box can do, and don’t even take it in after it’s been explained to them. Also, Tamworth seems not to develop his footage for exhibition so his subjects aren’t yet self-conscious. That circular frame and blur is handy also in period filmmaking – careful angles catch bits of masonry or fixtures appropriate for 1888 which excluding the modern world.
The thread of the film is, inevitably, the Whitechapel Murders, but though Ripperologists will recognise one or two characters – George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee – as real people and a few key events are established, this breaks with the things everyone knows about the case and even the things people who’ve followed the various theories and researches know about the case while casting an eye on the media of the time (sixty newspapers in London, all with their own angles) and the swirl of misinformation. Early on, Tamworth has a heated debate with a jolly journalist about the wounds inflicted on a victim – it takes a while to realise that both people in the argument have their own agendas and that the man who insists on the truth is also responsible for shaping this version of it. Tamworth is almost the only male character to have a throughline – he’s involved with a very complicated group of women of all classes who notionally come together in a Ladies’ Ghost Hunting Society, which pursues a theory that the murderer is not human. Minnie Penworth (Wippell) has broken with her well-off, controlling family and has a set of then-undiagnosable mental health issues – she’s become friends with a number of street women, including common prostitute Fanny (Hazel Rogers), madame-baby farmer Evelyn (Nadia Lamin), gang leader Molly (Lydia Helen) and wealthy widow and psychic researcher/crank Mrs Johnson (Constance Lovell).
How the investigation progresses and indeed what actually happens becomes vaguer as the footage fragments, with various edits and manipulations to suggest the story being shaped … though the frame is that what we have is raw, discovered after a century or more. It has some powerful moments, a few stretches which lose focus unhelpfully (if occasionally on purpose), a lot of history and analysis to get through, a few footnotes to the much-raked-over original case and a real sense of ambition.
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