Reviews

Night's End is a decent, small-scale horror with a story designed to work around lockdown limitations, characters only interacting through video links, and an emphasis on atmosphere and uncertainty rather than narrative coherence. Several story threads are brought in and not really followed through; the ending seems to have been brought in from another film entirely and just dropped in, sweeping away everything that happened before and making the rest of the film irrelevant.

Loner Ken Barber lives a shut-in life, not trying to get over his past life failures and keeping minimal contact with his ex-family and one friend through his computer. He starts to feel his new apartment is haunted and agrees to carry out a cleansing ritual live on the Dark Corners podcast, only to find he has been duped by a fiendish occultist who has used him to summon a demon and unleash the apocalypse.

Director Jennifer Reeder previously directed the covering narrative for VHS 94 and her directing career so far has mainly been in short films. Night's End shows the problems that can occur in moving into longer format work. It feels like 2 or even 3 short films shoved together. The beginning is a good examination of Ken's loneliness, with a weird off-kilter colour scheme emphasising the shut down, and possibly paranoid, nature of his life. The possibility of a haunted house story emerges, then seems to be forgotten about when the ending arrives, another short film all on its own.

It's still a perfectly watchable film, though. The performances are all good, Geno Walker is sympathetic and likeable as Ken, Lawrence Grimm is having a lot of fun as Satan's servant, Colin, and guest star Michael Shannon is in jocular mood, with a selection of Hawaiian shirts and matching persona.

Overall, Night's End descends from a nervy, claustrophobic beginning to a schlock ending. What could have been a haunting character study fails to come together because the director hasn't made the transition from short film to full feature film. The difference between the formats isn't just the runtime.

The Devil Below doesn't offer anything original but it's well made, the acting is mostly convincing, and the cinematography and production design combine to create believable locations.

The plot is familiar enough - a deserted mining town, underground creatures, hostile locals, and a doomed expedition. But the story is concisely told, the few explanations are delivered within the story so the film can move forward quickly and the ending delivers a sense of completion.

Alicia Sanz stars as Arianne, an adventurer/explorer hired to take a team of 4 men into a long-deserted mining town. She's introduced in a scene that establishes her a loner with daddy issues and a Lara Croft aesthetic. The scene also shows us the team she is bringing to Shookum Hills, a town empty since a mysterious disaster years before.

The team is led by Darren, played by Mexican-American Adan Canto. The most memorable thing about his performance is his struggle with a British accent, and, though there's nothing particularly wrong with his acting, his performance isn't strong enough for the role. Others in the team are stronger characters. Chineza Uche plays Shawn, a scientist who sees as much meaning in myth and folklore as in science, Jonathan Sadowski plays Terry, a bluff, no-nonsense type who exits the film too early.

Opposed to the explorers are the locals, led by Will Patton. Their hostility to outsiders is soon explained as their mission to suppress the creatures under the Hills is threatened by the team's explorations. Patton is very good as the grim, haunted leader committed to a fight he doesn't believe he can win. He's ably supported by Jesse LaTourette as his tough lieutenant who's grown up knowing nothing but the struggle against the devils below.

All creature features ultimately stand or fall on the quality of the creatures themselves. Here, they are guys in suits, which gives them more realism than CGI would; they are also hidden in darkness and distorted camera effects for most of the time. The main creature, which lives on human sacrifices, looks suitably disgusting.

The Devil Below is good enough to watch once, but it's a b-movie compared to others in the horror sub-genre of subterranean sub-species.

Bingo Hell is an entertaining horror film directed by Gigi Saul Guerrero, starring Adriana Barraza as a cigar-chewing boss lady, Lupita, who dominates a run-down small town, holding it together, in her eyes, and fending off the insidious forces of gentrification and hipsterism, by upholding vital social rituals, the most sacred of which is bingo night.

A sleazy outsider buys the bingo hall and sets up a new show full of glitz, glamour, and big money prizes. The catch is that no-one lives long enough to enjoy their winnings. Lupita and friends must band together to fight the temptations laid before them and hope that their community is stronger than the easy money and the quick way out it offers.

Bingo Hell is well directed with good acting throughout. The death scenes are particularly well constructed and grisly. The actors, led by Adriana Barraza all deliver engaging performances and experienced bad-guy Richard Brake enjoys his role as Mr Big, adding a Stephen King undertone to the story as the malevolent stranger preying on the weaknesses and dreams of the small-town losers in front of him, all clutching their little tickets to hell.

Gigi Saul Guerrero crafts a simple, effective tale grounded in economic and social reality and delivered through concise directing and strong character acting. The moral of the story emerges naturally through the plot, as a small, left-behind town makes a stand against the threats against them - the money, the fake promises and, most threatening of all, the hipsters.

This a horror film with an original and engaging concept. Elderly Satanists Henry and Audrey kidnap a pregnant woman in order to reincarnate the spirit of their dead grandson, Jackson, in her unborn baby. The omens look good for them, Jackson appears to the kidnapped woman, Becker, they have an ancient book containing the ritual, and they have the assistance of fellow coven member and true believer to the pint of madness, Ian. After completing the first stage of the ritual, however, it becomes clear that things are not going according to plan. It turns out that recalling a soul from the netherworld with Satan's aid is not so straightforward after all. Instead of singling out their grandson's spirit, they have opened the gates of hell for all manner of spectres and demons to flood into their quiet split-level suburban house and out into the world. They have also left themselves open to Ian's insane plan to use the ritual for his own purposes, although he is ultimately as much out of his depth as Henry and Audrey. While they all fall victim to their hubris, Becker, the only one to keep her wits about her, makes her escape, out into a world where demons are now presumably wandering freely. The film has been well put together. It has high production values and camera work that makes the most of the enclosed location and uses slow, methodical moves to maintain tension; the script is economical and crisp with some nice one-liners and no exposition dumps slowing everything down, allowing the story to dictate the pace. The acting from the three leads is excellent. Julian Richards as Henry and Sheila McCarthy as Audrey perform perfectly in portraying a couple who are doting grandparents and ruthless Satanists. Josh Cruddas is compelling as Ian, a vile psycho who somehow believes he will have a seat at Satan's right hand in the new Hellworld order. His fate is as horrible as it is deserved. Konstantina Mantelos plays Becker, and she is good, personable, and believable but who really has nothing to do except lie on the bed in handcuffs and wail then run away at the end. Her character could have been developed more but in the end her role is necessarily passive. Anything for Jackson is a change from their usual fare for director Justin G. Dyck and writer Keith Cooper, who have worked together on several projects in the past, of family friendly Christmas tv movies. This is their first horror film and they have created a well worked out and original movie with atmosphere and real scares. The only real issue is an unsatisfying ending and a plot that leaves Becker as little more than a damsel in distress. Overall, the film is well worth a watch and if it doesn't quite get everything right, who does?

Demon Eye is the second feature film from Ryan Simon and Jamie Cymbal, following 2016's Seizure. The film-making duo are from Huddersfield, West Yorkshire and the film was shot on location in nearby Eccles, Leeds, and Saddleworth Moor. The Moor contributes much to the feelings of strangeness and isolation that surround the main character, Sadie. She has returned to her childhood home, on the edge of the moors, following her father's suicide. In researching a local legend about a magic amulet that grants wishes, created by a woman later burned as a witch, Sadie's father, John, found the story was true. He recovered the amulet, the Demon Eye, and used it to wish his daughter home. The Demon Eye granted his wish then drove him mad and took his life. Sadie now has the amulet, or does it have her? She is haunted by the Burning Girl and her spectral accomplice, Padfoot, a demonic black dog. Simon and Cymbal have constructed an effective chiller, combining ghosts and gore well enough to keep fans of explicit and implicit horror satisfied. The story is well put together, with old surveillance tapes explaining just enough to make sense of the story and characters pushing Sadie to a conclusion she can't see until the very end. The acting is good throughout. Kate James carries the film as Sadie, moving forward from obnoxious brat to damaged woman who finds the love within her to make the necessary sacrifice to survive. Liam Fox is a slimy, malevolent presence, hollowed out by his obsession to reclaim the Demon Eye. Chris Blackwood is a standout as a gruff, grizzled editor of the local paper, and Ellie Goff excels as Sadie's nasty newspaper colleague Faye, her death scene is the best sequence in the film. A sense of humour, especially early on, gives Demon Eye some extra personality which makes it all the more appealing. Its inventive use of local folklore makes it more intelligent than most low budget horror fare.

Cry of the Banshee is a British horror film from 1970, starring Vincent Price and directed by Gordon Hessler. This was their third collaboration after Scream and Scream Again and The Oblong Box. The film tells the story of the Whitman family, headed by magistrate Lord Edward (Vincent Price) and their clash with a local coven of witches, led by Oona, an ancient wild-haired crone determined to destroy the Whitmans after they lead a violent assault on the coven. At first, Lord Edward is only concerned with witchcraft as a crime and threat to the social order. As his family comes under attack from the beast summoned by Oona, he begins to believe, but all too late. The film finishes with Lord Edward driven off to his doom, in the back carriage next to his dead children. His desperate cries amplify the hopeless nature of the trap he has fallen into. It's a powerful, chilling, bleak ending that rejects the conventions of good triumphing over evil that characterised the horror genre. Cry of the Banshee was filmed on location at Harrow Weald, on the north west edge of London, at a manor house also used for the Hammer classic The Devil Rides Out two years earlier. The two films couldn't be further apart. The comfortable moral universe of Hammer, with its certainty of good defeating evil, the clear villains, was abandoned by newer films like Witchfinder General, the Wicker Man, and Cry of the Banshee. This film is a grim, pessimistic stare at humanity's capacity for violence and abuse of power. The film also heralded a new era in its cinematography and lighting. Fixed camera and lighting positions kept to a minimum and handheld camerawork was emphasised throughout. This created a dynamic of real life that pulls the audience closer; the camera moves through a crowd or flows around a tavern, almost chasing the actors, to great effect, especially going from face to face in crowd scenes with excellent wide-angle close-ups. Lighting was in the hands of John Coquillon, who had worked with Hessler on Scream and Scream Again and would go on to be Director of Photography on Straw Dogs. He created some great on Cry of the Banshee, deep shadows and shade softly contrasting with subdued lighting along with high-contrast portrait lighting on faces. The acting is decent throughout, Vincent Price standing above the rest without trying too hard. He dominates scenes with his imperious voice and sheer screen presence, as his character goes from harsh patriarch to concerned father to doomed soul. The other standout performance is from veteran Welsh actor Hugh Griffith. His rough, colourful, naturalistic style relieves the standardised, stagebound acting of the rest of the cast. Cry of the Banshee is a fine example of the new direction British Horror was taking at the time. It was produced by American International Pictures, one of a number of companies challenging Hammer Films in the early 1970s with a dirtier, grittier tone more in tune with the cynical 70s that left Hammer struggling to catch up. The emphasis was now in sadism, nudity, and violence in a world where humans, not Dracula or Frankenstein, were the biggest monsters.

Amulet is the feature film debut of director Romola Garai, who has an acting career going back to the early 2000s. The story centres on the relationship between Tomas, who has left behind his war-torn home country to eke out a living in London, and Magda, a mysterious young woman who lives with her sick, mad mother in a crumbling old house. The mother is locked away upstairs and Tomas is brought in by a kindly nun to help maintain the house and provide some companionship for Magda. Tomas is traumatised by a crime he committed in the war. Unable to forgive himself, he stays out on the edge of society; he studies philosophy to keep himself sane. Magda seems to be equally trapped, living with a violent, deranged parent in an endless stalemate of co-dependency. Tomas sinks deeper and deeper into the household until he is trapped by more than his own guilt. Something has been tracking him ever since he dug up a small statuette in a forest back home and is now ready to claim him. His existential crisis ends with him becoming Magda's slave as she reveals herself to be the embodiment of the statuette, the Amulet that finds the evil in a man's heart and uses it to fuel its own existence. Amulet is a film that forces its audience to work a bit too hard to understand it. Almost everything in the story provokes questions and any number of answers. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does feel like a film that keeps its audience at arm's length and is ambiguous to the point of frustration. The direction is consistent and steady, the film is well-constructed, and the cinematography partners the direction well in creating the tone and disquieting atmosphere throughout. The main cast are all good enough to carry the film through its slow pace, Alec Secareanu is especially good as Tomas, a doomed man who finds an even deeper doom waiting for him in Wandsworth, home of demons and fake nuns.

Host is directed by Rob savage and developed for streaming service Shudder from a short film project by the director. It is a horror film based in the idea of holding a séance over zoom, the video conferencing cloud platform. Host starts with this inspired concept and leads us into a horror scenario that lasts as long as a zoom session and delivers the ultimate malware - demonic possession. The film mixes original scares with more familiar ones. Camera filters materialise in the real world, a background video clip becomes increasingly unsettling. As the film progresses the scares become more recognisable and its debt to the found footage genre and particularly the first Paranormal Activity film becomes more apparent. Dark corridors, a creepy attic, always a house's graveyard, flour thrown on the floor to reveal footprints, cupboard doors swinging and banging, and characters pulled along the floor with the door slamming shut after them. These scenes work better in Host than in most films as it delivers them so many of them, and so quickly, you really feel the assault on the characters. The cast is especially important in making Host work so well. With no backstories or deep characterisation, the film relies on their chemistry to establish believability, which they do very successfully. The improvisation, their reactions and interactions grounds the film and gives the fear and horror a foundation to grip onto. The zoom multiscreen having all the cast in constant closeup gives an almost Blair Witch level of close tension. Host is one of the better horror films of the year. It's as contemporary as can be and harks back to some of the best recent horror films. The genre often stays away from new technology but there's really no reason to. A haunted screen can be as scary as a haunted house. It can be a portal, a gateway to demons in the cloud.

This latest instalment in the Grudge series spins directly off the 2004 Grudge film starring Sarah Michelle Gellar. It has the same narrative structure of previous Grudge films, of multiple storylines set in the past and present and successfully maintains the grim fatalism that characterises the series. Fans will recognise the tone and original Grudge features - Kayako, a brooding house, death and decay - but this film does make a change to Grudge lore which, while necessary to the plot, changes the nature of the Grudge itself. It begins in Tokyo, at the house soon to be visited by Karen Davis in the 2004 film. Care worker Fiona Landers is already in fear of the house and anxious to return to America. She is already doomed, of course, and, with the Grudge curse imprinted on her she goes home to Cross River, Pennsylvania where the curse begins again and where the rest of the film takes place. The story starts again two years after Fiona's return. Recently bereaved Detective Muldoon (Andrea Riseborough) investigates the discovery of a decayed corpse. This leads her to the old Landers House, now inhabited by an elderly couple, the Mathesons, played by Frankie Faison and Lin Shaye. The curse is already at work and the more Muldoon uncovers about the deaths and madness that have surrounded the house since Fiona's return from Japan, the more she is pulled to her doom. The film is written and directed by Nicolas Pesce. His script is clear-sighted and well-constructed in managing the different storylines, keeping them close enough to form a coherent whole but allowing each one enough time onscreen to be an episode in itself. His direction is unobtrusive and economical, focused on revealing the story, mixing jump scares with creepiness, and giving the actors their stage. A strong cast is on show here, a group of versatile character actors who lift the film above most horror film franchise sequels. All the performances are good, especially Demian Bichir as Muldoon's partner, dispirited and haunted by his previous experiences investigating the Landers case, but still the only character in the entire franchise with the common sense not to go inside the haunted house; Frankie Faison and Lin Shaye are very good, both automatically elevate any film they are in and Shaye has one very nice callback to the first Japanese Grudge film, playing a game with a child spirit only she can see. Faison plays a gentle man coping with his wife's dementia, trying to organise the assisted suicide she requested by bringing in Lorna Moody, played by Jackie Weaver, another good performance in making Lorna the creepiest human in the film. She calmly tells Faison she has been a "compassionate presence" at 44 deaths, raising the question who has killed more people, her or Kayako? Transplanting the Grudge to America may allow the franchise to continue but it has lost the quality of a supernatural black hole it had when it was centred on a dark house on a lonely street in Tokyo. Attaching it to a person and having it move to another country turns it into a virus. This could be a clever way to open the series up, with Grudge houses all over the world yet it dilutes the original concept. It was the gathering of violence and rage in a single place that created the Grudge and it really doesn't travel.

This is a splatterpunk tale, updated for the streaming era. It stars Daniel Radcliffe and Samara Weaving as combatants in the latest online tv sensation - Skism. Guns Akimbo has just enough story, characterisation, especially for Daniel Radcliffe, and depth to lift it above its action scenes of gun fights, car chases, and combat delivered in a mix of high intensity and slow motion with whirling cinematography, to deliver a film that has something to say about cultural production today. Radcliffe plays Miles, a small-time programmer who falls foul of the makers of Skism, an underground show streamed live where contestants fight to the death and the winner gets to live and play again, and again, and again. Looking for a new angle to freshen up the format, the producers decide to throw mild-mannered geek Miles into the game, nailing two giant guns to his hands and pitting him against one of their most feared killers, Nix, Samara Weaving. We follow this odd couple through the film as Miles struggles to stay alive long enough to figure out how to use his phone without hands and Nix chases him with a variety of high-powered weapons, believing one more kill will finally free her from the game. Weaving and Radcliffe are both strong leads and much of Guns Akimbo's attraction comes from watching them duelling their way across the city. Samara Weaving is in full suicide blonde mode, playing a game she can never win, until she decides to blow the game up from the inside. She has just a sliver of a backstory but that's all she needs. Her character is all about chaotic energy, and weapons, lots of weapons. Radcliffe is excellent as millennial everyman Miles, a sad man who sits at home, under his Rambo and Schwarzenegger posters hurling insults at the world from his keyboard. The film has a stop-start pace, allowing secondary characters space to come through and this gives the film a solid extra layer. The most notable are Rhys Darby, playing a homeless tramp with wit and charm, and Ned Dennehy, playing Skism supremo Riktor as a psychopathic entrepreneur. It is Riktor who reveals the film's attitude to Skism and the wider culture. He is turning Skism into a global franchise, a brand name as recognisable as Starbucks or McDonalds, aiming for an audience who find watching people fight to the death as light and disposable an experience as buying a coffee or a burger. The postmodern claim that all cultural production is ultimately capitalist in origin and that modern consumption itself is a desire produced by capitalism makes it perfectly natural that Riktor should want Skism to become the "Starbucks of murder". Violence and murder as mass entertainment, consumption and desire all existed long before capitalism but in an era of mass markets, mass technology, and mass boredom capital has fused them all together to produce a new consumer: us.

This is an enigmatic film that reveals itself slowly. It makes no allowance for audience impatience, telling its story sparingly. The film's impact is delivered through its atmosphere and themes - claustrophobia, religiosity, the dead hands of the past clutching at all its characters until the weight of the past becomes so heavy the film slows down to an insane and lifeless end. The story is simple enough, superficially, but gets a lot deeper and darker as past events are revealed. Richard and Laura are getting divorced and Richard intends to marry his new partner, Grace. On hearing this, Laura kills herself. Six months later, Richard suggests to his two children, Aidan, a teenager, and Mia, slightly younger, that they spend Christmas together with Grace at the family lodge, up in the mountains. Grace is the sole survivor of a mass suicide carried out by a cult led by her father. Richard met her while researching a book on cults. He left his wife for Grace and now wants them all to bond. The children are not impressed and begin working on a scheme they hope will get rid of Grace. They research Grace's past online and discover the story of the mass suicide. A whole back story comes into view here that culminated in Laura shooting herself, and we realise that this story is really the sequel to an earlier story. This is intelligent script work, getting our imagination working as a complicated past is revealed through events rather than an exposition dump. Alicia Silverstone is outstanding in the opening, making a real impact as a woman in despair, victim of an earlier story that ends just as the film begins. This is all in the first 20 minutes, before Grace even appears on screen. She is a difficult character. Emotionally distant, we are kept away from her at first, she appears in the background until introduced to the children, and us. She relies on pills, the trauma of her past still inhabits her and will finally take over under the pressure of the children's cruel scheme. Riley Keough plays Grace perfectly, especially when the breakdown occurs, her dead-eyed fatalism is genuinely disturbing as she suffers the realisation that she has been dead inside for many, many years. Aidan and Mia suffer a realisation too, that children shouldn't play with dead things. Lia McHugh and Jaeden Martell act convincingly throughout, as the children go from sullen to scheming to terrified, trapped in an isolated lodge with an insane adult. The Lodge is well directed and scripted. Dialogue is sparse, none of the characters have much to say to each other so tension is generated through contrasts - the garishly bright church windows at Laura's funeral, the journey from the airy, bright modernist box Richard and Grace live in to the dark, wooden lodge the represents Richard and Laura's life together - and symbolism - the early connection of religious symbolism and a gun, the overbearing icons at the lodge, the frozen wasteland surrounding the lodge representing Grace's internal state. She can no more walk away from her surroundings than she can walk away from the emptiness inside herself. In the end she has to turn around and go back, to the lodge and to her past. This a tense, subtle film with a story that stretches back beyond its beginning. Grace's mental decay is well portrayed by Riley Keough. The direction and screenplay are economical and focused on maintaining an atmosphere of low-key dread right up to the final disturbing scene.

Being rich seems easy. All you have to do is sell your soul to Satan, make the occasional human sacrifice, and money and privilege are your forever. Unless the latest victim turns out to be the final girl from hell, in which case the whole house of cards falls apart and burns to the ground. Ready or Not is one of the last releases from Fox Searchlight Pictures, keeping its remit of high quality, low budget film production going right to the end. The film creates a fresh story from familiar ingredients as grace, played by the charismatic Samara Weaving, marries Alex and meets his rich family. She soon learns that tradition comes first with old-money types, as she spends her wedding night being hunted around the family mansion by her new in-laws with a variety of antique weapons. Not that they intend to kill her this early - that comes later when, after maiming and capturing her, they sacrifice her to Satan. The family fortune comes from selling games of chance and the opening image shows Satan's grinning face surrounded by dice, playing cards, and a roulette wheel in a nice graphical foreshadowing of the story, where it is revealed that the le Domus family really do have a deal with the Devil. Each new family member has to pick a card at midnight, pick the wrong one and they must be hunted and sacrificed before dawn, with dreadful consequences for the family if they fail. The ensemble cast is a major reason Ready or Not is so watchable. Samara Weaving takes us with her all the way from living the dream to surviving the nightmare; Alex is ambiguous right to the end, veering one way then the other in his wife vs family dilemma, we can see both sides of his guilt in a well-balanced performance from Mark O'Brien. His brother Daniel is full of drunken loathing for himself and the family, will he sober up in time to do the right thing? His wife Charity is the anti-Grace, fiercely committed to the family that has rescued her from some unspecified hellish past. Alex's sister Emilie is a ditzy cokehead who shouldn't be let near a tin opener, let alone a gun, her husband is a lazy chancer who married a rich girl so he would never have to get a job. Old aunt Helene, deliciously played by Nicky Guadagni, is demonic and bitter to the core, but also the funniest character in the film. Henry Czerny is the oddly sympathetic patriarch, his long-suffering demeanour a symptom of his ultimate responsibility for, literally, keeping the family alive. Andi McDowell is still a class act, although she doesn't have much to do. John Ralston completes the main cast, playing the family butler as part accomplice, part concentration camp guard. All the characters are given room to exist, with just enough dialogue and sharp observation to bring them to life. Much credit goes to the directors and scriptwriters. They have all created a film that encompasses comedy, horror, and thriller while keeping a consistent tone and packing in a lot of action. Let's hope the demise of Fox Searchlight doesn't make it more difficult to produce smaller budget, well-crafted films like this.

SEA FEVER

One of the most straightforward ways to evaluate a film is to compare it to the director's intentions. Neasa Hardiman, Sea Fever's director, has spoken of her wish to make a scifi/horror thriller that presents science and the scientific method in a positive light, pushing back against the hostility and anti-intellectualism she sees in these genres' attitudes to science. She is certainly correct in seeing a difficult relationship between science and popular culture as far back as Frankenstein, so does Sea Fever live up to her ideal of science as our saviour, or did creating this film show her that things are a little more complicated? Sea Fever is a very well-made film. The acting is excellent throughout, always a crucial component in a lower budget film; the cinematography is first-rate, underwater scenes are beautifully shot, both in dream sequences and in menacing tentacles rising from the deep; onboard the boat photography and direction combine seamlessly to create the world of the boat, a single-vessel small business, full of grimy mechanics and dirty engineering, cramped, operating at subsistence level and relying on camaraderie but still with room for intimacy; a business forced to ignore coastguard warnings to get their catch, and forced to rent out space to science students like Siobhan, our hero. Siobhan is presented as a stereotypical scientist: cold, socially indifferent, only happy in the lab. She could easily be just a cipher for the audience's imagined prejudices but she is brought to life by Hermione Corfield, in her first leading role, who plays Siobhan as awkward and well aware of how far she is from her comfort zone but also strong and self-assured in her science. The crew's prejudices are established as soon as they see Siobhan's hair. Redheads are not just unpopular in Hollywood. The superstition that redheads are unlucky on a boat is ancient and represents beliefs that will not be pushed aside by science. The gap between the culture of fisherfolk and science is presented in different ways throughout the film without ever building to a conflict or becoming part of the narrative drive. Simply mentioning a superstition or a piece of folklore doesn't contribute anything unless it deepens an understanding of character or opens up the plot. Similarly, just having a big beastie at the bottom of the ocean doesn't necessarily make this a horror film. While there are some good gore moments well delivered, they aren't followed through in the plot strongly enough to push the film into a third act of survival horror, which it did seem to be building towards. The narrative structure prevents any real buildup of tension. One of the issues is that the threat from the ocean is too insubstantial, too abstract, to become a character in itself. In the absence of a predator hunting the crew one by one, all we have are some blue blobs on the floor. For a threat to be real, it has to have a characterisation all its own. Added to this is the fact that only two of the crew are killed by the waterborne parasites; others die by suicide, or worse, by accident, one just gets in the lifeboat and rows off! In the end, the scientific method doesn't save anyone, with Siobhan becoming the last victim. Science and superstition are both helpless against the deeper mysteries of the earth, a Lovecraftian subtext introduced at the end to offer a way out of the science vs belief dualism. The film ends with Siobhan diving deep to confront a final mystery - an act of science or an act of faith? Or, at such an extreme, is there any difference?