By The Throat - FrightFest Glasgow World Premiere Review
Director: David Luke Rees
Starring: Patricia Allison, Jaeny Spark, Rupert Young, Matthew Cottle
Written by: Madelaine Isaac, David Luke Rees
Produced by: Simon Crowe, Richard Fletcher, Madelaine Isaac, David Luke Rees
Cinematography by: Aaron Adrian Rogers
Original Score by: Kev Bolus
Synopsis:
After agreeing to act as a carer for a young couple who have recently suffered the tragic loss of their only child, Lizzy begins to suffer from nightmares and hallucinations.
Thoughts:
I went into 'By The Throat' knowing only one thing: this is a film about grief. The film’s director, David Luke Rees, stated that the film was ‘born out of a desire to examine grief through the lens of horror—not in grand, sweeping gestures, but in the intimate, quiet spaces where it festers. This is not a film about ghosts in the traditional sense. Instead, it is about the way loss lingers, how it embeds itself in the walls, the air, the fabric of our existence. It is about the spaces in between, the silence that suffocates, and the ways in which people— and how left in the wrong hands, this can be exploited. I wanted to strip away the artifice of conventional horror and find something raw, something that breathes in the quiet dread of real experience’.
'By The Throat' is an interesting exploration of grief. Our protagonist Lizzy (Patricia Allison) takes a job house-sitting for a couple who recently lost their child in a tragic car accident. The husband Alex (Rupert Young) tries to act normal to the point of straight-up denial, whereas the wife Amy (Jeany Spark) has confined herself to her room, her portrayal muted and heavy for the first half of the film. Spark’s performance is fantastic, you can literally feel the weight of her grief through her physicality and vacant expressions. Her performance in the second half becomes more erratic and frightening, characterised by bright eyes and wide, unsettling smiles. Their house is echoey (I’m not sure if this was intentional as there are scenes where it is so echoey the dialogue is hard to understand) and though it is filmed in warm sunlight, it feels artificial and empty.
The house’s true atmosphere comes to life during the night, with cold, blue shots filling you with a sense of dread. Lizzy is battling her own complicated grief. She is plagued by constant PTSD-like nightmares of a traumatic event and is (supposed) to be taking medication so she can function fairly normally. We have three very different portrayals of grief in these characters and each actor does a wonderful job.
A combination of isolating mid-shots to highlight the emptiness of the house and the physical/emotional distance of the characters and uncomfortable close-ups give the film an unsettling atmosphere, as you’re never certain what is going on. Like Lizzy, we don’t know what is real and who to trust. The shaky camera did become tiresome, personally, but it works because it feels as if we’re there with the characters rather than watching from far away. It makes us feel like voyeurs, oddly complicit in what unfolds.
Plot wise, it was interesting enough. I’d describe it as a pagan 'Rosemary’s Baby'. Amy cannot get pregnant due to the injuries she sustained in the car crash so she decides to sacrifice Lizzy to bring her daughter back. Using the services of an (unexplained) pagan-esque cult headed by the local doctor (Matthew Cottle), Amy and Alex trap Lizzy in a coffin with the decaying body of their child as part of a ritual (which is never explained). It’s a story we’ve seen many times before. I did not, however, expect the fate of Amy and Alex, so that was a satisfying conclusion to their story and I did appreciate Lizzy and her mother, who appears at the house because she is worried about Lizzy (this concern is well-established throughout the film so it feels earned), fighting off the ‘cult’ members one by one, but the ending was so abrupt that I was taken aback by a ‘oh, that’s it?’ thought. The ending would have benefited from an additional scene or two.
Rees states that ‘true horror is not in the supernatural, but in what people are willing to do to each other’. He achieves this fairly well but the film falls flat due to a familiar and therefore fairly predictable plot and a short runtime, leaving little room for in-depth exploration. It was a fun experience, but nothing I haven’t seen before.
Verdict: ⭐️⭐️½
-Victoria Brown
'By The Throat' received its World Premiere at FrightFest Glasgow on March 7th
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