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DIRECTED BY: Lindsay C. Vickers

FEATURING: Edward Woodward, Jane Merrow, Samantha Weysom, John Judd

PLOT: Ian informs his daughter Joanne that he will be forced to miss her upcoming violin concert; Joanne takes the news poorly, and terrible dreams and mysterious occurrences ensue.

COMMENTS: The Appointment is one of those movies that I’d seen before seeing it, thanks to the pervasiveness of memes. The film’s climactic car crash has been excised and circulated on the web as a bizarre mishmash of extreme closeups of screeching tires, unconvincing steering wheel acting, and a downright gymnastic final moment on the road before the car plunges over the side of a cliff. It’s absurd in isolation, but a notable demonstration of the crucial role of context. Restored to its surroundings, what seemed funny is revealed to be tragic, what was ridiculous is horrifically unavoidable.

The Appointment stands out for being so irrepressibly British. Not merely in its origins, with writer/director Vickers taking his first and only spin in the lead director’s chair after a career as an assistant with Hammer Films, a pastoral country home tailor made for a Britbox mystery series, and a budget bankrolled by the pension fund of the British Coal Board. Not even due to the casting of the quintessentially English, pre-Equalizer post-Wicker Man Woodward, or Weysom’s droopy voice that sounds like a Mike Myers character. No, the thing that makes The Appointment a cinematic version of a “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster is the ongoing and concerted effort to depress the stakes and make this horrific situation as mannered and emotionless as possible.

In many respects, Brian De Palma’s Carrie could be seen as a similar film, with telekinetic powers in the hands of a teenage protagonist confused by oncoming womanhood. But in the hands of De Palma (and original author Stephen King), the scenario is laden with intense drama; the potent subjects of acceptance and rejection fuel cataclysmic events. What The Appointment brings to the party is that classically British sentiment that says, “What if all that, but with everyone making a heroic effort to avoid talking about anything unpleasant?” Joanne’s possible supernatural abilities take a backseat to what the film considers a more compelling subject: a decent middle-aged man beleaguered by the conflicting demands of work and family. Consider that the most intense moment in the film involves a father walking past his daughter’s room, stopping outside the door, and standing motionless for many long seconds while both father and daughter wait for something to happen. Nothing does, and yet with the weight of repressed feelings and damaged psyches, the moment hits as hard as a bucket of pig’s blood.

That doorway scene serves as a litmus test for the viewer; you get to decide just what’s been going on between them, and how distasteful it is. But there are other signs that the rot runs deep in this family. Merrow petulantly complains that her husband ignores her in favor of their daughter, a sentiment he ratifies by absentmindedly complaining that she’s hogging the sheets. There’s the event that calls Woodward away in the first place, an unexplained inquest in which he must testify in place of his (mysteriously) absent business partner about the events that led to an employee (mysteriously) dying.  And that’s the say nothing of the prologue, an effectively shocking scene—that almost seems to have been flown in from another movie—in which a music student two years prior is violently attacked by an invisible force. Death is in the air. Perhaps young Joanne doesn’t come by her covetous rage honestly.

The Appointment goes exactly where it intends to, never straying from its course. This deprives the film of suspense, but it also gives it an unsettling feeling of inevitability. Ian repeatedly tells his daughter that he has no ability to change his plans, and this happens to be true; his fate is set. His dreams and those of his wife predict the circumstances of his demise. Both his own car and its replacement acquire similar damage, as if to ensure that there is no avenue for escape. Time itself is against him; moments that should pass in a heartbeat stretch out before us. Woodward is constantly out of sync with the clocks in his house, and his watch stops working during his drive (before he loses it entirely). That car crash which seemed sloppily edited turns out to be deliberately extended beyond linear time, showing every element of the incident from multiple angles and perspectives and lingering in the moment past what one would reasonably expect. The Appointment is about 10 minutes of story and 80 minutes of mood, but that’s less a shortcoming and more a choice.

The title ends up being the key to the whole film. Woodward has an appointment with death, a fact the film elides to preserve some degree of suspense (and to sidestep litigation from the estate of Agatha Christie). In some respects, that feels like a cheat, like a shaggy dog story that takes an awfully long time to reach its punchline, and with suggestions of more substantial plotlines that never quite materialize. But The Appointment has an almost noble focus on its primary aim, to capture the exquisite discomfort of watching every detail of the last 24 hours of a man’s life as he goes about it in blissful ignorance. Show me the meme that can do that.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an odd, not entirely coherent work, but obvious faults aside, it’s also something rather special, with a couple of stand-out, set-piece sequences which mark it out as a ‘must see’ for genre fans… The suburban doom theme finally manifests itself in an extraordinary, absurd yet chilling climax…” – Eddie Harrison, Film-Authority

(This movie was nominated for review by Morgan, who remarked “it begins with an eerie opening and leads into a chilling accident sequence, one that had me muttering “W…T…F……. Truly a visual wonder.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)     

The Appointment (Flipside No 44) (Blu-ray)

• The disk has English audio and subtitles.

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