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DIRECTED BY: Simon Rumley

FEATURING: Leo Bill, Roger Lloyd Pack, Kate Fahy

PLOT: The once-noble Brocklebank family struggles to cope with father Donald’s failing finances, mother Nancy’s terminal illness, and adult son James’ crippling paranoid schizophrenia. 

COMMENTS: Horror makes its bones on the power of surprise, but one particular strain of horror that often goes overlooked is the kind without surprise at all, where the outcome of an action can be seen from miles away and the emotional trigger is the dreadful sense of inevitability. You know you’re going to see something deeply unsettling, and that something unfolds steadily, irrevocably, and awfully. The Living and the Dead is all in on that kind of horror, the slow-motion trainwreck where you’re always aware that bad things are going to happen, and all that’s left is to hammer out the details.

The run-down country estate where we set our scene is the kind of place that must have been a Downton Abbey-style hub of activity a century ago but is now threadbare and barely functional owing to the occupants’ flailing attempts to manage the upkeep on their own. This would be enough plot to fill your standard British class drama, with matriarch Nancy’s chronic illness as a complicating factor. But The Living and the Dead has the additional wild card of James, an adult in appearance but possessing the mind and haphazard body control of a petulant 8-year old. He constantly demands a level of responsibility and respect that he can never merit, and it’s obvious that his beleaguered parents have yielded him some control—most notably, access to his own medication—out of sheer overwork and desperation. And this is where you immediately start to see the terrible pieces falling into place. Lloyd Pack’s David is a doting father tempered with British restraint and propriety, but as the sole member of the household with relatively good physical and mental health, he has more on his shoulders than he can reasonably bear. Meanwhile, Fahy’s sickly mom surely knows that she is not safe in James’ company but is literally powerless to overrule him. So we march toward the seemingly inevitable outcome, dreading the destination we know we must reach.

Bill commits in full, emphasizing James’ unmanageability and highlighting the nobility of Donald’s stalwart support. Without a trace of humor or sentimentality, the performance earns our pity while exposing the horror of the situation. Rumley accentuates the discomfort by using Requiem for a Dream-style techniques—bursts of fast-forward speed runs, shaky camera and double exposures, cacophonous soundtracking—to heighten the paranoia, confusion, and instability in James’ head. The director also slips in a crucial bit of misdirection late in the second act, stepping inside one of James’ delusions and blurring the line between reality and hallucination. James’ world is the peak of weirdness in The Living and the Dead, and it sets up the stark, unhappy drama of the film’s more grounded final scenes.

Rumley has said that he drew inspiration from his own mother’s terminal illness. If this is the dark metaphor for that experience, it was a gut-wrenching ordeal indeed. What proves weirdest about The Living and the Dead isn’t the characters or their circumstances, but the fact that we’re given a glimpse inside them, one which we already know we want to avoid. Rumley crafts a reminder that decline and death come for us all, as well as a warning that sometimes there’s an unpredictable pain that comes first.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A bizarre psychological study of degeneration and dependency, “The Living and the Dead” is a horror movie only in the most literal sense. Skirting genre conventions, Simon Rumley’s twisted feature inhabits shores where the gore is minimal and the demons unseen – neither of which makes it any less disconcerting… The travails of Britain’s inbred aristocracy have long been mined by its filmmakers, but rarely with such eccentricity or unrelieved ruthlessness.” – Jeannette Catsoulis, The New York Times (contemporaneous; subscription required)

(This movie was nominated for review by BlueYonder. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)