TREK REVIEW - Lower Decks 5-1 - 5-2

Catching up on the old Trek reviews with a quick rundown of the fifth and final season of Star Trek: Lower Decks. I'm going to miss this show, which, while very much for die-hard fans, has been a real pleasure throughout and maybe the best of the relaunch-era series. The other contender for that is Prodigy, which I will also catch up with reviewing as soon as I can feasibly fit it in.

5-1 - "Dos Cerritos"

The season kicks off with an entertaining story that balances two entirely separate plotlines, one of which is fairly personal and small scale and the other which will have repurcussions for the whole season and the entire universe.

It's clear from the outset that this is going to be the Multiverse season, and while Trek has played with parallel universes plenty, this is its first time really delving into the concept. Everything is doing multiverse adventures now, so it's not surprising that Trek is having a go as well, and that Lower Decks is the series to do it. "Dos Cerritos" has great fun with this, sending the Cerritos through an interdimensional rift to meet its alternative self, commanded by Captain Becky Freeman. Tawny Newsome is clearly having a blast playing her character's aggressive, authoritarian other self, and it shows how much Mariner has grown as a character; in spite of being more like her earlier, more rebellious self, she's far more mature than Captain Freeman. The more assured alt-Boimler is pretty fun, but the most interesting is the heavily-augmented alt-Rutherford, who has forsaken his humanity so that he doesn't have to feel the loss of Tendi. The funniest pairing, though, is the two indistinguishable T'lyn's, who hate each other nonetheless. 

The other plotline follows Tendi as she takes on her role as the Mistress of the Winter Constellations. This strand has plenty of action but also works well as an exploration into Tendi's character. I like her pirate crew and love how we're seeing more and more of Orions who want to do something more fulfilling than violent piracy. Including the Blue Orions from The Animated Series - stupid costumes and mispronunciation of "Oreeon" and all - is another fun instance of Lower Decks taking the odder elements of TAS and celebrating them.

Callbacks: 

• The title sequence has been updated again. The title itself has been given TNG-style whooshy effects, while the big space battle is now ludicrously busy with the hand of Apollo, the Tholian Web and ruddy V'Ger all joining in.
• We get another visit to a Collector ship, this time owned by an alien with a weird metal thing running through his face ("It's prescription!") He's the same species as Palor Toff from TNG "The Most Toys," one of the strangest looking chaps to appear on the series.
• Mariner and T'Lyn play Kal-toh, a favourite of Naomi Wildman on Voyager. Boimler isn't happy Naomi made the "30 Under 30" list, and that she's "Like ten years old." If this is accurate, this places this season in 2382, meaning the entire five seasons take place over about two years.
• Becky Freeman does the same sarcastic Vulcan salute to Mariner as Mariner did to her mum back in season one.

Fun for me: One of Tendi's pirate crew is called Astrid. That's a great name (if you don't know, it's my daugter's name).

Sexy Trek: Not gonna lie, angry alt-Mariner with a riding crop is hot.

5-2 - "Shades of Green"

These first two episodes were released together originally, and appropriately this is basically the second half of a two-part story, at least for Tendi's ongoing storyline. Her adventures on and around Orion are easily the better part of the episode. A space race is a cliche, but a fun one, and it's hard to beat hitching a ride on a comet to get to the finish line. 

The other plot, on new Federation member Targalus 9, is good fun, but not as successful. It's interesting to see how a civilisation might dismantle its plurocratic society so that it can mesh with the Federation, and although everything seems ludicrously oversimplified here, it's fun to see the uber-rich of the planet desperately trying to stay relevant. Boimlers "bointers" are pretty funny and aren't overused, and we get the beginnings of his beard - well, fuzz - as he tries to emulate his alternative reality counterpart.

The C-plot, seeing T'ly trying to get closer to Rutherford and doing the logical yet entirely wrong thing is sweet. While it's wonderful to see Tendi back on the Cerritos where she belongs, it's a shame we don't get more development of this friendship. Still, the various plotlines dovetail nicely at the end, making for a satisfying episode.

Callbacks: 

• The Orions use archaic solar sailing ships for their races, much like the Bajorans once used, as seen on DS9 "Explorers."
• The socks Tendi offers D'Erika look like the space dog from TOS "The Enemy Within," an iconic little alien.

Alien life forms: 

• The Orion Queen has a dragon-like bet called a blazzard, which looks and sounds quite like the stock monsters that turned up on The Animated Series.
• The Targalans have really long ears and tie them up on top their heads. Given that they have orange skin and were super-capitalist, maybe they're related to the Ferengi.

Hmmmm: Surely a planet doesn't have to ditch money overnight to become a Federation member? We've already seen that the Ferengi are maintaining their way of life in spite of petitioning for membership, and we've heard of the Bank of Bolias a few times on DS9.

WHO REVIEW: The War Games in Colour

 

As part of the 60^th anniversary celebrations, the Beeb released The Daleks in Colour, an edited down, colourised omnibus of the second Doctor Who serial (and the earliest one they can currently show, due to an absurd copyright dispute). It wasn't terribly good. So I greeted the news of The War Games in Colour with cautious interest. The War Games is one of the best 60s serials, and while it's overlong, it's entertaining across all ten episodes, which is no mean feat.

Cutting a story down from four hours to ninety minutes means a lot has to go in the bin, even more so when new footage has been generated to swish things up. Still, The War Games is a story with plenty that can be chopped; while the padding is all enjoyable, it's still padding, put in to stretch out a story that had to fill the gap of two late in the day. It's an important story, though: Patrick Troughton's final story; the last of the monochrome era; the introduction of the Time Lords and the Doctor's exile to Earth.

The War Games in Colour, fortunately, works. It's a vast improvement on The Daleks in spite of taking more liberties with the original material. Visually, it's a massive step-up from The Daleks; part of this is down to better quality of the original footage, but a lot of it is down to more consistent and logical colouring work. A large chunk of the story being set in familiar historical locations means that there are realistic colours to try to recreate, but even the alien locales, in the War Games headquarters and Time Lords' capital, a less over-the-top than the Dalek cities while still making the most of the incredibly late-60s psychodelic design.

The music is also an improvement on whatever was going on in The Daleks, with much of the original score surviving, albeit somewhat remixed, although there's still a weird tendency to make some scenes sound like the worst excesses of 80s Who. (This sort of thing has been happening since the 90s patchwork release of Shada.) Musical cues are also used to highlight story connections, in a cheeky but obvious retcon: it's made abundantly clear that the War Chief is now meant to be considered an earlier incarnation of the Master. While the use of both the original Master theme and the Murray Gold one are obtrusive, due to being entirely out of keeping with the rest of the score, I'm completely in favour of the idea. I've always been in the War Chief = Master camp, so it's nice to have some validation of this on screen (with plausible deniability if you don't like the idea).

It's certainly a pacier version of the story, and while this means you can comfortably enjoy it all in one sitting, it also means the story loses a great deal of its original atmosphere. The original serial had a slow build-up of foreboding as the extent of what was happening was revealed, while here everything is explained at breakneck speed. Whole chunks of the story are excised, and while a lot of this is just capture-escape-capture stuff used to bulk the original serial out, it also makes the story and the Aliens' plot seem a lot smaller. Lady Jennifer is scarcely in it now, which is frankly a crime.

The most notable changes come at the story's climax, highlighting an old issue with how The War Games is viewed by fans. We tend to treat the first nine episodes as an extended prologue for the last one, when the Time Lords show up, put the Doctor on trial and sentence him to exile and a change of appearance. With so much of the preceding plot removed, the focus is even more heavily on the ending, with the majority of extra material added here. There's new CGI material throughout, most strikingly a outside look at the Aliens' base, and while it all looks great, it's so clearly of a different style and grade to the original footage that it sticks out like the proverbial tender thumb. This is ratcheted up a notch when we're approaching Gallifrey, making the final scenes feel even more separate to the rest of the story.

The biggest change, of course, is the addition of the regeneration. Originally, all we got was Troughton spinning away into blackness, pulling faces until his image was obscured completely. The net time we saw the Doctor, he was played by Jon Pertwee, tumbling out of the TARDIS at the beginning of Spearhead from Space. Now the entire trial is rejigged – much more effectively, in fact – and the story ends with a full regeneration sequence, put together using archive footage, rendering and new effects. On the whole, it works, and gives the Second Doctor a rather more dignified send-off than he got before. Where this leaves the old “Season 6B” theory is anyone's guess, as there appears to be even less of a gap for the Doctor to nip off for some extra adventuring than there used to be, but entire eras have been shoehorned into less feasible places. The only thing I'm not keen on is the substitution of the Tenth to Thirteenth Doctors for the Doctor's parade of possible faces. Something like it has been done before by fans, of course, but in an official story it's a bit too knowing. (It would have been more fun to stick in photos of some of the actors who were considered to take over from Troughton.)

At the end of the day, though, whether you want to consider this the “real” events of The War Games or ignore it completely is up to you. As an alternative version of the story it works, providing a punchier, far shorter yet still effective adventure, while the 1969 original still sits there, untouched and ready to watch.

WHO REVIEW: 2024 Christmas Special - "Joy to the World"

 

Christmastime again already. After a hell of a year, it's nice to sit down and enjoy the traditional Doctor Who extravaganza. It's our first sober Christmas and our first with a child who can actually talk and demand things, so new experiences all round. She'd worn herself out by the time Who was on (probably all that boisterous shouting of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”) so we were able to enjoy this fairly unharrassed.

Some firsts on-screen, too: this is the first Christmas special not written by the showrunner, as RTD was too busy with Season Two/Series 15. Moffat therefore remains ahead in the number of Christmas specials he's helmed. It's the first time Gatwa leads an episode without Millie Gibson at his side (although she gets a cameo, naturally) and therefore his first episode with a one-off companion (although what constitutes a companion these days is highly debatable).

Behind-the-scenes info suggests this one went through a few wildly different drafts, and you can tell. There are plenty of great ideas, but they're a bit haphazardly thrown together. Nonetheless, it works. This episode is, if you'll pardon the pun (intended, always intended) a joy to watch. It's fun, silly, moving when it needs to be. Gatwa is superb throughout, leading one of the best guest casts we've had in a long time, even if not everyone gets as much focus as they deserve. It's very Moffat as well, full of the timey-wimey stuff and heavy-handed emotional beats we've come to expect from him, but toned down for a potentially less involved Christmas Day audience.

The cold open was rather spoiled by being over-played months before the event, which made more of the jumping between timezones than we actually got (an element that was reportedly more significant in an earlier draft), but it works well when it's actually attached to something. I can't help but want to see more of the old couple in Blitzed London (the gent maybe implies he knew Vastra and Jenny) and Niamh Smith's wonderfully intriguing lady on the train (called Sylvia Trench in the credits, after the very first Bond girl).

The opening was essentially a series of loosely linked vignettes, and that's pretty much the case for the whole plot. The Time Hotel is a wonderful idea, and it's one that allows for this approach, dropping the Doctor in an array of different times and places (although that's also the basic concept of the series as a whole, to be fair). Unlike “Boom,” Moffat is really writing for Gatwa's Doctor here. I can easily enough imagine “Boom” as an Eleventh or Twelfth Doctor story with little in the way of changes, but “Joy to the World” simply wouldn't work the same way. Sure, the plot itself could stay the same, but the delivery would be different with any Doctor but Fifteen. Gatwa walks into a hotel in his dressing gown, nicks their coffee, and immediately owns the situation through sheer charisma. I loved the “what did I notice?” scene, as he finds himself preparing for investigation subconsciously. Again, it's easy to imagine other Doctors doing this, but the delivery would be so entirely different. Gatwa sells the allure of adventure with one broad smile.

The story is full of characters I want to see more of. At just under an hour, there isn't time to give them all due attention, yet while they're sketched in, the sketches are beautiful. Joel Fry is wonderfully watchable as the adorable, inept Trev, while Jonathan Aris makes his Silurian hotel manager both endearing and classy. Both are killed off far too soon, yet while it should be too soon to have formed a real attachment, both deaths hurt, thanks to slick characterisation by both writer and actor. Yes, they each get a moment as the interface for the starseed, but even that is fleeting.

The standout of the episode is Steph de Whalley as Anita. Unflappable and professional, she's a very real character amongst a larger than life cast. Her initial moments are just for scene-setting and comedy, and she excels at the latter in particular, but the sideplot of her and the Doctor living and working together for a year is the highlight of the whole story. The Doctor actually spending an extended period without access to time travel, with no further alien invasions of world-threatening schemes to occupy him, is remarkably new to the TV series. It casts a whole new light on the Fifteenth Doctor and the Doctor in general, forcing him into domesticity and a straightforward friendship based on simply liking someone's company, not on their shared adventure or esprit du corp.

And yet it's entirely unnecessary. There's no need for the bootstrap paradox to have a whole year's duration; it could have been a week, a day, or an hour. It also makes a mockery of the Fourteenth Doctor's ongoing rehabilitation. We don't actually get to see him live out a normal(ish) linear life, we only hear it's happening in passing. This plot thread honestly makes the two contemporaneous Doctors harder to swallow as a concept; not only could Fifteen pop over to his earlier self's house and borrow his TARDIS, sidestepping the entire problem (barring technobabble about a TARDIS trip not allowing for the paradox to work) but his clear psychological problems on display give lie to the idea that Fifteen is a clean slate after Fourteen's years of recuperation. Not that this is a bad thing, nor is it unfeasible that wounds have been reopened for the Doctor lately. It does, however, make the bi-generation look increasingly silly.

The big problem with the episode, though, is how it handles Joy. After Nicola Coughlan's character was built up over half a year, the episode named after her, and her prominence in promo images, she's scarcely in it. Part of this is the result of the changes in focus in the drafts and the last-minute name changes – working titles being “The Time Hotel” and “Christmas Everywhere All at Once” - which place more emphasis on Joy than she actually achieves in the story. After her arrival, she more-or-less disappears until the second half, so her story is rushed. Coughlan and Gatwa share some great chemistry, but there isn't enough time to show it off. It also makes it hard to accept how quickly Joy forgives the Doctor's outright cruelty to her, in spite of the justification of saving her life. I love it when the Doctor's a bastard – and again, it hits differently with Fifteen, who's otherwise so relentlessly charming and generally nice to be around – but there isn't time for Joy to go from reluctantly accepting his explanation for his behaviour, and endearingly calling him her “funny little Doctor.” He and Anita had a year, even if we only saw bits of it over ten minutes. He and Joy had ten minutes.

Yet, it gives us the absolutely blistering scene where Joy, rightly, tears into the Doctor, and into the bastards who abused their positions in the pandemic. That came out of nowhere and stung, and it stung so much because so many of us were affected like that. For me, that was about my Nan, and millions of viewers will have someone dear to them to suffered or died alone because of rules that were flouted by those who should have known best. I hope Boris Johnson sat down to watch this with whoever he's currently cheating on his wife with and choked on his overpriced champagne, the platinum ballbag.

It's the scolding burn of this that let's the episode get away with its ludicrously saccharine ending, just as the successes of the episode let it get away with its flaws. The use of Villengard is always going to be topical, sadly, but they remain a defeated enemy and are barely an enemy at all here (another shadow of multiple rewrites – Moffat has said that in the first couple of drafts there was no villain at all). Making Joy the Star of Bethlehem will no doubt piss off some hardcore Christian viewers, assuming any hardcore Christians even watch Doctor Who, but it's pretty harmless (it took me a stupidly long time to realise that's where they were going). It could have been made more of, though. I get that it's Christmas, so you can get away with a fluffy story that doesn't quite hold together. But when the enemy is a rapacious arms company with no concern for human life, and the episode ends on Bethlehem, a town that has now been reduced virtually to rubble by military-backed settler violence, there was an opportunity to really say something.

Still. That would be a bit much to hope for, at Christmas and on the BBC, and we should grateful they even let the level of political commentary we got be broadcast. Overall, “Joy to the World,” for all its flaws, works. It's a bit of a mess, the timing's all over the place and it ends with too much sweet stuff. The Doctor Who equivalent of a Christmas dinner, and exactly what we need on Christmas day.

Settings: The Time Hotel, London, 4202; the Sandringham Hotel, London, 2024-25; briefly, London in the 1940s, Mount Everest, a train journey in the 1920s, and somewhere at the end of the Cretaceous, c. 65 million BC.

Historical context: I love it when the importance of a line changes between filming and broadcast. A month ago, very few of us would have had a favourite assassination.

Prehistorical context: I'm enjoying the recent series' tendency to throw dinosaurs into the mix for no particular reason other than because they can.

Maketh the Man: The Doctor's main outfit is his brown leather hero coat over a yellow striped top and brown checked trews held up by some chunky braces. We also get to see him in a very Arthur Dent dressing gown, and during his year working at the Sandringham Gatwa gets to show off his arms and nips in a tight blue T-shirt.

Down on Festive Road: Mr Benn has an outlet at the Time Hotel. A cute reference, but does this shop just sell historically-appropriate outfits? Or is the Hotel's time-door technology based on Mr Benn's original miraculous shop? 

The Name Game: For that matter, how is Anita linked to this? According to the credits, her surname is Benn. The credits also confirm that Joy's surname is Almondo, so I will assume the very blonde, Irish woman either has an Italian male-line ancestor a long way back, or got it from her stepfather.

Real-life links: The sherpa on Everest, Tenzing Norgay, is played by Samuel Sherpa-Moore, his real life grand-newphew.

Flood Warning: The missus is convinced Anita is Mrs Flood, and I think she might have something there. Steph de Walley and Anita Dobson look alike enough for it to convince, and now Anita has access to time travel it opens all sorts of options.

REVIEW: SMILE and SMILE 2

It was a smiley time this Hallowe’en, with Smile 2 in the cinemas and Smile itself hitting streaming services to cash in on this. It’s been a quick turnaround for writer-director Parker Finn, who released his short film Laura Hasn’t Slept in 2020, built on it with the feature-length follow-up Smile in 2022 and turned out the second feature this year. In that short time, the Smile sequence has established itself as one of the most popular and celebrated horror franchises of the last decade.

Does it deserve this? Well, yes and no. There’s no denying that these films are effective shockers, combining psychological terror with body horror to unpleasant effect. Smile itself, though, doesn’t quite live up to the hype. Originally titled Something’s Wrong With Rose, aesthetically tied more to Laura Hasn’t Slept which it ostensibly follows from directly, with Caitlin Stasey reprising her role, albeit briefly, as Laura, so that she can pass on the (literally) nightmarish curse to psychiatric therapist Dr. Rose Cutter. While Laura has been haunted by a terrifying being that smiles at her from behind different faces, the unsettlingly wide rictus grin didn’t become the focus on the manifestations until the feature, hence the change to the punchier, more intriguing title. It makes for a good poster, too.

The best thing about Smile is undoubtedly its star, Sosie Bacon, who gives an impeccable performance as a woman whose sanity is slipping under constant assault. Focusing on a psychiatrist is a good move, putting her directly in harms way by exposing her to someone already plagued by the… I’m just going to call it the Smiley Thing. It also puts her in the unusual position of a horror protagonist of understanding the dangers to her sanity she is experiencing, making it all the more feasible how long she refuses to accept what is happening is real, and also intelligent enough to admit when she can’t deny the evidence in front of her any longer.

Rose has already experienced intense trauma due to witnessing her mother’s suicide as a child, her entire life revolving around mental illness. Trauma and guilt are at the heart of Smile’s story, with the Smiley Thing specifically channelling and transmitting through unbearably traumatic experiences. It forces its victims – perhaps hosts is a better word – to relive their most painful experiences, while visiting new horrors on them. It warps its victim’s perceptions, so that at no point do they, or the viewer, know whether what they are seeing is real. Most disturbing for Rose is how it enjoys appearing as the long dead, but most effective as horror is when it appears as the still living, taking its time before it reveals itself as an illusion, usually only when reality intrudes and Rose realises that the person she thought was in front of her is actually somewhere else entirely.

It's not as if Rose has it easy in her day-to-day life, having to cope with an overwhelming job at an understaffed hospital and a complex romantic situation – her fiancé (Jessie T. Usher) doesn’t understand her, while Joel, her ex (Kyle Gallner) frequently finds himself in her workplace in his capacity as a police officer. Worst of all is Holly (Gillian Zinser), Rose’s self-absorbed and materialistic sister. Yet you can sympathise with everyone who begins to turn on Rose as her mental health deteriorates, and she is accused of appalling acts that she can’t remember committing.

This is where Smile works best. Finn’s script perfectly captures the experience of declining mental health, as your own mind betrays you, putting you in a place where you can’t trust you perception, memory or actions. It paints the fear and heartbreak as the people closest to you find they can’t cope with the changes in you, who turn away as you need them the most – but also the relief and gratitude towards those who do stick by you and try to help.

The most effective moments are when Rose is made isolated and afraid by her distrust of her own reality. The grotesque smiles on the Thing’s various faces are disquieting, but it’s the moments where you realise that what you’ve been watching, what Rose has experienced, never happened, or happened in an entirely different way to how you thought. Unfortunately, the film relies too much on jump scares which, although they do their job, just aren’t as interesting, original or effective as the core horror of the story. Still, it’s all in service of the Smiling Thing’s process, as it uses these to continually wear aware at Rose’s nerves. The Thing acts as a generic horror movie shock jock a lot of the time, precisely because this helps its mission of driving its victim to the brink. And also just for the kicks.

I really like that there’s no explanation for what the Thing is. It’s clearly supernatural, and acts like a curse, passing on from victim to victim after no more than a week of pushing them to breaking point. Beyond that, we have no idea, although we do eventually glimpse its alleged true form (if it even has such a thing). Horrible though it is, it simply isn’t anywhere near as frightening as someone you thought was on your side slowly breaking out into that appalling grin.

So Smile works, largely down to the powerful central performance of Sosie Bacon, but it never quite reaches the penetrating horror it’s really going for. It’s also hard to avoid comparisons to other films with similar conceits, such as Ringu and It Follows, which gave us implacable, relentless phantoms before and did it better. Smile 2, though, is as much an improvement on its predecessor as that was on Laura Hasn’t Slept. It leans into the gore and violence far more than Smile, which would normally be the sign of a lack of imagination and faith in the story. Finn finds the right balance here, though, using revulsion in service of the psychological horror that plagues the new protagonist, Skye Riley.

Skye is a considerably less likeable main character, but remains compelling and believable. The multi-talented Naomi Scott is absolutely excellent in the role. She has the singing and dancing skills to make Skye a believable pop sensation, and also the acting chops to give an incredibly tense and sympathetic performance as Skye’s sanity goes through the wringer. It doesn’t hurt that Scott is one of the most beautiful actresses in the world, either.

Centring the sequel around a troubled pop star gives it an entirely different aesthetic to the first film. It’s altogether bolder and more colourful, another reason why the increased violence works: everything is heightened. Skye is altogether different to the selfless Rose; her trauma comes from the pressures of fame, her own self-centred lifestyle and her reliance on substance abuse, and the brutal car crash that has left her in physical and emotional pain. It’s no surprise when we find out that the crash was her fault, but the visions of waking up bloodied in the wreckage are among the most haunting in the film. Skye also has to deal with her mother (Rosemarie DeWitt) who has commodified her daughter and puts her career over her wellbeing (although as everything is seen through Skye’s perspective it’s entirely possible her mum isn’t nearly as hard-nosed in reality).

Also giving strong performances are Miles Gutierrez-Riley as Skye’s PA Joshua, and Dylan Gelula, Skye’s once best friend who has been out of her life since a particularly venomous attack by Skye in the lead-up to the accident. Smile 2 picks up a week after the first film, rather perfunctorily dealing with a loose end from that story, before fast-forwarding another week to pass the curse onto Skye as she is just starting to put her life and career back together. There’s the sense that Skye might finally be able to make herself into a better person if giving the right environment, but once the Thing latches onto her, her already shaky grasp on reality is broken.

While the gore is increased, it’s once again the psychological aspect of the Thing’s attacks that hit hardest. It’s more relentless this time round, with entire hordes of zombified, smiling avatars assailing Skye. (Nothing in the film is more terrifying than the little girl at the signing and photo-op, whose manic grin may make her the single creepiest child in horror movie history.) There’s a little more exploration of what the Smiley Thing is in the second film, but it’s all speculation and, importantly, every source of information is unreliable. The Thing seems to be learning from its victims as well, playing with them and their sense of reality more and more. There’s a sense that the entity is aware that it’s in a horror movie and is gleefully playing with the tropes that brings, and is fully genre-savvy. You realise as the film progresses that the Thing has always been in charge of the story.

Smile 2 takes the concepts of Smile further and with greater style. Smile 3 is already in the works; filming is set to start next year so it will likely keep the schedule going and arrive in 2026. It’s hard to see where else it can go beyond Finn’s own promise of “more off the rails;” there’s only so much gore and violence, and only so traumatic its themes can get, before it simply becomes another example of shock for shock’s sake. If he can deliver an improvement once again, though, then Smile 3 will be something very special indeed.

REVIEW: Possum

 

I've been on something of a horror trip lately, catching up not only on recent releases but several from the last few years which I'd never quite got round to watching. Possum is a 2018 film written and directed by Matthew Holness, based on his earlier short story published in The New Uncanny (which I now simply must get hold of and read). If, like me, you know Holness best as his alter ego Garth Marenghi (author, prophet, dreamweaver) then Possum is entirely unlike the kind of horror film you'd expect from him. Garth Marenghi's Darkplace was a ludicrously over-the-top, deliberately hammy, parodic horror series. Possum, in contrast, is utterly humourless. It's quite astonishingly grim and serious in its presentation and subject matter.

Possum stars the underrated Sean Harris as Philip, a children's entertainer who we meet on his way back to his grim Norfolk home, having been thoroughly disgraced by an unknown incident in his work. Philip is a puppeteer, a creepy enough medium when done well, and he doesn't seem to be a performer at the top of his game.We never learn the nature of what happened, and we never learn how Philip normally lives his life. When we meet him, he's in dire straits, returning back to the rotten house he grew up in, still crumbling and ashen from the fire that killed his parents. Forced to live with his bullying and decrepit uncle who brought him up, Philip begins reverting to an almost childlike state, losing himself as he returns to the site of his cruel and traumatic upbringing.

To make matters worse, a teenaged boy has gone missing, and the shuffling, mumbling Philip is an easy target for suspicions. Oh, and Philip is being haunted all the while by Possum, a nightmarish puppet of a character he invented in childhood, that he lugs around in a duffle bag. We can assume that Possum had something to do with whatever incident led to Philip being kicked out of the puppeteer trade, but it's real significance is as a manifestation of everything that preys on his damaged psyche. He repeatedly tries to dispose of the puppet, even burning it, but Possum somehow turns up again and again, lurking in his tiny bedroom, even invading his dreams.

Possum is a deeply unsettling film, haunting and uncomfortable in a way few films these days are allowed to be. Holness has said that he was inspired by monochrome silent horror films of the 20s and 30s, and the deeply disturbing British public information films of the 70s. There's a definite feeling of the latter here, the same seedy, threatening version of reality that those short PSAs subjected kids to back then. (Thank god I only ever saw them secondhand, as an example of how utterly weird British television used to be.) There's a disturbing uncertainty as to how much of what we see is immediately real, how much is a result of Philip's deteriorating sanity, and how much is the truth slowly being uncovered.

Sean Harris is exceptional, giving a performance weighed down with a tangible sadness, perpetually on the edge of full breakdown. Philip is discomforting and untrustworthy throughout, even as he is a wholly sympathetic protagonist. Almost as good and even more distressing is Alun Armstrong as his black-nailed, yellow-toothed Uncle Maurice, a viciously cruel and loathsome character. Yet even between these two men who clearly hate each other's guts there are moments of tenderness, which only makes the cruelties worse.

There's not a great deal to the plot of Possum, but what there is keeps you guessing, wrongfooting you by leaking just enough information to lead you to the obvious but wrong conclusions about what's going on with Philip. Holness's direction is complemented by subtly uncomfortable electronic music and sound by the Radiophonic Workshop, also helping lend a 70s texture to the film. Possum itself is a remarkable creation, a revolting mishmash of spider-like limbs and unidentifiable bits of discarded taxidermy, crowned by a chalk-white cast of Harris's own face. Yet, even as disturbing this creation and its manifestations are, it's the performances by Harris and Armstrong that stick with you long after watching.