Although I was aware of the fact that their screentime would probably be limited, the presence of Peter Mullan and Bill Paterson in this cast was enough to put Repression (which is also known by the title Marionette) on my radar.
It is the tale of a woman (Thekla Reuten) who ends up working with a young boy (Elijah Wolf) who seems to have strange and dangerous powers. But does he make things happen, or does he just have the ability to foresee things? And can he help our leading lady to fix a recent tragedy in her life? Or . . . did he cause it?
This is nicely put together, an enjoyable slow burn that has enough darkness in it to make it a solid horror/thriller viewing choice, and starts to really impress when you get to the meat of the central idea being poked at and explored. Riffing on that famous tale from The Twilight Zone, “It’s A Good Life”, this gradually makes the central theme bigger and bigger on the way to an ending you suspect won’t be a happy one.
Director Elbert van Strien (who also gave us the excellent Two Eyes Staring) sometimes struggles to capture just the right visuals that would be most impactful, but his work on the script, co-written with Ben Hopkins, is where the film is strengthened.
What could have been a child-centric reworking of The Medusa Touch instead turns into a film that muses on ideas we could consider with every major horror movie character. Can someone foretell things that will happen, or does that information being put out there mean that someone else turns it into a self-fulfilling prophecy? How can you prove that you have free will if your actions are guided by the thought of just reacting to what you think others have predicted you to do? And if we consider the tale of Schrödinger’s cat then surely that means that everything out of our line of sight is permanently both dead and alive until they come back to us.
Interesting and heady ideas, I hope you agree, and the cast do a bloody good job of having conversations about them, in between moments of tension and dread. Reuten is a decent lead, playing her pained character well enough, and believably becoming more and more desperate as the situation around her looks set to drag her down via some spiritual kind of riptide. Wolf is also good, admirably allowed to play his part without too many sympathetic moments. Mullan and Paterson have a few scenes each, doing their usual great work, and there are very good performances from Rebecca Front, Emun Elliott, and Dawn Steele. Sam Hazeldine is also given a vital role here, but he doesn’t get to make as good an impression as anyone else, partly to do with the script and partly to do with his lacklustre turn.
It’s a shame that the very end of Repression goes for something we have seen, in one way or another, many times before, undercutting what came beforehand. It’s perfectly fine, but nowhere near as good as the rest of the movie. Although unspectacular, this is well-made, well-acted, well-written (maybe more in terms of the ideas than the dialogue spoken), and well worth your time.
7/10
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