Dead By Dawn 2018: Rabbit (2017)

Writer-director Luke Shanahan makes his feature debut with this enjoyably strange film that at times feels reminiscent of the work of David Cronenberg, at times reminiscent of Nicolas Roeg, and yet still remains an impressively unique vision. I was initially rather unimpressed, sitting there quietly as the end credits rolled, but the more thought I gave it, the more I liked what I had just seen.

Adelaide Clemens plays a young woman named Maude. Maude is a twin to a missing sister, and she returns home after a particularly vivid dream leaves her convinced that she knows the whereabouts of her sibling. She doesn't waste much time in beginning her search, accompanied by her sister's fiance (Alex Russell) and a local cop (Jonny Pasvolsky) who believes that the fiance had a hand in things. They all end up encountering a couple (Nerida, played by Veerle Baetens, and husband Keith, played by Charles Mayer) who may have been among the last people to see Maude's sister alive.

More of a mood piece than anything else, Rabbit is an intriguing film that shows Shanahan to be a dab hand at the slow burn. Things seem to build in intensity without much changing at all, thanks to the scenes showing how everything is wearing Maude's mind down, perhaps to a breaking point.

Clemens is great in her role. Well, she's great in both roles, but one has a lot less screentime than the other. Her performance never edges towards hysterical, but she obviously becomes more and more disturbed and flustered as the situation unfolds around her. Russell and Pasvolsky both do well enough in their roles, supporting Clemens while also providing the required potential suspect/red herring strand, and Baetens and Mayer are quietly unsettling, far too neat and polite to not be hiding something.

While the performances and mood work well throughout, Shanahan falters when it comes to injecting elements to provide viewers with a satisfying third act. There are many decent individual moments, but nothing as powerful or affecting as I was hoping for. It's okay to sit and watch a film that doesn't provide you with all of the answers, and I do, but quite another to sit and watch a film that seems to almost gleefully swerve away from them at the last minute (as it feels here).

Overall, this is well worth your time. Shanahan is a name I will be keeping an eye on for the next few years, especially if he continues to make such canny casting choices and retains his impressive instincts when it comes to marrying up visuals with excellent score choices (the music here is by Michael Darren, who also deserves a mention, and there it is). You may love this film, you may end up hating it, but it's almost impossible to simply dismiss it.

7/10

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Silent Hill: Revelation (2012)

I enjoyed the movie version of Silent Hill. I have fond memories of playing the game many years ago and the movie recreated a lot of imagery that I'll always remember with fondness (fondness = paralysing fear as I played the game at night with the lights out and then started to panic whenever I heard a siren signalling the approach of "the darkness"). So when I started to hear the negative reaction towards this sequel I still held onto hope. Some people had, after all, hated the first movie.

Alas, the majority were right on this occasion. Silent Hill: Revelation is rubbish. It's a lot of cool imagery from the games created thanks to some varying CGI with nothing substantial to call an actual plot. Of course, the plot of the first movie wasn't exactly anything to write home about, but it did enough to get by while the atmosphere was heaped on in thick, thick spoonfuls.

Adelaide Clemens plays a young woman who lives a transient, anonymous life. This is all done because her dad (Sean Bean) has warned her that Silent Hill wants to claim her. He's right. But changing address and keeping a low profile isn't enough to stop Silent Hill reaching out and trying to get what it wants. The darkness starts to fall, bringing strange visions with it.

Written and directed by Michael J. Bassett (who, of course, had the mythology of the games - adapted into a movie idea by Laurent Hadida - to work from), this film just doesn't work as a film. There are individual moments that manage to impress, such as a sequence involving the famous, creepy, nurse characters, but these are few and far between. Any twists and turns can be predicted well ahead of time, the CGI varies wildly between great and godawful and there are exactly zero characters that viewers will care about.

Clemens is okay in the lead role, she's just stuck with bad material, and Sean Bean and Radha Mitchell don't have much time onscreen as her parents, but everyone else is wasted, with Martin Donovan almost managing to be the exception. When a film with so much potential manages to squander the talents of Deborah Kara Unger, Carrie-Anne Moss AND Malcolm McDowell then it deserves any critical lashing that it receives (and this did receive a fair bit already). As for Kit Harington, his role is such a bag of cliches and signposted moments that he's not really required to give any kind of performance, he just has to hit his marks and spout horrible dialogue. Okay, okay, he has to give SOME kind of performance, of course, but it's impossible to judge thanks to the treatment of his character, which seems to have been written by a particularly low-level Auto-scripting program.

There's enough here, on the surface, to almost make the movie worth a watch. It's below average, but some of the visuals are enjoyable and I, for one, like getting to revisit parts of Silent Hill. Your best option, however, is to simply rewatch the first movie. Or, if you're a gamer, replay the videogames.

4/10

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