Shudder Saturday: Cherry Tree (2015)

The last film from director David Keating was Wake Wood, an enjoyable folk horror movie that I, as so often happens, enjoyed more than many other people. It was an enjoyable riff on familiar material, well put together and featuring some quality cast members in the main roles. Reading that Cherry Tree was in a slightly similar vein, and also written by Brendan McCarthy (the co-writer of Wake Wood), I hoped to once again find a film that I enjoyed than many other people. Sadly, that wasn't the case. It came close though.

Naomi Battrick plays Faith, a schoolgirl who gets through every day while carrying the weight of the knowledge that her father, Sean (Sam Hazeldine), will soon die from a terminal disease. An unlikely chance of salvation arrives in the form of Sissy Young (Anna Walton), a witch who makes a deal with Anna. Get pregnant and deliver the newborn to her . . . and Faith's father will live. It's a deal that seems too good to pass up, of course, and Faith agrees, but it's not long until she starts to have concerns about what is going to happen when she hands over the baby. Oh, and as this is a spooky and special kind of pregnancy, it will take Faith weeks, rather than months, to reach full term.

I was going to use this part of the review to mention how Cherry Tree has a good idea at the heart of it. That's not really true though. The more I think about it, the weaker the film seems. It's a very basic idea, a Faustian pact, and it isn't developed in a way that allows you to see any real progression in the characters. The deal is made, two people start to dislike one another, someone tries to call the deal off, the deal cannot be broken, etc.

Keating directs with a lack of any real style, although he manages to insert a few images in the third act that stand out because of how dark and bloody things get (you're always going to find things a bit darker when there's a baby involved in the midst of everything), and McCarthy's script is about as perfunctory as you could get. And let's not even mention the "punchline" at the very end of the film, which is written AND directed in a way that made me fully laugh aloud just as the end credits started to roll. I cannot recall the last time I watched a movie so spectacularly shoot itself in the face at the very last moment, and I admit I was still considering trying to err on the side of generosity up until that scene.

Battrick and Walton aren't too bad in their roles, despite working with a script that forces them to keep a straight face while delivering some utter bilge, but the rest of the cast , from Hazeldine to Elva Trill and Patrick Gibson, playing paper-thin main supporting characters, give performances that are disappointingly flat and unengaging.

While it's made with a certain level of technical competence, and has some moments that show great use of a relatively small budget, there isn't enough done with the central premise. It may only clock in at 85 minutes, but this could have easily been a 20-minute short. It feels less like a full-blooded feature film and more like a Hollyoaks Halloween special for most of the runtime, and, with respect to any Hollyoaks fans who may stumble upon this, that's not something I would consider a good thing.

3/10

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Shudder Saturday: Repression (2020)

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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