Shudder Saturday: The Creeping (2022)

I want to review The Creeping in a way that somehow explains why I disliked it, but also gives due credit for what it gets right. While the film didn't work for me as a whole, there were enough individual moments to make me appreciate the effort made by director Jamie Hooper.

Riann Steele plays Anna, a young woman who is going to spend some time caring for her grandmother, Lucy (Jane Lowe). There will also be another carer, Karen (Sophie Thompson), on hand to help, but Anna will still struggle to deal with the various turns in her grandmother's behaviour. She will also struggle when she starts to suspect that something is wrong in the house. There's something there that shouldn't be there, or perhaps she's just spooked by seeing such changes in her grandmother.

Co-written by Hooper and Helen Miles, The Creeping is a supernatural horror grounded in the same real-world horrors of films like The Taking Of Deborah Logan and Relic. There are few things more upsetting than watching a loved one turn into someone completely different, and struggle to keep themselves together as they face losing themselves, piece by piece. The Creeping treats that aspect of the story with due care, but it also does well when the scares start to filter in. Unfortunately, Hooper and Miles cannot keep things tightly intertwined on the way to a disappointingly anti-climactic third act. Some reveals are drawn out for too long, which undermines their impact as viewers get a step ahead of the narrative, and tension starts to dissipate when it should be building, and things just don't come together in a way that is anywhere near as satisfying as it should be.

Steele is decent, if unremarkable, in the main role, and Lowe does well with her portrayal of an old woman who is no longer as compos mentis as she once was. Thompson is also good, as she has been in pretty much every role she's played throughout the decades of her career (even when being horribly abusive to a child during her stint in Eastenders), but it's a shame that Jonathan Nyati and Peter MacQueen aren't given enough time and space to do anything with their paper-thin characters.

Hooper has achieved something impressive here, especially when considering that it's his directorial feature debut. It's just a shame that there's no consistency, which affects the pacing, which ultimately unbalances the whole thing. Individual moments are great, but often all too brief, and I hope to see Hooper do even better with whatever he lines up next. Maybe he can take an extra run at the script to iron out any wrinkles and ensure a more rewarding viewing experience. Or maybe he can just strip things down to a more basic core idea that allows him to focus more on the atmosphere and scares.

I do recommend this one to horror fans, but you have to be patient and willing to see the potential in it while Hooper keeps stumbling and weaving around the intermittent high points.

5/10

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Tales From The Lodge (2019)

The general idea of Tales From The Lodge is a good one. It’s a comedy horror anthology that makes the framing device just as enjoyable as any of the main tales, and also has a lot of fun with the horror genre tropes. Mind you, it is another movie co-starting Johnny Vegas and Mackenzie Crook. The last time I recall seeing them onscreen together was in Sex Lives Of The Potato Men. I’ve not been brave enough to revisit that, but the scar is still on my psyche. 

A group of friends gather to scatter the ashes one of their number, Jones, who committed suicide in a lake very close to the titular lodge. There’s Martha (Laura Fraser) and Joe (Crook), a couple battling on as Joe waits for a new heart. There’s Emma (Sophie Thompson) and Russell (Vegas), a couple happy to get away from their kids for a while. Last, but by no means least, is Paul (Dustin Demri-Burns), a womaniser who has unwisely decided to bring along his latest girlfriend, Mickey (Kelly Wenham). Things soon get a bit tense and emotional, and everyone has a turn of telling a dark and twisted tale.

Written and directed by Abigail Blackmore, making her feature debut, Tales From The Lodge is a strange beast. It is sometimes fun, sometimes quirky and entertaining, but always never too far away from one sour note to undo any good work. As a sweetener for the cast, I’m sure, each participant gets to direct their own tale, but nobody brings any unique voice to the proceedings. That isn’t necessarily bad, in a way, as it allows the film to flow as one piece made up of the interconnecting parts, but it also feels like a bit of a missed opportunity. 

The cast all do well enough in their roles, although some fare better than others at the hands of the script. Fraser comes off the worst, a pretty unrelentingly horrible and moody person (for a reason, but it doesn’t make her any easier to enjoy while onscreen), but Wenham and Demri-Burns are also required to twist themselves in some knots to sell their stories, which becomes even more difficult to buy into during the climax of the proceedings.

And that climax. To say it is problematic is putting it mildly. The more I think about it, and having been more aware than ever before of certain issues that the ending here brings to mind, the more horribly misjudged, at best, and ignorant it seems. It’s undoubtedly one of the worst I can think of in recent years, although there’s also a part of me thinking it may well be playing into some of the ridiculously wild endings of some of the schlocky horrors of yesteryear. If the rest of the film had been in the spirit of a throwback slasher then that would be easier to accept. As it stands, not so much.

Ending aside, although I know many who will not be able to see past that (and rightly so), this is a film that keeps skirting close to being good, without ever fully reaching that standard. Blackmore needs to learn some lessons from this, and hopefully do better next time.

5/10

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