Early on, I was getting a feel Child's Play meets The Twilight Zone or Doctor Who with a bit of The Neon Demon in there with regular readers will know that that comparison can only be a great thing. It also reminded of those trashy x-rated horrors of the 70's that would have the most ridiculous sounding title.
It was fun trying to work more of it out and with the director doing a lot of 'show, don't tell' moments, I could the respect Strickland was giving to his audience.
There was also a lot of cleverly dark comedy that on the whole was put to good use, especially by two characters.
It does lose its way in the second half. Some scenes dragged a lot and the story kept covering old ground. But at the same time, I liked how it was intertwining itself and teasing us many theories of the reason for all these strange occurences happening.
The cast did a pretty good job with this. Marianne Jean-Baptiste was a nice stand-out and gave us a wonderfully sympathetic character that had a great every-day quality that we could root for.
Fatima Mohamed totally transforms into this mysterious character, makes great use of the dialogue and in the end was a very memorable character.
The combination of Julian Barrtat and Steve Oram was a top casting choice as their scenes together was clearly the funniest in the film.
It was great seeing Hayley Squires as the last time I saw her was in her breakthrough role in 'I, Daniel Blake'.
Despite not being given much to do, having Gwendoline Christie gave it some nice star-power. One scene had me going back to my childhood as Kim Benson from '2point4 Children' came was involved in this, which quite the surprise for me.
As well as the style and score that I mentioned earlier, another notable positive was the writing. It just fitted in nicely with the tone. For a lot of the time, it had me laughing in disbelief at the dialogue that would never be used in day-to-day conversations. In my head, I was going "Who talks like that?!" The dialogue reminded of the way Jake Gyllenhall's character talked in Nightcrawler.
I did have a good time watching this. I liked the overall strangeness to the whole story. Plus, the incorporation of the 1970's trashy horror style and score made it quite hypnotic and mesmerising.
The performances are solid and the dark comedy also worked wonders. But all the good stuff was just that and it never jumped to the levels of great. The lack of emotional impact and the sometimes messy problems it had in the second half prevented it giving me an exceptional rating.
I would still check this one out. I liked how it tries to tackle the themes of consumerism and if you're a fan of Hammer Horror films, then I think you would get the best possible experience out of anyone.
Rating: 7/10
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