13 Slots for the Best Horror I've Seen in the Past Year
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POSSUM

(June 2018)

Look at Possum, there he lies

Children, meet his lifeless eyes

See his nasty legs and tongue

When he wakens, watch him run

Drenched in tone and atmosphere, dotted with mysteries (a bag and its hideous contents; a perpetually closed door), Matthew Holness’ debut feature Possum is subjective, oblique horror at its finest.

In it, Sean Harris (notable to this film and music geek for portraying Joy Division’s Ian Curtis in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People) plays Philip Connell, who returns to his now squalid childhood home in an attempt to rid himself of his figurative (or perhaps literal?) demons.

And since we’ve mentioned music, certain aspects of Possum put me in mind of a particular track from The Cure’s Disintegration.

If you take a gander at Possum, and are a Cure fan, you’ll know which track I’m referring to…

And even if you aren’t a Cure fan, and are also somehow opposed to horror films that don’t rely on over-exposition, surely the eponymous Possum is a creature of deep, dark nightmare that, at the very least, demands to be seen, so its insidious presence can stain even your most innocent, sundrenched dreams…

Wait a while, my little child,

For what is playing dead

Possum, with his black balloons

Will eat you up in bed.

Parting Shot: Sean Harris also appears in Billy O’Brien’s excellently repulsive Isolation (review here).

(Possum OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

¡QUÉ HORROR! 2019

Candidate #7

POSSUM

(June 2018)

Look at Possum, there he lies

Children, meet his lifeless eyes

See his nasty legs and tongue

When he wakens, watch him run

Drenched in tone and atmosphere, dotted with mysteries (a bag and its hideous contents; a perpetually closed door), Matthew Holness’ debut feature Possum is subjective, oblique horror at its finest.

In it, Sean Harris (notable to this film and music geek for portraying Joy Division’s Ian Curtis in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People) plays Philip Connell, who returns to his now squalid childhood home in an attempt to rid himself of his figurative (or perhaps literal?) demons.

And since we’ve mentioned music, certain aspects of Possum put me in mind of a particular track from The Cure’s Disintegration.

If you take a gander at Possum, and are a Cure fan, you’ll know which track I’m referring to…

And even if you aren’t a Cure fan, and are also somehow opposed to horror films that don’t rely on over-exposition, surely the eponymous Possum is a creature of deep, dark nightmare that, at the very least, demands to be seen, so its insidious presence can stain even your most innocent, sundrenched dreams…

Wait a while, my little child,

For what is playing dead

Possum, with his black balloons

Will eat you up in bed.

Parting Shot: Sean Harris also appears in Billy O’Brien’s excellently repulsive Isolation (review here).

(Possum OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

ISOLATION
(Review)

Isolation’s premise is simple: Dan (John Lynch) is a farmer who’s agreed to have some of his cows undergo an experimental procedure, courtesy of Bovine Genetics Technology. Dan’s not entirely sure what’s been done to his cows, but he’s about to find out.
And when he does, what we get from writer/director Billy O’Brien is an oppressive and terribly unsettling exercise in biological horror the likes of which we’ve not seen since the horror heyday of the ‘80’s.

O’Brien delivers up a taut and tense little nasty that exploits the Irish farm setting for all its unsanitary and repulsive worth, and, armed with a disturbingly designed beastie (by Stephen Brown and Philippa Wright), unleashes a no-nonsense horror movie that truly gets under the skin.
Quite possibly one of the best decisions made in this production was to go the way of physical, on-set effects. No cold, sterile CGI here. The effects are warm, and gooey, and horribly organic: Isolation is everything Species should have been, but wasn’t.
O’Brien pushes just the right panic buttons—fear of infection, of the act of reproduction gone terribly wrong, of the dire consequences of genetic tampering—to make modern audiences squirm uncomfortably in their seats. It’s been awhile since a film of this sort has been so spot-on in its desired effect of scaring the beejeezus out of its viewer.

Helping to ground the film are some rather good performances by a cast which, aside from Lynch (who starred in Richard Stanley’s low budget cyberpunk opus, Hardware, and the Gwyneth Paltrow-starrer, Sliding Doors), also includes The Matrix sequels’ Essie Davis (who also starred as Mrs. Lovett in the BBC TV adaptation of Sweeney Todd, opposite Mr. Beaver/Beowulf himself, Ray Winstone), Sean Harris (who was in Brothers of the Head and was Ian Curtis in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People), and Breakfast On Pluto’s Ruth Negga.
Their understated performances, amidst the fantastic and gruesome elements of the narrative, make the whole that much more believable.

Isolation is low budget horror that packs a potent punch, that gets you on a visceral level and leaves you disturbed, even after Jim Ford’s “I’m Going To Make You Love Me” has trailed off, and the end credits have completely rolled.
If horror’s your thing, you really should check it out. You’ll never look at a cow in the same way again…

(Isolation French OS courtesy of impawards.com; DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.co.uk.)