After years of struggling with infertility, Robin and Daniel, realise their dreams of parenthood by adopting Kathelia, a mute orphan, with a dark and mysterious past. But Kathelia’s erratic behaviour proves increasingly alarming, and before long strange and inexplicable occurrences begin to plague their lives…
Grimmfest Says: At heart, an old school “Devil Child” narrative this beautifully crafted, subtly creepy movie is a masterclass in reinventing and repurposing classic horror tropes in a manner that makes them seem entirely fresh and intriguing again. Partly this is finding new imagery and visual language to represent the gradual encroachment of malignant forces into the family’s life, such as the pink, placenta-like gunk that starts to appear in their swimming pool. But primarily it’s down to the film’s keen awareness of social nuance and unspoken subtext. The adopted girl is black, from, it is suggested, a fairly rough background, even before the violence that claimed her family, and attempts to house her with other black families haven’t proved successful. Enter our would-be white saviour protagonist couple, with their wealthy middle class lifestyle, and, in the wife’s case, unacknowledged and largely oblivious assumptions, prejudices and snobberies. The film plays on expectations about race and class and on white paranoia in a manner that Jordan Peele would be proud of to truly uncomfortable effect. Similarly, the extraordinary, nuanced performance of Lily D. Moore, as the otherworldly Fiona brings grace and warmth to a role that could so easily have felt uncomfortable and even faintly exploitative in lesser hands. As it is, her relationship with her brash but good-hearted recovering addict mother, sympathetically played by genre icon Shawnee Smith provides much of the film’s emotional weight, and a further level of social nuance when contrasted with the film’s judgemental middle class white lead couple . Elegantly shot and staged, genuinely tense and troubling, with uniformly excellent performances, and an eerie, nerve-jangling score, this is a uniquely odd and alienating vision of wealthy suburban America, when the cracks start to appear. And fans of British splatterpunk horror fiction will no doubt be amused by the fact that the company the wife works for is called “Hutson”.