ANIMOSITY

ANIMOSITY

Sometimes – no, often times – the DVD cover art tells you very little about the films contained in the box. What seems to happen is this: one film with a certain flavour of cover art happens to do pretty well, and then its cover art is held up as The Thing to emulate by folks understandably keen that their low-budget film does pretty well too, by any available means. Never mind whether it was the film itself that got the package noticed; if the cover art shows a woman being dragged backwards along the ground then by fuck, there will be a glut of films all showing a woman being dragged backwards along the ground, whether or not this has the least thing to do with the film itself. This means that you can't take the cover as an indication of all that much, any more. So when I picked up Animosity (2013), with its cover depicting a dishevelled young woman standing in the woods, I was none the wiser. What was I about to see? A slasher? A supernatural thing? The minimal blurb was little help either. So, even though I had the full DVD package from Bloody Earth Films, I went into my viewing of Animosity with very little to go on.

Happily, this is one of those times when I was completely pleasantly surprised.

The film starts with a bang too, throwing in what really becomes evident is a red herring, as the first face we see on screen is not the star of the film at all. We see a woman pursuing a younger, terrified woman from a remote house, possibly hers, into the surrounding woods. This girl turns out to be her daughter – judging by her agonised pleadings – but it is of no avail to Mother, and the first blood splatter lands within the first few minutes that the film is rolling. That's that, for now; we see that this woman's happy homestead is up for sale though, and in the next scene, we are introduced to a young couple, Carrie (Tracy Willet) and Mike Bonner (Marcin Paluch), who buy the house from her.

The house is evidently a steal at the price but in film land as in real life, there's a reason for this. Thing is, the reason or reasons for it are not straightforward. We're introduced to a strange, possibly dangerous neighbour, Tom, who likes to roll up at the house with his gun, 'hunting' – and Carrie, who works at home, gets the worst of this behaviour, quickly feeling threatened by this irascible, unstable man. Things get weirder as the odd noises she hears in the house turn out to be of decidedly natural origin, as she finds a young man who has been hiding in the attic of the house. When he sees Carrie, he seems to know her, and tries desperately to flee.

And that's just the start. Whatever Carrie thinks her life is, it's all about to called into question and dissected in a series of disconcerting, bleak and compelling ways.

There are some really innovative ideas on display here. Whatever I thought I might get, I didn't expect to get such a clever film which draws together aspects of familiar horror movie tropes in a new sequence of ways: the whole idea of being the only person who doesn't understand what's going on is a horror in itself, but in Animosity it is linked to other concepts, providing the film with the bedrock of a really engaging story. It knows how to do subtle, too. With the exception of a mere few seconds of screen time, blood and guts are displaced by feelings of uncertainty, then fear and anger. Much of this is due to the effective performance given by Willet as Carrie; I could empathise with her, and she does an excellent job of moving by turns through that range of emotions. It helped also that she looks so refreshingly normal, rather than like some pneumatic starlet (a lesser film, if that's not overstating it, would have cast supporting actress Alyssa Kempinski in the lead as she is more of a model-type in appearance, but director Brendan Steere definitely casts the better actress in the more demanding role). There's a sense of real-time in how she finds out what is really going on, too – this only added to the empathy I felt as this woman's world and life crashed down around her.

Blending supernatural elements with warped science and some of the bigger questions. Animosity doesn't answer every question you might have, and I believe it is stronger for it. It's also not a perfect film, and it does begin to become more generic, less unsettling towards the end, particularly in the final twenty minutes or so, with Carrie losing some of her unusual tendencies (and some of the make-up choices were ill-advised). This is probably related to an issue which curses many indie projects, namely that so many of the films tend to run a little long. However, this is a film which managed to keep me guessing and engaged me throughout, with some skilled tying-together of plot elements, flashes of dark humour and a generally sound idea of good pace. Hell, if every indie I watched which had a guessworthy cover like this one surprised and interested me as much as this one, I'd quit kvetching about it altogether. It's great when something like this comes along, and on such a miniscule budget ($15,000) it definitely deserves high praise.

This Bloody Earth release takes pains to include a bunch of extras, including a bonus short film, commentary, blooper reel (this seems to be a thing they like to add!) and a raft of trailers. The film itself looks of a reasonable quality considering its cheap production, and comes in at 102 minutes altogether.

Review by Keri O’Shea


 
Released by Bloody Earth
Region 1
Not Rated
Extras :
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