Somewhere inside They wait in the shadows is a nasty, well-acted little film about two women who can’t agree on what happened to them. A haunting continues to wander before him.
The setup is simple. Ingrid and Jenny, separated for years, return to the isolated house they grew up in after the death of their mother. Ingrid is recently divorced and carries guilt related to something from her childhood. Jenny is caught in another unstable relationship, this time with Ray. The family’s old Ouija board is still in the house, and soon after, the things the sisters have spent their adult lives refusing to name begin showing up with bodies. Sam Mason-Bell wrote, directed, shot and edited it, giving the film an unmistakable auteur and almost no one able to say no to it.
Hunt and Adara do the heavy lifting
Jessica Hunt and Meghan Adara are convincing as sisters, which seems like a low bar until you count how many better-financed horror films clear it. They play estrangement as something with form rather than as a condition of the plot. There’s a specific register that two adult siblings fall into when they’re polite to each other instead of talking, a tone worse than yelling, and Hunt and Adara find it again and again. Hunt gives Ingrid an injury that has been managed rather than healed, the kind you might carry through a work day. Adara plays Jenny as someone who decided a long time ago that moving was safer than sitting with her own memory. Put them in a room to discuss the past and the movie comes to life.
The sisters are the movie. Everything else is weather.
Monsters you can touch
The monsters are practical, built with full makeup, prosthetics, puppets, and animatronic work, and they behave like hand-made creatures always do. They take up space. A rendered object floats in the frame no matter how much money you spend on it, while an object assembled by human beings has weight, a slightly incorrect texture, and the faint suggestion that someone inside is having a very long day. This last part is not a criticism. There’s some real friction here between creature designs that make no attempt at realism and a family story that’s depressingly plausible, and the film gets a weird charge by putting the two in the same house.
The film also stops to admire them. Hands-on work requires the camera to stay still and engage, and engagement costs time, and it’s with time that the film loses its argument. The slow stretches don’t do enough character work to justify their length. There’s a difference between a scene that builds pressure and a scene that waits for something off-screen to be ready, and too much middle is the second type. Every time the film cuts back to Ingrid and Jenny, the heat they generated escapes from the room. They have to start the movie again.
What sisters can’t agree on
What holds the thing together is its subject matter. This is a story about childhood abuse and what two siblings do with a story that neither of them told in the same way. I wouldn’t call it a study of any clinical condition, since the film doesn’t offer a diagnosis and neither should I, but it is genuinely interested in guilt as something you inherit and then pay for in installments. Monsters are attached to this guilt rather than detaching themselves from it. The childhood material is treated as damage that produced two specific adults with two specific coping strategies, not as a scary origin story with a bow on it. This puts They wait in the shadows in front of the large and growing pile of horror films that turn a family wound into a creature and then lose interest in the family. Mason-Bell is not losing interest. He just can’t always find the images to convey what he wants to say.
An ending that answers the wrong question
The end does not reach. Without going into detail, the resolution deals with the supernatural side of the story much more energetically than it deals with the sisters, and the sisters were the reason for being here. The disagreement that the film spent its entire length building up to never gets a scene that lives up to its weight. What happens instead is closure of the tidier variety, answering a question the film didn’t actually ask. A film so devoted to two women who contradict each other about the past should end with this contradiction, and not politely around it.
Who is it for
Two and a half stars, and half does an honest job. If you follow Trash Arts, if you’re looking for British underground horror on principle, or if the hand-made creature effects are appealing enough for you to forgive a loose milieu, there’s something here that’s worth your evening, and Hunt and Adara are worth it alone. If you need a movie that keeps moving, or want an ending that rewards what the performances delivered, this one will test you well before the credits roll. It arrives on UK digital today via Miracle Media, following the US digital release in May via Cleopatra Entertainment.
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
About the Author
