‘I have decided that you are an expert in carnality.’
Harper (Jessie Buckley) takes a holiday to a fancy manor house in a quiet little village following the death of her abusive husband James (Paapa Essiedu). Owner Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear - who reminded me a bit of Fred West, if Fred West had grown up in generational wealth and went to boarding school and enjoyed fox-hunting), is there to welcome Harper and show her around.
Harper spends her first few days walking in the woods and face-timing her friend Riley, (Gayle Rankin) but a series of encounters with men who all look remarkably similar to Geoffrey threaten to spoil her peaceful getaway. Well-intentioned or not, all of them give Harper the heebie-jeebies.
Rory Kinnear does a great job of playing all the different iterations of the same man, managing to make them both distinctly different and eerily similar very effectively; the sexually repressed vicar made my skin crawl and I felt a little sorry for posh-boy Geoffrey who at one point exclaims, ‘you have all the qualities of a failed military man. My father said that to me once. I was seven,’
Jessie Buckley is also great as conflicted Harper; who is battling with her guilt over James’ death while trying to accept that it wasn’t her fault.
Gayle Rankin provides the comedic relief even though we only see her via Harper’s phone screen and for about thirty seconds at the end (and then you’re kind of glad she’s rocked up). Paapa Essiedu gets total screentime of around ten minutes but still manages to make me absolutely hate James.
This is a beautifully shot, lush film with a dreamlike quality - things make the most perfect, logical sense even when they shouldn’t. The themes of the nature of trauma, rebirth, spring and the patterns we are doomed to repeat are fairly obvious, so there’s not much that’s new here in that regard. That said, it’s still a compelling watch, particularly if you’re a fan of fairytales and folk horror.
Content warning: suicide (there isn’t a running theme here, I promise) extreme body horror (the final fifteen-odd minutes are not for the faint of heart) domestic violence, decay, nudity.
Final verdict: She’s gone on holiday by mistake.
