Uninhabited

Starring: Geraldine Hakewill, Henry James, Tasia Zalar

Synopsis:

Based on actual events….

Harry and Beth want a different kind of holiday. So they charter a boat to drop them off on a remote coral island on the Great Barrier Reef. The island is idyllic – surrounded by a wide reef, covered in palms and full of birds and other wildlife, small and totally deserted. Or is it? The young lovers soon come to believe there is someone else on the island. Things go missing from their camp – and then they discover someone else’s footprints in the sand. What they didn’t realise was that the island has a ghost – a young girl who had died in shocking circumstances some eighty years earlier.

The ghost at first plays mischievously with the young couple, but then turns malevolent. And their idyllic island holiday becomes a nightmare.

I put this on, during the UK heat wave, wondering if it was a good idea to watch a horror movie on an evening with a beautiful petrol blue sky. As the movie opened, it seemed like a great idea. The cinematography of the approach to the island was arrestingly beautiful and made me long for the ability to walk down to a beach there and then. Uninhabitable begins with promise, the idea of a ghostly horror movie set in such a lush environment was always going to be a challenge, a challenge the filmmakers decided not to rise to. The promise of the movie came from the synopsis and the subtle way in which the boatman that transports Beth and Harry to the island emphasises that he is 5 hours away if the couple wishes to get picked up in a hurry. It’s almost as if he is complicit in what happens next.

Character (if you can realistically call them that) building scenes ensue and I patiently sat through these scenes waiting for the spooky bits to come along. Hakewill and James are both good looking leads but both seem out of their depth when it comes to more emotional scenes like arguing over who what’s behind the strange occurrences. There are a couple of coy love scenes that both highlight the fact that this couple appear as if best friends; there’s no chemistry between the actors. James reads most of his lines as if he’s more at home reading Men’s Fitness than acting. Hakeswill, at least tries and has a number of good scenes, normally when she’s alone. The dialogue isn’t great, admittedly. At one point Harry says “We should be skinny-dipping” to which Beth replies “I’m too embarrassed” and it’s this coy attitude which doesn’t help the viewing process. The movie is either trying too hard to appeal to the modern woman and underline the fact that the filmmakers aren’t out to exploit the actress or there’s a definitive conscious approach to do this throughout the entire movie. It’s not that I felt the desire to see the actors naked but the fact that the script has to almost apologise for the lack of nudity, which is distracting.

In scenes that make the Blair Witch Project interesting, footprints are found, underwear is placed on trees, things go missing and fish get strung up on kind of washing line. During this, the pair seem to wander around the same small bit of location and eventually find a cabin with all the clues as to what has been happening but both characters are unable to work anything out initially. The screenplay lets the actors down again with half-hearted dialogue on how the phenomenon must have a logical explanation. The mood setting and any chance of suspense once again gets quashed.

My curiosity peaked when the characters come across a couple of dodgy foreign fishermen who, by their very presence on the island, imply that they’ve been behind the “spooky” goings on all along. We, the audience think we know that they aren’t but we can’t be sure. You’d think that this would open up an opportunity for the filmmakers to play a few mind-games with the audience, but they don’t seize it.

Beth and Harry discover that their SAT phone is missing and blames the metalcore listening fishermen. Both men indicate their lack of English. Harry throws an embarrassing hissy-fit that wouldn’t scare a three year old child, gets a slap (I cheered the fishermen on in this scene) and storms off as if he’s been turned down in a nightclub.

A decent bit of suspense follows when Harry swims to the men’s boat to look for and stupidly (in my opinion) leaves Beth to continue to forage around the men’s island bivouac. They don’t know where these guys have got to, so I felt a little concern for Beth’s welfare. Harry gets another well earned smack. This time, it’s a rifle butt to the head. Sadly, it doesn’t knock any sense into the guy.

Once again, the movie takes a little turn that looks promising. After a decent directorial choice of seeing things from Harry’s semi-conscious state, he awakens fully to find that both he and Beth are tied and gagged to trees. It suggests that the movie is going well and truly into survival horror territory, especially when one of the fisherman, who has been swigging from a bottle drunkenly moves toward them with a knife. James does his best acting here, with a gag on, in fear for his and Beth’s life. The man swaggers toward Beth with the knife and implies he’s going to cut away her clothes. He stops short of doing it, having threatened it and wanders off after hearing some sounds. His buddy follows and the sound of gunfire can be heard. One of them appears and it looks as if his guts might be hanging out but we can’t be sure. Harry manages to grow a pair, a small pair, and break the tree trunk that he’s tied to and untie their bonds.

A little while later, Beth works out what is happening on the island and has a theory (the right one) and a battle of the sexes begins. This could have been a decent exchange between Harry and Beth but James is not up to it and looks uncomfortable with the scene.

It transpires that the ghost of a girl called Coral haunts the place and kills any male visitors. Beth appears to side with Coral after learning her tragic fate at the hands of seven men. Harry, argues that the problem is supernatural and is in denial. Again, James’ acting skills are woefully inadequate. That aside, I thought things might get interesting again, with Beth becoming possessed by Coral, killing Harry and the boatman arriving to find her a gibbering wreck next to her murdered friend’s corpse.

But, that’s not the way the movie went.

The movie ends with Beth falling victim to something that had been cleverly signposted early on, but by then I’d lost interest. The boatman returns and gives us an epilogue scene that is suitably uninteresting like the rest of the movie and reminded me of the end of John Carpenter’s The Fog: Except, here it made no sense at all. The boatman’s arrival at the cabin, again, initially suggests that he has been complicit – weird as he is male and the ghost doesn’t like his sex. Instead it ends mundanely.

Summary:

I hate being this hard on a movie but I wanted it to be so much better than it was and I could see many ways that it could have been improved and been a genuinely scary film. Uninhabited was “inspired by actual events” and sold as a horror, buy it wasn’t scary. Any potential for scares was handled badly, unless you like the typical jump moment, of which there was one. The score confused.

Was it the girl/ghost singing or part of the soundtracks? As for the ghosts, the individuals playing them looked like ordinary human beings. There was no direction helping to make the ghosts come across as deadly or otherworldly.

The cinematography was stunning. My advice to the filmmakers? By all means carry on the filming career, but stick to filming travelogues, not pseudo-art horrors.

3 out of 10 (Wayfarer)

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