Wake Wood

Starring: Aidan Gillen, Eva Birthistle, Timothy Spall, Ella Connolly

Synopsis:

In an attempt to cope with the grief and despair of losing their only child Alice (Ella Connolly), mauled to death by a savage dog, veterinarian Patrick Daly (Gillen) and his pharmacist wife Louise (Birthistle) move from the city to the remote Irish village of Wake Wood. With Patrick taking over the local vet’s practice and Louise working in the village chemist store, the couple soon become friends with many of the local landowners, farmers and their families.

Their acceptance as members of this small but close community leads them to the discovery of an ancient pagan ritual practised by the people of Wake Wood in order to help ease the sudden loss of a loved one. This tradition, secretly preserved for many centuries, enables the grief-stricken to bring a deceased person back from the dead for a period of three days within one year of their passing, allowing them to say a final farewell to the departed before they make their final journey to the spirit world. For Patrick and Louise, this represents a miraculous opportunity to see Alice one more time and their request for the villagers’ help in realising their wish is reluctantly granted. But the ritual is bound by strict rules and conditions, which, if broken, demand a terrible price be paid.

I’ll hold my hands up immediately and say that this type of horror movie just isn’t for me. After reading lines from professional reviewers, as in those that are paid by publications to review, and it’s their day job, I was primed and ready to watch a superior horror movie from the resurrected and much loved film studio: Hammer.

After a tense, horrific, opening that must resonate with any parents watching, I found myself losing interest quite quickly. The two leads are fairly bland and uninteresting. Having not seen the actors in anything else, I don’t know if this was the quality of the writing or their acting skills. I’d gamble that it was the writing as I found it way off on a number of occasions. As they’re a grieving couple (which is the whole point of the movie; their desperation and how it drives the plot forward, inexorably to its sad conclusion) there’s not much evidence of what they are like normally They were convincing on the whole and I believed in their plight and why they might break the rules of the ritual.

Ella Connolly gave a good account of herself as Alice but the scenes of her “afterlife” just weren’t scary enough. The actress was clearly protected (and rightly so) from the carnage her character carried out, so I felt detached from the murders when they occurred. The editing of those particular scenes didn’t seem tight enough. What Miss Connolly does do superbly is the initial creepiness as it becomes clear that something is wrong with her return.

Timothy Spall, is an actor I’ve admired for years and ever since I saw him in the original series of Auf Weidersen Pet; here he just seems to be picking up the cheque with little or no interest in the role. I was surprised how an actor of his calibre can come across as ordinary, despite what the character is involved with. Thankfully, though Mr Spall didn’t go the other way with the role and play it too flamboyant.

The screenplay seems lacking in something. It almost hits the mark a number of times, as in it almost evokes atmosphere, and it almost invokes sympathy for the characters. The trouble is that it introduces a number of interesting things and never follows through with any depth. It’s as if the writer thought “That’s a good idea, I’ll put that in but as I can’t think of any background history for the ritual, I won’t put it in the film. The audience won’t care”. Well, I did care. There were enough interesting elements to the story that could have been fleshed out, such as why the village had this power in the first place. I’m guessing that it’s the budget that restricted the movie from fulfilling its obvious potential.

What the movie does do well is the atmosphere of the village and the gore. The locations are wisely chosen and evoke the isolation of Wake Wood. This is effectively sign posted by the wind farm on the village’s limits that indicate the point at which the family, eventually, could not go beyond without serious repercussions. The film doesn’t shy away from the red stuff; from the genuinely disturbing death of Alice through to her murder spree. As a completed movie it just doesn’t tick all the horror boxes for me. However, it’s still miles better than a lot of the teen horror dross that is imported from across the pond and different enough from the J-horror we’ve enjoyed over the past decade. Hammer is alive and well and just needs a bit more money.

Summary

If I appear to be hard on this movie (given that it has been well received generally) then it’s a fault of the pre-publicity again, making a movie sound far better than it is. Had I not known of comparisons between Pet Sematary and The Wicker Man, I might not have gone in at least expecting some of the suspense from those two movies. Pet Sematary wasn’t a classic but it did have some suspenseful scenes. Reading quotes like “spellbindingly eerie and deliciously grotesque” excited me into thinking that Wake Wood was going to be a different kind of movie.

Like the recently released Damned Before Dawn, Wake Wood is not a film I’d recommend but neither is it one I’d tell viewers to avoid. Reviews are of course opinions and it’s up to you to make your mind up if the premise sounds interesting to you. I think that Wake Wood could well spearhead a growing interest in Hammer, along with Let Me In and The Resident.

5 out of 10 (Wayfarer)

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