sneersnipe film review

International Film Festival Rotterdam 2006

The Living and the Dead Simon Rumley UK 2006

Simon Rumley’s film The Living and the Dead delivers a psychological kick to the teeth. A renegade heritage film which is diseased and then turns nasty, it briefly bursts out from the crowd.

What sets Rumley’s film apart is the well exploited expectation gap between setting and visual style. It’s set in the dregs of a presumably once great English country house. The house still stands but its interior looks like an institution. There is barely any furniture and as we are soon to discover barely any inhabitants. Just the Brocklebanks - Donald, Nancy and their grown-up son James. A shot of a suit of armour guarding a threshold flanked with radiators says it all really. The supposedly great name of Brocklebank has seen better days and, in true aristocratic blue blooded cliché, the heir apparent is mentally deficient. All Rumley lets us see of the house is the kitchen and the bedrooms in between a maze of unfurnished halls and dank corridors. At night meanwhile an illusion of former grandeur is created as light beams out from every available window of this vacant shell.

At its heart The Living and the Dead is a psychiatric horror film bolstered by a strong visual sense. It has much in common with other misguided Munchausen syndrome by proxy films from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane to Misery. The medical profession often do unspeakable things to us with our consent, on the agreement that they will make us better. Abusing this trust naturally makes for an effective source of horror, as when a carer ends up torturing their patient.

Son James has some severe but non-clarified psychological condition that leaves him in a childlike state, an aggressive, boisterous infant with the height and strength of an adult man. His mother Nancy is also seriously ill, in body, and confined to her bed. Father Donald holds everything together tending for both spouse and son, as he traipses around his empty mansion. When Donald has to leave for a few days James decides that he wants to look after his mother. So much so that he bolts all the doors when the nurse hired to help arrives. He then skips his medication and the nightmare begins.

Rumley shows psychiatric disorder vividly, a mental cacophony in the Darren Aronofsky mode (Requiem for a Dream) created by taking less drugs, not more. Disorientating fast forwards with drum-machine instrumentation that almost heads into white noise explodes out into the seemingly sedate country setting as James’ daily routine rapidly deteriorates. Pills in the morning and injections last thing before bed. Take one away and it all falls to pieces. The visual chaos then escalates into medical horror as James spirals out of control but still tries to care for his mother. Notable scares for anyone familiar with nursing someone include James trying to bathe his mother whilst he becomes distracted elsewhere or trying to feed the poor lady pills by the plateful under the misapprehension that if one pill has a small positive effect, many surely must be better.

After the storming basic premise extinguishes itself Rumley struggles valiantly to cure his nightmare with false lulls of security and prolonged dream sequences that despite considerable inventiveness (the image of Roger Lloyd Pack with a melted candle on his head is unforgettable) can’t follow the raw power of the opening half. Keeping the setting mostly in the family home works well but occasionally the film suffers because of this. The mother’s operation takes place at home for instance; an unusual decision at best, and certainly a costly one for an impoverished family. The casting is strong though and British character actor Roger Lloyd Pack as patriarch Donald Brocklebank gives a very restrained performance that holds the piece together well throughout.

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