Three Films Make A Post: There's Only You And Your Dreams

Dad Savage (1998): The main selling point of Betsan Morris Evans’s thriller about greed and betrayal set in the British countryside is Patrick Stewart in one of his infrequent – and as usual in these cases clearly cherished - eccentric villain roles, though the rest of the cast with actors like Helen McCrory, Marc Warren and Kevin McKidd isn’t half bad either. The film’s trouble lies with a script that assumes you can make a simple story more dramatic by telling it in the most complicated, flash-back heavy manner available, where more time spent on actually fleshing out the characters would have done the film much more good. I also found myself not terribly fond of the film’s chamber piece aspirations, where everything that isn’t a flashback consists of the characters trapped with each other to enable loads of overtly dramatic ACTING of the very shouty variety.

Dangerous Lies (2020): Whereas this dreadful Netflix production by Michael Scott should be so lucky to actually have aspirations on things like theatricality. It’s a psychological thriller whose characters have all the depth of those of a daytime soap, played by the sort of young and pretty things not experienced enough to provide depth when the script doesn’t, shot in the bland style of a bad 90s TV movie and showing all the verve of a sleeping pill. It’s the kind of by the numbers filmmaking that really makes a boy think fondly of a less than successful film like Dad Savage because that one’s actually trying to do something interesting, whereas Dangerous Lies is just as generic and boring as its title.

La terre et le sang aka Earth and Blood (2020): Of course – and I know I am repeating myself here – originality isn’t everything. Case in point today is Julien Leclercq’s fine French Netflix production that goes through a lot of the typical motions of movies about middle-aged men violently protecting their daughters. But Leclercq knows where to add specificity to his clichés, understands about the importance of the telling detail to sparse characterisations, and has absolute control about the pacing of his film. The cast led by Sami Bouajila is pretty great too, applying care and intelligence where others would go through the motions.


The film’s also admirably brutal and ruthless, not in a gratuitous way, but one simply unwilling to be nice for nicety’s sake. This would make a rather instructive double bill with Netflix’s Braven, a pretty similar film that does everything wrong this one does right.

The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death (2014)

While I liked Hammer’s first Woman in Black movie quite a bit, I find it difficult to come up with much to praise about Tom Harper’s sequel. Oh, it’s not a truly bad movie – it’s obviously made by professionals (it’s the “everything’s technically alright” non-praise) – but it’s painfully uninspired, as slight as a puddle, and without much of an imagination. While the film’s cornucopia of flaws aren’t truly painful, there’s very little it actually does right. Oh, who am I kidding? This thing’s actually pretty dreadful, just in the deeply boring way that comes with technical competence.

At least, it becomes bad quickly once Angel has finished establishing its plot (such as it is) as taking place during 1941 – which is a genuinely good idea a better film could have done a lot with and at least shows the makers didn’t just want to make the first movie again - and concerning the misadventures of two teachers and a group of evacuee children who are for reasons that never will make any damn sense brought to Eel Marsh House and will therefore be threatened by our titular ghost as known from movie number one. Obviously she fixates on the mute traumatised member of the child cast, because having the kid thusly stricken makes the stakes automatically higher without the film actually having to do the hard work of involving its audience through mysterious feats like sharp characterisation.

Alas, it’s pretty difficult to believe these children would have been brought to a place this much of a ruin, and this isolated from the outside world, and the rest of the film won’t be getting much more logical. It is really less a lack of logic here, I think, but rather one of world building, as if the film assumes it’s enough to make vague gestures towards the horrors of 1941 but never bothers to make the 1941 the characters walk through a fictional reality. There’s a lack of internal coherence here in other regards too that I find rather maddening – the characters’ various traumas never add up to anything more but to an opportunity for one or two scenes of crying, the film’s haunting makes little sense (and not in the way the supernatural is supposed not to make sense), and the finale is just inexplicable in its utter randomness. Actually, come to think of it, I’m being too nice to what really is lazy writing, an unwillingness to examine the formulas used, that just reproduces crap screenwriter Jon Croker (Susan Hill is credited with “story” here, but I don’t think she’s responsible for much more than the setting) saw in other films, loose ends and bad ideas flapping in the wind.

Of course, I’ve praised films with worse scripts and even praised them for their lack of coherence, but Angel does not show any interest in being dream-like or anything of that sort at all, it just prefers to not really make sense and not be very interesting. Harper’s direction doesn’t improve my impression, for while it is basically professional, it is also as uninspired as the rest of the film, with the supposed spooky scenes by numbers stuff, some dubious ideas about how to light scenes (apart from a few nearly effective shots of twilight grey landscape, everything here is either too dark or too bright to a degree it is nearly comical), leaving me with the general feeling of watching a slightly more costly TV movie. Of course, the first TV movie that comes to mind in this case, a certain Woman in Black, was much more atmospherically directed (as well as intelligent, coherent, and emotionally involving), for much less money and made in much less time than this one here.

And of course there are jump scares, too, all just as thought through as the rest of the film, which is to say, not very much.

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