The Prey

Gut Reaction

The Prey
The Springhead Film Company 
UK 2015
Directed by James Webber
Coming Soon

I’ve seen a couple of James Webber’s short films over the past two years and I have to say, I do look forward to getting to look at each new one as it becomes available. Once again, I was lucky enough that the director let me see this new short ahead of its official screening and release dates and I’m, as always, very greatful for that.

This movie takes a totally different direction for the director, both in subject matter and tone. It’s nice to see this guy tackle a horror movie for a change and I was kinda curious as to how that idea would work out because the genre is not often noted for the subtlety of its emotional expression or less direct approach to traditional storytelling, which is something Webber’s Driftwood (reviewed here) and Soror (reviewed here) both have in spades. I knew I’d have no reason for concern though because he has a very direct way of communicating through a visual space and The Prey is nothing, if not direct. It also uses his understated and sly camera gaze to catch the profundity of what are, to be fair, broader but still quite amazing performances by the lead actors here... James Alexandrou, Sam Gittins and the amazing Rebecca Van Cleave.

The film has a strong opening with a car drive from an unsuccessful Halloween party switching back and forth between both of the occupant's view from inside and a shot looking in through the front windscreen. Which, okay, is nothing too special perhaps but it’s actually made quite potent by the way the sound design, sans music, kicks in and cuts away to the title of the movie. As the driver, Ethan (James Alexandrou), shouts at a man dressed as a skeleton, the film cuts to the credit with the sound of Ethan’s voice still echoing on the soundtrack, giving it a certain amount of power which I’ve not, consciously, been aware of having seen accomplished in this way before. So that was a bit of a surprise and much credit to Helen Miles, I guess, for the sound design on this thing.

This is all happening in the middle of an argument in the car dissecting the evening, between Ethan and his wife/girlfriend Mel (Rebecca Van Cleave) which, actually, gives a certain amount of foreshadowing as to the events that are about to unwind in the picture and, if you like this movie, I would recommend you going back to look at this little opening quarrel, with all it’s hostility and warning signs, again. This is, of course, a standard ‘horror movie set up’ because we then get the girl leaving the relative safety of both the car and her ride home, to go off and brave the journey alone and on foot, instead.

So then we have the start of what could be Mel’s long walk home through the night life of the urban sprawl, with Webber taking full advantage of the colours, with seemingly enhanced lighting throwing up different hues and backgrounds for the actress and her... watcher. A shadowy guy played by Sam Gittins who comes complete with a fast food carnality/predator metaphor and has his already cool performance enhanced even more by composer Richard Keyworth’s scoring kicking up into sinister mode.

There’s a brilliant moment here where Webber uses what I would call a directorial signature where the character is kinda honed in on with both camera movement repeats and the perceived proximity to the lens. We start off with an establishing shot of the character eating which is then followed by a tighter shot of him, with the camera panning to the right as his eyes track Mel walking along the opposite side of the street, going past. We then cut to an even closer shot of this urban predator’s eyes, with almost a Sergio Leone kind of intensity, but the camera is still moving in the exact same direction and the eyes are still tracking the girl... both at the same speed as the previous version of the shot.  We then get a few other variations of that kind of thing going on to further enhance the point and it’s a beautiful piece of focusing in on the sinister intentions of the guy which goes into the brain at an almost subconscious level. Seriously, a cool piece of almost imperceptible, yet powerful, cinematic shorthand there.

Gittins follows Mel with the obvious intention of doing her some harm... whether that be rape, murder, robbery or, you know, a thrilling combination of all three... but there is a moment during this next sequence that will surprise some of the audience and involves both predator and victim in a brilliant, almost wordless dialogue of the lead in to grisly death. The scene is beautifully done though, with a certain naturalism and throw-away quality to the performances of both Van Cleave and Gittins which gives the scene a certain reality and helps the viewer suspend disbelief… always a neat trick if you can pull it off and one of the first hurdles that lesser horror films fall at, a lot of the time.

The brilliant thing about this one is the amount of humour within the pay off scene too, as one of the three characters in the movie goes through a little transformation and both players in this sequence go through that nice little bit of non-verbal back and forth which says everything about the quality of the actors in this. The special effects and make up here by Mark Greensmith, Annie Tagge and Frances Darvell White are truly wonderful elements and the humour created with the unreality of a certain gory moment in a shot (involving someone's intestines) in terms of the way it's timed… another little throwaway which tiptoes the line between badly edited and, like it is here, edited with the tongue firmly in the cheek and as a shout out to fans of the genre… really made me chuckle. Of course, as far back as films like Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein, humour has always been a good bedfellow to the horror picture, and if thoughtfully done as it is here, the two opposing attitudes can enhance each other nicely.

The follow up moment to this, by one of the actors is, frankly, like a goryfied Wiley Coyote reaction in an old Warner Brothers Loony Toons cartoon but also mixed in with a gritty denouement and.. ahh… it's just brilliantly timed both in performance and cutting. I seriously don’t get why Webber isn't being picked up by Hollywood to waste his time on blockbusters by now. He’s a phenomenal director… no two ways about it.

The creature make up is both brilliant and the, presumably, odd moment of CGI involving the eyes of one of the characters, is quite phenomenally restrained yet gorgeously handled. There are little things done which elevate it past the monster effects on most modern movies I've seen… to be honest (something I really didn’t expect to find myself saying in regards to a short film). I was stunned and, frankly, it's rare that I get that excited about any monster design since the original Creature From The Black Lagoon so… this was a really nice thing.

As usual with Webber, the film is beautifully framed with the director using the actors placed within certain sections of their environment to highlight both them and the attitudes/atmospheres the director is trying to communicate. The film doesn't have the emotional subtlety of either Driftwood or Soror but, to be quite honest, it doesn't need it and it's obviously been deliberately jettisoned in a few sequences. There are certain things the music does well with backing up the underlying sexuality of the main pay-off (sex being another common bedfellow of the horror genre, of course) featuring a musical release after the foreplay and orgasm of the main sequences with a shot of one of the characters walking along to a musical piece faintly reminiscent of Dick Dale and the Deltones version of Misirlou... a piece called Stuck In The Swamp by The Creepfreaks. The instant it started, I felt like I was watching the post-victim, James Webber horror film version of somebody smoking a cigarette after sex… which is another thing which brought a smile to my face.

The film finishes with a nice, unpretentious punchline which doesn’t devalue the main feast of the film, like some writers manage to somehow do, and then we are at the end credits and Webber’s job is done. That job being to show the audience a thoroughly entertaining, mini horror film that looks outrageously fantastic on the kind of low budgets these things are made on and puts some modern horror film directors to shame. One day, I’m sure, I’ll find that Webber has made a movie which I don’t care for but, frankly, this film isn’t it and, like the two previous movies, the whole thing put a spell on me and kept me pulled in and entranced for the whole length of it. So... a James Webber directed short horror movie? Job well done!

You can see a trailer for The Prey here... https://vimeo.com/127254449

James Webber is on Twitter here and The Springhead Film Company’s facebook page is here... https://www.facebook.com/springheadfilm

Driftwood

Sink Or Swim?

Driftwood 2012 UK 
Written and Directed by James Webber
Produced by Meddy Ford and Freddy Green
Viewed at the request of the director.

If you’ve been reading my blog reviews for a while now, you’ll know that I started off with a general sense of creeping dread towards ‘short films’, but that the more exposure I’ve had to them over the last couple of years since I’ve been doing this, has allowed me to embrace the format a little more gladly. Don’t get me wrong. My three favourite shorts are still Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou, Svankmeyer’s Virile Games and Scorcese’s The Big Shave... but some of the films I’ve seen over the last couple of years by people like Leilani Holmes, Damien Cullen, Rouzbeh Rashidi and James Devereaux, to name a few, have really challenged my tired old “I can’t be bothered” attitude to this particular species of the art form.

I saw four shorts at BAFTA just over a week ago (review here) and, based on the qualities, such as they are, of that review, a director called James Webber DM’d me on Twitter to see if I wanted to take a look at his new short called Driftwood. I said “yes”, of course, being that I’m always genuinely flattered when someone can make it through reading one of my blog entries without gnawing their own legs off, and put in the proviso that, if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t review it... I don’t like to publish negative reviews of a film if a specific person involved with it has actually asked me to take a look at it.

Driftwood tells of a little episode in the life of a young man training to be a competetive swimmer.

It starts off with a slow, but steady, pan/reveal of the central character, Sam (played by Sam Gittins) in a swimming pool changing room. This is cut (almost violently, in terms of sheer agressive editing) to a shot dollying in from the front of the character and the juxtaposition of this relatively speedy shot combined with the look of determination on Sam’s face when he looks up as the camera closes in on him, gives one a real sense of the dogged, self-motivation of the character. This guy wants to win and it’s interesting because that sense of fluid, forward momentum created with the movement of the camera continues during the opening credits, which are intercut with similar set ups showing a relatively static person (static in his own space) combined with this constant state of motion, or ‘moving forward’ from the camera.

It’s actually very powerful because you can almost feel the central character, and the film for that matter, storing up its potential energy by expressing it with a kinetic camera eye, so to speak. Waiting to pounce on you once the credits have finished. Sure enough, as the story starts proper, the stillness of the central character stops (mostly) and we have three parts of the story intercut with each other, each working through in a linear fashion but each part filling in little bits of information about Sam as the camera eye moves back and forth between one part of his story and another, before returning to a fourth, bookending, slice of the story (for want of a better word).

It’s long been my belief that you don’t need everything (or sometimes even anything) spelled out for you in movies and the short film format proves this again and again. Driftwood, throughout, uses the central character and observations about him as you see little details of a bigger story, to give you all the information you need to give incidents an overall shape in your mind. As it cuts between a session with Sam’s trainer played by Brandy Doubleday, a run in with a bully and his gang of thugs, and Sam’s problematic, abusive father, played by the excellent Neil Maskell (who I knew from his outstanding performance in last year’s Kill List, reviewed here)... before reuniting with the opening of the picture to bring us the actual event that Sam has been training for... you are given the chance to ponder the little connections between the events that happen on screen.

Questions like why his father has become abusive and why Sam has become like he is, for example, are referred to in both the sequence with his father and in the run in with the gang of hoodlums. The implications of death and loss are visibly portrayed without ever implicitly stating or overstating what the audience will pick up on. Other details, like the nasty scarring on Sam’s back which his trainer is so obviously concerned with, are left for the viewers to make a decision on for themselves, as to the source of this wound.

This is, I’m happy to say, like a lot of independently produced films outside of a big studio system... not a passive experience for anyone watching. This is how more films should be, giving the audience a little more of an interactive role with the flickers of light and sound beaming into their souls at 24 frames per second and, I’m glad to say, that the end of this film will not wrap everything up in a neat little parcel of ‘closure’ for you. This is a short that doesn’t want to pander to you or spoonfeed your mind but grab you by the collar and ask you to really respond to what you’re seeing. And this short, in particular, does contain a certain amount of, what I like to call, ‘power between the frames’. It’s beautifully shot, well performed, has a nice score which is reflective of the sense of a character drifting from one situation to the next (as suggested by the film’s title and also by the style of the shooting and editing... if I was paying attention to what I was seeing properly) and which also gives you a sense of building to transition within composer Richard Keyworth’s notes, like a caterpillar emerging from it’s cocoon as almost a new species. This, naturally, highlights the ultimate promise of Sam’s original look of wilful determination, foreshadowed straight away in what is only the second shot of the film.

The ‘to-ing’ and ‘fro-ing’ of the camera movement and the rhythmic editing style pull the viewer in to the film almost hypnotically and won’t let you go until the short running time has ended up exactly at the point where the director wants you to finish filling in the blanks, so to speak. This is a really great use of cinematic syntax that will keep your mind occupied and, dare I say it, entertained to the point where you may find yourself haunted by it once the film has stopped running. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t an epic and, obviously, the nature of the short film format kind of precludes that kind of accomplishment anyway (you watch, someone will go and prove me wrong now), but it is a very satisfying and, ultimately, extremely watchable piece of moviemaking. It just shows the incredible talent we have here in the UK working on such great, unsung gems who need to be given the money to make their own feature length movies. So if you find yourself in a position to give Driftwood a watch, then it certainly comes with my recommendation. Anybody who can work the visuals like this, whether it be the story of a swimmer in training or whatever else is in the writer’s head, deserves a larger audience and a bigger budget to bring their vision to the world.

So it’s a big thank you from me to this particular director for doing me the honour of letting me watch his new work. And I’m also really glad I didn’t hate it. ;-)

Follow the director on twitter here and check out the film-maker’s website here.http://www.fingercuffproductions.co.uk/