A vet (Essie Davis) arrives on a remote Irish farm to do what vets in movies always have to do – stick her hand up a cow’s arse. Something feels wrong. Perplexed, she pokes about before – ouch – she gets bitten. By something. It’s a neat subversive moment, quite typical of Billy O’Brien’s delightfully nasty horror.
One could, if inclined, with supposed high-mindedness, make lots of observations about Isolation. Like Adam And Paul, it promises a new maturity following the look-at-our-wad cinema of recent times, preferring blood and shit to metrosexuals. Like the excellent incoming Middletown, it fantasises around the trauma of being stuck in the middle of Nowhere, Ireland. Like Dead Meat, it displays an uncanny acquaintance with genre.
Located somewhere at the nexus between horror and science fiction, Isolation imaginatively transplants the squelching grand guignol of Alien onto a desolate Hibernian landscape. John Lynch, making for a convincingly mournful protagonist, plays a farmhand working for a bovine genetic technology company. It hardly needs to be said that the experiments quickly Frankenstein into murderous catastrophe or that the farm’s few visitors – including Ruth Negge’s Final Girl - are greeted by gloopy spectacle.
But Billy O’ Brien injects these standards with superbly suspenseful timing and a splendid sense for ickiness - byres and barns house a multitude of unsanitary propositions. Only in certain celebrated J-horrors has water seemed so murky, so vile. And cows, here the plausible agents of destruction, seem more menacing than Romero’s equally dim-witted and slow-moving killers.
Even the nuts and bolts of the film exhibit an exemplary gleam - exposition and dialogue are, astutely, kept to a minimum. Performances are understated and sharp. And clever framing allows us to buy into the monster at large.
By the time Mr. O’Brien is done, we’ll never think the words ‘idyll’ and ‘rural’ in the same sentence again.