As a genre where leading lights have frequently made waves with no budgets and projects knocked together over a few weekends, horror is always a good call for young filmmakers. Hence we were terrifically excited when 2009 brought a raft of indigenous horror flicks then crushed when none of them made the grade.
It’s not as easy as it looks, is it chaps? Too often, a director imagines that repeat viewings of Don’t Look Now and The Wicker Man is all the schooling required. But as countless big budget Hollywood remakes have shown, horror is impossible to fake. You need to live and breathe giallo and Hitchcock. You need to hunt down VHS copies of The Slayer And Scalps. You need to think like Eli Roth.
That’s why the lamentable Irish psyche-out Dorothy Mills was released without a press show for one week only last month. And that’s why The Daisy Chain, the new film from Aisling Walsh, the acclaimed director of Songs For A Raggy Boy, fails to convince.
The plot needs no introduction. A couple (Samantha Morton and Steven Mackintosh) mourning the death of their baby daughter decide to compound their miseries by moving to a creepy remote Irish village and adopting a young autistic child who the maggoty locals believe to be a changeling.
This potentially interesting take on the Bad Seed milieu veers wildly between social realism and the sort of heightened camp we’ve come to associate with Leprechaun movies. Even the reliable Morton can’t seem to get a handle on the material.
The result is vaguely engaging but never authentic.