ROTTERDAM 06! Elaine On THE LIVING AND THE DEAD!!

(Written and directed by Simon Rumley)

A trippy family drama with absurd, existentialist touches. That's how one could roughly paraphrase Simon Rumley's "The Living and the Dead", a nightmarish descent into hell by one of Britain's more promising directors.

The film opens moodily. An unkempt sixty-something man walks through a dark, seemingly uninhabited building which appears to stretch for miles. For some reason the building is full of wheelchairs, which gives it a very gloomy and depressing appearance. As one wonders who the man is, why the house looks the way it does, and to whom the discarded wheelchairs used to belong, the story moves back in time. The building, one learns, is Longleigh House, a magnificent but decrepit estate somewhere in modern England; the man, it turns out, is its owner, the reclusive and impoverished Lord Brocklebank (Roger lloyd-Pack), who lives in the house with his ailing wife Nancy (Kate Fahy) and his mentally challenged, possibly schizophrenic son James (Leo Bill). When the story opens, Lord Brocklebank is called to London to discuss the sale of the estate. His bed-ridden wife isn't too keen on his leaving her for a few days, but Lord Brocklebank tells her not to worry -- Nurse Mary will arrive the next morning to look after her and keep an eye on James. Only Nurse Mary never actually sets foot in the house, because the devious James has taken it into his head that he, being the man in the house, is going to look after his mother himself, and no, he doesn't need help from outsiders. And not only is he going to look after his mother himself, but he's going to make her better -- by force if he has to. For James is on a mission to prove to his parents that he's a responsible human being just like everyone else, and what better way to do this than to nurse his sick mother back to health?

So far, so regular family drama. However, there's more to “The Living and the Dead" than just a not-so-intelligent young man embarking on an ill-advised quest to prove himself. You see, Longleigh House just happens to be full of drugs. For starters, there are the vast amounts of pills James takes each morning to keep his mental illness at bay -- pills he soon stops taking and then starts taking again in wrong doses. And then there are all the hypodermic syringes in the fridge, full of stuff which is supposed to keep James calm in case of emergencies, but which actually seems to make him hallucinate. Left to his own devices, James develops quite a taste for the stuff in the syringes, to the point where he'll shoot up several times a day and lose touch with reality. All of which spells bad news for his mother, who now finds herself locked up with an increasingly erratic son -- a son who is obviously going mad, and may well be on the verge of getting dangerous. The question is, will Nurse Mary and/or Lord Brocklebank realise the gravity of the situation and return to Longleigh House in time to save the family from disaster?

"The Living and the Dead" is an excellent film with a palpable sense of dread. Right from the start, the viewer senses he is in for something gloomy. As the story unfolds, the vague sense of foreboding turns into a very obvious downward spiral, as chilling and inevitable as death itself. The tragic atmosphere is established early and maintained throughout the film. To a large extent, this is because of the powerful script, which moves from disaster to disaster at a nice and tidy pace and sets up each new turn of the story very effectively. But Rumley's also proves himself a master of direction. Not only does he get great performances out of his three leads (Leo Bill is particularly impressive as James), but he also has a wonderful eye for setting. He really makes the most of the enormous house he has at his disposal, using the long corridors, endless staircases and peeling wall-paper of Longleigh House to great effect as outward reflections of the Brocklebanks' fraying minds. Fabulous cinematography and flashy editing do the rest. Milton Kam's dark, drab and desaturated images superbly evoke the gloomy atmosphere of Longleigh House, which is falling apart as steadily as the family which owns it. Superb camera angles add to the visual impact. The same is true for the editing, which was inspired by Darren Aronofsky and Shinya Tsukamoto's films, and clearly betrays its influences. Initially, the ultra-fast, frantically trippy scenes in which James gets high jar; they seem at odds with the stately, old-fashioned, aristocratic feel of the rest of the movie. However, one soon gets used to the mad changes of pace, which provide an excellent glimpse into James' feverish mind. Eventually, the whole movie begins to feel like a bad trip – a superbly cinematic one, if a profoundly depressing one. And it never quite ceases to be trippy, for as the film draws to its close, it turns out that there are more ways to interpret the story than just the surface one -- more levels of reality than the one the viewer thinks he has just witnessed. Let's hear it for layered films, eh?

If there is anything negative to be said about "The Living and the Dead", it is that Rumley (a cinematographer himself) seems overly fond of time-lapse photography, which features heavily in the film. A nitpicker could also complain that the sound isn't always up to scratch (parts of the dialogue are hard to make out; James in particular is inaudible at times), but these are minor flaws in a powerful film which firmly establishes Rumley as a talent to watch.

Elaine