The Gatehouse, 2016.
Directed by Martin Gooch.
Starring Scarlett Rayner, Simeon Willis, Linal Haft, Paul Freeman, Hannah Waddingham, Alix Wilton Regan, and Melissa Knatchbull.
SYNOPSIS:
Precocious ten-year old Eternity (Scarlett Rayner) lives in a gatehouse at the edge of an ancient forest with her father (Simeon Willis). She likes to dig for buried treasure in the woods, but one day she digs up something she shouldn’t and the forest wants it back.
You wait for one genre film about unwitting victims being picked off in the woods, and you get forests worth of flicks all at once. Following on from Blair Witch, The Woods, and the film with which this shares the closest DNA, in idea if not execution, Corin Hardy’s The Hallows, we get this micro-budgeted tale of schlocky horror.
Martin Gooch’s The Gatehouse is a drinking game’s worth of horror tropes, thrown together as a tonally haphazard monster mash.
We get mysterious locals who create a burgeoning sense of terror, in this instance a rather creepy turn from Andrew Caley as a gun-wielding landowner, who gives you the willies through a series of arched eyebrows and strange noises. Then there’s the drunken girls who stumble through the mist during the night, one of whom ends up becoming a pretty decent horror effect for the remainder of the film. And then there’s the monster, which does feel as though it has wandered from the set of M. Night’s The Village, but is effectively kept silhouetted for the duration. They’re all hokey elements, but they work.
In terms of scares, The Gatehouse goes for cat-in-the-cupboard jumps, but doesn’t allow room for any tension building. Spooks just appear, and then it’s cut to the next scene. There’s no sense of dread.
Equally unsuccessful are the strange attempts at humour, which undermine a lot of the horror. Most of the blame must be laid at the feet of Willis, who plays the single father as something of an insufferable jerk. We’re meant to feel for this guy, having lost his wife (depicted in an unintentionally hilarious flashback), but his dialogue is rather rote, and he gives us nothing to be empathic about. You wish the tree monster would pick him off first.
Similarly there’s a strange alphabet spaghetti piece of foreboding, and a scene in which the young protagonist (an enthusiastic Rayner) is electrocuted, which feels like it belongs in Home Alone 5.
The plot may be a bit wooden, but Gooch frames his film quite well. There are some neat shots, such as a small toast burning timelapse, a dead spider caught in a web, and an old coin on a windowsill, that are lovely scene setters. The impressive locale feels like it has been ripped straight from the pages of a James Herbert book, with Gooch giving it a couple of impressive backdrops, and there are hints at a Shining style descent into madness, which involves a bloody good scissorhands sequence, which is never really built upon.
It’s hard not to recommend a film that includes the following dialogue – “Is that ectoplasm? No, it’s sick” – or one that features a Raiders of the Lost Ark reference, but despite some decent monster-under-the-bed myth making, The Gatehouse is a rather rusty effort.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★
Matt Rodgers
