Sight&Sound - 04.2020

REVIEWS

66 | Sight&Sound | April 2019

Reviewed by Trevor Johnston

Nick Rowland’s first feature is adept enough

dramatically to prompt sustained agony in

watching its protagonist make the wrong

decision. Most people around ex-boxer Douglas

‘Arm’ Armstrong take him for a none-too-smart

thug-for-hire, yet a career-making performance

from Cosmo Jarvis convinces the viewer that

goodness lurks beneath his brawny frame. Instead

of embracing his estranged partner and their

troubled five-year-old son, however, he sticks by

his criminal paymasters, who have him doing

their dirtiest work for them. When his decency

gets the better of him and he lets one pitiful

assigned victim off the hook, we fear that his

good deed will not go unpunished – and that

pretending all has gone to murderous plan may

not be his smartest move in the circumstances.

On one side, there’s a devoted mother

and an innocent little boy with behavioural

problems; on the other, lawless, drug-dealing

villains with no loyalty outside their benighted

family unit – an opposition so schematic it’s

a wonder the film just about gets away with

it. However, if the construction is as basic as

a set of self-assembly furniture instructions,

the movie’s deep investment in character and

milieu makes it a worthwhile exercise for its

debut helmer, strong cast and able crew.

Reviewed by Kim Newman

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ (1872) is the

second-most-filmed vampire story, but seldom

very faithfully. Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932),

notionally based on the novella, takes almost

nothing from it, while Roy Ward Baker’s lushly

lurid Hammer outing The Vampire Lovers (1970)

is unusual in sticking reasonably closely to the

plot. The high concept that’s usually embraced

in Carmilla movies is the lesbian relationship of

vampire and victim, though Le Fanu’s also stresses

the ‘cuckoo in the nest’ story of a stranger taken

in by and seducing/transforming/destroying

a bourgeois household. As such, Jean Renoir’s

Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932) and Katt

Shea Ruben’s Poison Ivy (1992) are nearer to the

Le Fanu than such vampiric extrapolations as

Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses (1960) and Vicente

Aranda’s The Blood Spattered Bride (1972).

Writer-director Emily Harris shifts the story

from Austria to England and introduces an

unusual ambiguity about whether the peculiar

and provocative Carmilla, taken in by the

widowed Dr Bauer and his daughter Lara, is

really a vampire or simply happens to seem like

one. Dogs shun her, she sleeps late, her closeness

to Lara leads to a red-lipped blood-sister pact

(crucially, Lara tastes Carmilla’s blood first), and

she’s mysterious in her origins. This is enough

to persuade older authority figures, but perhaps

not the audience, that she needs to have a stake

pounded through her heart. Lara’s governess,

usually played as a minor victim – Kate O’Mara

in The Vampire Lovers – is portrayed here with

tight-lipped concern by Jessica Raine as a version

of the narrator of ‘The Turn of the Screw’,

jumping to supernatural conclusions informed

by her own repressed desires and neuroses. Even

before Lara might be tempted by lesbianism or

vampirism, Raine’s Miss Fontaine ties the girl’s

hand behind her back to school her out of being

left-handed – a condition she deems satanic.

In its comparative lack of melodrama, its stress

on casual cruelty, gloomy pastoral interludes, hints

of night-time sensuality and lived-in/on-location

period look, this Carmilla almost pastiches the

The small-town west of Ireland settings look

miserably unwelcoming, and cameraman Piers

McGrail drains any tourist-board glow from the

landscapes, making it all dismayingly believable

that miscreants such as the Devers clan should

lord it over this forlorn territory. For all that,

we’re not exploring precisely social-realist terrain

here but a heightened version thereof, even if

pop-culture-slanted conversations seem too like

a Tarantino-esque box-ticking exercise, and the

blazing red filter over a tense nightclub scene

feels too heavy on the cinematic highlighter pen.

In fact, it’s the gentler, more poetic moments

that sing here, especially the scenes where the

otherwise unsettled little boy has a soothing

workout at the riding stables under health-service

supervision. Niamh Algar excels in the slightly

thankless part of the boy’s mother, nurturing

him with a fierceness that speaks of strong

emotions; meanwhile, American-born Jarvis

copes admirably with the rural Irish accent and

turns in a hugely touching display in an extended

final-reel take, as self-knowledge beckons very

late in the day. Elsewhere, Barry Keoghan, as two-

faced underling Dympna, is even more slithery

than he was in The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017),

while Ned Dennehy mines some secret realm

of psychosis as scary Uncle Paudi. Functional as

drama it might be, but engagingly ornamented.

Calm with Horses

Director: Nick Rowland

Certificate 15 100m 32s

Carmilla

United Kingdom 2018

Director: Emily Harris

Certificate 15 94m 5s

Rural Ireland, present day. Former boxer Douglas ‘Arm’

Armstrong is hired muscle for the criminal Devers

family. After a teenage female cousin is molested at

a party, weaselly scion Dympna persuades Arm to

murder the perpetrator. Arm lets the victim flee but

pretends he’s killed him; the pay helps him support

his estranged partner Ursula and their five-year-

old son Jack, who has behavioural issues. Ursula

is about to move back to Cork to find a place in a

special school for the boy. Meanwhile, psychopathic

Devers uncle Paudi has discovered Arm’s lie. Arm

escapes after a shootout but is tracked down to a

nearby house, where patriarch Hector Devers is after

a wealthy widow’s stashed fortune. Arm confesses

his love for Ursula and Jack in a tearful phone call.

Paudi arrives, and Arm expects to be killed.

Producer

Daniel Emmerson

Written by

Joseph Murtagh

Based on the short

story Young Skins

by Colin Barrett

Director of

Photography

Piers McGrail

Editors

Nicolas Chaudeurge

Matthew Tabern

Production Designer

Damien Creagh

Music

Blanck Mass

Production

Companies

A DMC Film in

co-production with

Element Pictures

with the support

of Film4, Irish Film

Board, WRAP Fund

Executive Producers

Michael Fassbender

Conor McCaughan

Andrew Lowe

Ed Guiney

Sam Lavender

Daniel Battsek

Sue Bruce-Smith

Will Clarke

Mike Runagall

Celine Haddad

Sarah Dillon

Cast

Cosmo Jarvis

Douglas Armstrong,

‘Arm’

Barry Keoghan

Dympna Devers

Niamh Algar

Ursula Dory

Ned Dennehy

Paudi Devers

David Wilmot

Hector Devers

Kiljan Tyr Moroney

Jack Dory

Bríd Brennan

Maire Mirkin

Simone Kirby

June Devers

Anthony Welsh

Rob Hegardy

Ryan McParland

Needles

Liam Carney

Fannigan

In Colour

Distributor

Altitude Film

Distribution

Mercy rules: Cosmo Jarvis, Barry Keoghan

Clove actually: Hannah Rae, Devrim Lingnau

Credits and Synopsis