Sick Product of a Sick System

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Nothing like going into something blind and having it blow your socks off. This is some emotionally brutal stuff, the last film to kick me in guts like this was Session 9 (which this shares some DNA with, along with The Babadook, The Shining and, peculiarly, Withnail & I). Leo Bill's performance seemed a little too mannered at first, but I bought into it after a little while, from there on in it felt devastatingly authentic. Bleak as it undoubtedly is, director Simon Rumley balances tragedy and comedy so perfectly that it often blurs the line between the two, had he not nailed that balancing act so completely, I might not have got through the brisk 79 minute running time without wanting to go outside and lay down in the road. Really, really excellent stuff, going to have to give Rumley's follow up Red, White and Blue a look now.

I blind bought this mistakenly thinking it was some kind of zombie flick (put the words 'living' and 'dead' in a film's title and I automatically think of zombies), but I couldn't have been more wrong. The Living and the Dead actually deals with the all-too-real horrors of schizophrenia, and the terrible impact that such a condition can have on a family.Roger Lloyd-Pack plays Lord Donald Brocklebank (not 'bottlebank', as I first thought), financially challenged owner of a run-down stately home, father of grown-up schizophrenic son James (Leo Bill), and husband to critically ill, bed-ridden Nancy (Kate Fahy). When Donald leaves the family home for a few days to sort out finances, James—keen to show his father how capable he can be—takes it upon himself to look after his mother, barricading the house against her nurse.Of course, James proves to be a far from ideal carer, unable to adequately look after himself, let alone his mother; as time goes on, his schizophrenia goes from bad to worse, exacerbated by a careless approach to self-medication. Slowly, he becomes a danger to both himself and his mother.Although The Living and the Dead is far from what one would traditionally term as 'horror', trust me when I say that what writer/director Simon Rumley depicts in this film is terrifying. Watching a person gradually descend into a personal hell and turn against his mother is harrowing enough, but there is also the suffering endured by Nancy due to her own illness: in one memorably nasty moment, the poor woman suffers the humiliation of soiling her bed, being carried to the bathroom covered in her own crap, and stripped naked by her son. Another very unsettling scene shows James injecting himself with anti-psychotic drugs, jamming the needles into his arm, leaving them jutting from his skin, and then having a turn and knocking them sideways. Yowch!In a bold move by Rumley, the story then enters territory that REALLY messes with the mind: the visuals become totally chaotic and it becomes unclear as to what is reality and what is delusion. It also emerges that the story is being told using the 'unreliable narrator' style, coming from several viewpoints and casting doubt on the accuracy of all we have seen. This 'alternate perception' technique, which implies that Donald may be the one who is mentally ill, not his son, might lead to lots of confusion and uncertainty, but since we're dealing with the subject of schizophrenia, it seems an apt treatment.So... to summarise: no ambling undead, but plenty of ambiguity; no gut munching, but a visceral experience nonetheless; and no bullets to the brain, but enough emotionally distressing and downbeat content to scramble the viewer's mind for a while.7.5 out of 10, rounded up to 8 for IMDb.

I think it would be fair to say The Living and the Dead had me held in some sort of blind terror for more often than not. The film is so outrageous in the places it goes and the manner in which it acts when it gets there, that it's impossible to merely put aside the watching experience having seen it. The film is a freak-show, yes, of characters; visual tricks and constructed scares, but a calculated and carefully constructed one: one that I think will tap into a nerve within, whether you're a veteran of many-a horror films or not. The film is something like a little under an hour and half long, but when it had ended, felt as if it had clocked in at something like three hours; such is the grip of terror and unease I was in. Like a hypnosis session in which you're out for the count for all of about thirty minutes, but the deep-rooted places you may have been to during that time unearthing such discomfort and a sense of feeling, that the whole process feels like half a day's gone by.The film's premise sees it set up a perilous exchange between a middle aged mother and her twenty-something son in a large, pre-modern and isolated house in the country. She's physically unwell, suffering from some sort of extreme form of M.E. whilst he's a scatty, eccentric schizophrenic whose mannerism; movements and vocal tone is wildly inconsistent and unnerving. The mother is Nancy (Fahy), the son is James (Bill) and the family name is Brocklebank; something that I think instills a certain amount of pride into the household as father and husband of the piece Donald (Lloyd-Pack) seems to furiously defend them and their right to house there by way of a number of conversations over the phone with someone. It's this someone Donald must leave the property to venture out and see, and it's from here that most of the trouble unfolds.The film's tone is unbearably downbeat, beginning in the present tense with a greyed out Donald covered in injuries as he observes an ambulance advance down his property's long, lonely driveway towards him. His face is glum, rueful and regretful and a perfect teeing up for the events the film covers in instilling a sense that something's up: he's thinking that leaving that final time was a big mistake. In flashing back to better times, certainly the best times either of these characters find themselves in throughout the film, it's revealed Donald cared for both his wife and son accordingly; with the early exchanges coming across as calm and methodical in their feeling and construction what with static camera work and long takes. This is in stark contrast to when James takes over as the self proclaimed "man of the house", a title actor Leo Bill does well in his character's mixture of pleading and exclaiming, in what is a desperate attempt to try and prove to his parents that he's able to take on responsibility. The danger signs in this lie within the fact his strict medication diet of various pills and vaccine shots sit uneasily with the fact he's commanded by his father to hide from visitors and avoid the newspaper, instilling a certain child-like sensibility to him and acting as triggers to stoke a fire of warning.Leo Bill plays James as a sort of pastiche of Rik Mayall's character from popular 1990's British TV show 'Bottom', only rendered schizophrenic and far more mentally ill. Early on, I wondered if the man had an agenda; whether or not he was at all homicidal and indeed hated his mother which added to an intense element of unease. As the film switches perspectives in carer, a gradual shift in emphasis onto James becomes apparent in the conventions writer/director Simon Rumley applies. In switching from a mainly static camera complete with long takes which took prior precedence, Rumley then throws sped-up footage; bizarre angles; editing as well as distorted sound effects which amalgamate to form odd music into the mix, getting across a sense of chaos and somebody seriously ill-suited for the task. Rumley's tactics of applying a disorientating and off the wall aesthetic to most of the scenes James' acts as carer beautifully but disturbingly conflicts in a highly effective manner with this large, decrepit, centuries old manor house with which you do not associate the given conventions.There are killings in the film; somebody gets knifed and there's a fair degree of blood running on a premise that sees it bed down in one place as terror and uncanniness plays out, but don't let that lead you to think this is a Halloween sequel or some similarly underwhelming slasher film. One sequence which goes a long way in highlighting this odd combination of techniques and conventions to actually form something half-decent occurs nearer the end when, isolated and on their own, a young female supporting character creeps through the dark passages and corridors of the home unaware of what lurks around them but knowledgeable that there's a male lead, somewhere, who could very well react negatively if he sees or finds her. The whole thing is constructed like an age-old sequence in a slasher-sub genre flick, but the film sets a bar far higher. Roger Lloyd-Pack does a superb job, banishing any lingering memory you might have of him in a prior comedic role as we observe his envisaging of what might very well have gone on during his absence. Rumley's film is not all about shocks and scares; a sequence later on in which many family members have gathered in the house's main area is shot from high on up in the rafters, the camera just too embarrassed or ashamed to go to ground level and capture these people's expressions and reactions. I found The Living and the Dead to be a smart and affecting film.

A preference of director Simon Rumley for this film's title before its release was THE LIVING IN THE HOME OF THE DEAD since the work that he formulated is based round his potent emotional reactions to the death of his mother from cancer, an exhausting event for Rumley as well as for the disease's victim. The film will be at least in part artistically inaccessible to those viewers who will be uncomfortable watching a rather nauseous compendium of scenes filled with the actions of an obvious madman, in addition to unbridled drug usage, gore, feces, and vomitus. For the most part, Rumley employs a brilliantly expressionistic method in order to reflect his repugnance at recollecting the dismal three month decline into death of his mother, with his intent here obviously being communication to viewers of his ruinous sense of incertitude and bewilderment, quite conventional states for one observing another person gradually perish. Because there is no particular linear aspect to the narrative, the tone of the film steadily becomes surreal, with incongruous and often ostensibly senseless scenes born from a nightmarishly burdened subconscious, and while handling of this type of episode seems at times laboured and in poor taste, a viewer should be aware of the internal flaying that became a primary determinant for the piece. Shot in only eighteen days within the voluminous Cardigan Savernake House in Wiltshire, England, using eight of the derelict structure's 250 rooms, the picture is efficiently crafted by director, cast and crew, and offers a bravura turn from Leo Bill playing as addled son of a dying woman. The film was in reality constructed during post-production editing, and there will be precious little for a majority of viewers to like, since the affair plainly is too repellent for most audiences. None the less, one looks forward to whatever the talented Rumley will provide next, now that this purgative production has been completed.