The influence of Jordan Peele’s mighty Get Out lingers behind this enigmatic British sci-fi horror, with its stricken black hero, while white folk get up to insane things in basements; thanks to the often frontal framing, there is something in the visual style too. The difference is that race is an unspoken subtext here, completely submerged somewhere inside the atmosphere of dissociated trauma.
Tobi King Bakare plays William, adopted child of Richard (Sightseers’ Steve Oram), who emerges wheelchair-bound and mute from a coma after an unspecified accident. He returns home to complete his physical and mental recovery, afflicted by white-hot flashbacks to speeding roads. His dad seems doting and solicitous, but is disturbingly evasive about his mother Amelia (Ramona Von Pusch); she is also convalescing, but apparently refusing to leave her bedroom and greet her son.
Sebastien Blanc, directing his first feature, maintains a cool starkness that helps the initial tension-building, as William tries to piece together his broken psyche while playing sleuth over the glaring absence on the home front. In sharp relief against the wipe-clean spaces of the house, Bakare’s deft, mime-like performance telegraphs his helplessness and growing outrage in the first half. Consciousness and the nature of the mind are the film’s self-declared themes – but with William’s mother also appearing harpy-like in his visions, the sci-fi conceptual bunting here functions as a metaphor for something far more relatable: the subliminal guilt and resentment of arbitrary parent-child bonds, heightened by the adoption situation (referred to just once in the film) and perhaps by the race factor too.
After this disciplined beginning, Cerebrum dips into B-movie schlockiness (a throwback to 1962’s The Brain Who Wouldn’t Die, perhaps) when it is revealed what William has done and what Richard is planning. The film benefits greatly from Bakare’s economy, and also shrewd underplaying by Oram, callow and simpering, all the better to buff the horror. There is a fantastic scene in which he sits his son down and sensibly counsels: “I want you to close your eyes and visualise what’s troubling you, and then, I want you to laugh openly at it.” They do, and then some. Blanc’s debut is possessed by a promising madness.
• Cerebrum will be available on digital platforms on 3 July.
