‘Forty-five thousand years ago …” So begins this ambitious, confident feature debut from Scottish director Andrew Cumming. It’s a horror movie set in the stone age where a poor old early human is yomping about the Highlands in winter; no Gore-Tex or warm pub, just a tough bit of elk meat to chew on and the odd run-in with a hairy Neanderthal. What a god-awfully grim time to be alive – even before things go bump in the night.
The premise is simple: this movie is “Alien in the stone age”. It begins with six intrepid early humans washing up on a Highlands beach, all of them quickly and efficiently sketched out as characters. Adem (Chuku Modu) is in charge and evidently sees himself as a mighty leader of men. He’s travelling with family: his pregnant partner (Iola Evans), son, and younger brother. Beyah (Safia Oakley-Green), a teenage “stray”, is with them; she’s no relation to anyone, which makes her vulnerable (“strays eat last”). Finally, there’s a wily old adviser who starkly warns that “cold, starvation and bloodthirsty things” await them in this new land.
All of which comes to pass. As they sit around the campfire, terrifying noises emerge from the forest; something out there in the dark wants them dead. And for a while Cumming’s film really touches a nerve; for the first half it’s super tense, before the pace dips in the second and it goes off the boil.
That said, miraculously this film is never silly. The recreation of stone age life feels unexpectedly convincing – partly I suspect, because of the sensible decision to have the actors speak a made-up stone age language instead of English (bolted together, apparently, from bits of Arabic, Basque and Sanskrit). It left me in awe of the survival instinct: how on earth did humans make it through those cold, bloody old times? I’d hurl myself into the nearest loch.
• Out of Darkness is in UK cinema|s from 23 February.
