Here is a cheerfully ingenious lo-fi movie experiment from first-time feature director Joseph Archer and writer-performer Cathy Wippel; it’s a found-footage horror with hints of Blair Witch and Peeping Tom, set in the Victorian London of Jack the Ripper. The footage that’s been found, incidentally, is composed of unearthed reels of monochrome film from the 1880s, which we see entirely in a kinetoscope-style circular screen, flickering and glitching and buzzing with eerie accidental jump cuts from one weird scene to the next.
It was supposedly shot by an enterprising pioneer called Tamworth (we hear his voice from behind the camera, but never see his face), who, it becomes clear, is a sensational and until now unacknowledged genius of early cinema – in that he manages to record lip-sync sound on to wax cylinders so we can actually hear what everyone is saying. With a cheeky touch of implied black comedy, the film is suggesting that Tamworth was somehow able to carry his camera and recording equipment to these places of Victorian horror and underclass shame as easily as an iPhone.
