“Families are the scariest thing on the planet,” says a teenage girl in this Irish horror film from young director Kate Dolan, making a seriously impressive debut. It’s the dead of night in a suburban cul-de-sac outside Dublin: a baby is in the middle of the street, alone and whimpering in its pushchair. A woman scurries out of a house, pushes the buggy into nearby woods and lights a fire.
For the next hour or so the film feels like a slow-burn slice of drab family drama: claustrophobic, but not obviously supernatural. The unsettling sound design begins to reveal the truth; all clanking pipes and whistling winds. Hazel Doupe is terrific as quiet, introspective teenager Char, who lives with her mum Angela (Carolyn Bracken) and granny Rita (Ingrid Craigie). Their semi is decorated in the late-70s style you only now ever see in horror movies: everything in shades of brown, including a velvet sofa the colour of overbrewed tea.
