Possum

Walter Bishop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5jaqmQyAJw

Horror from Matthew Holness of Garth Marenghi's Dark Place fame - a disgraced children's puppeteer (Sean Harris) returns to his childhood home to face his misanthrope uncle (Alun Armstrong) and his hideous puppet.


Judging from the trailer not one for the arachnophobes among us but good reviews and looks like some decent scares to be had here.

Fysh

I'm hoping to catch this in the next few days, it sounds oppressive and dread-fillex, which is just the sort of thing I like in my horror movies. Didn't realise it was from the director of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, sounds like a fair shift in tone for him.

Fysh

Ended up watching this on the BFI streaming rental service as I missed its short run near me. Definitely worth a watch, although the sound clearly hasn't been properly balanced in the mixdown from surround to stereo so you'll be doing a lot of turning the volume up to catch dialogue, then turning it down to avoid being deafened by the score. Sean Harris seems to have learned how to un-project speech so it's particularly hard to catch some of his lines to the extent that I watched it with subtitles to make sure I didn't miss anything.

The Babadook is the most obvious comparison, for me, but perhaps also Kaleidoscope or Berberian Sound Studio. Very much a character focused piece, full of dread and the baggage of returning to a town left long ago. There are a couple of jumps towards the end but mostly it's about slowly ratcheting up the tension and unease of trying to work out why and to what extent the protagonist is traumatised and broken...

Walter Bishop

I greatly enjoyed this, there was some mumbling from Harris alright but overall both he and Alun Armstrong were very good. The Babadook is one reference, there was a touch of Eraserhead here and there too, I thought.

pixelburp

The Guardian ran a decent interview with Holness a few weeks back; definitely one to read for those (like myself) who wondered where he went & got up to, having effectively disappeared after Darkplace:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/oct/12/from-garth-marenghi-to-big-screen-horror-what-the-lost-boy-of-comedy-did-next

Possum clearly looks like a different beast altogether, but ... man, Darkplace was fantastic.

Howard the Duck

Thought it wasn't bad, as mentioned there are sound issues. Thought the ending was pretty predictable but it's worth a watch.