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This is an unsettling little horror movie that explores the nature of the genre. Enid, a lonely Englishwoman who holds the titular profession, is assigned a movie, the fictional Don’t Go Into the Church, that really should have been given to someone else. This is because it reopens an old wound involving her sister, Nina, who has been missing since childhood. It rekindles her desire to find out what happened to her, and the more she searches for her whereabouts and thinks about Church, the more she loses touch with reality.
Setting the movie during the Thatcher years is an apt choice for how the PM's scapegoats for the U.K.'s problems mirror those who do the same for the era’s extreme horror flicks like Don’t Go Into the Church, commonly referred to as "video nasties." It helps that the production design and touches like changing the aspect ratio to one found in such movies captures the '80s so well. The touch-tone phones and boxy TVs are definitely my favorite touches. I also like the many ways the movie asks if horror is to blame for the country's crime wave or if it's merely a reflection of it. The highlight is a subplot involving a murderer whose method of killing resembles one in another movie Enid watched. Speaking of Enid, Niamh Algar does a great job at capturing her understandable coldness and unwillingness to connect with others, but it's Michael Smiley's turn as a sleazy producer who gave my favorite performance. It also goes along with another theme the movie explores for both laughs and cringe: how patriarchal and full of mansplainers the industry is.
Is this movie just a vehicle for a bunch of commentary? Definitely not. It's just as unsettling as it is mind-bending for how it makes you question what's real and what's imaginary as much as Enid does. I've seen several movies about people who makes discoveries in their jobs that throw their lives into chaos from Blow Out to The Final Cut and this one is neither the best nor does anything that novel with the formula. I still highly recommend it, especially if the last season of The Crown didn’t get every last bit of Thatcher hatewatching out of your system.
This is an unsettling little horror movie that explores the nature of the genre. Enid, a lonely Englishwoman who holds the titular profession, is assigned a movie, the fictional Don’t Go Into the Church, that really should have been given to someone else. This is because it reopens an old wound involving her sister, Nina, who has been missing since childhood. It rekindles her desire to find out what happened to her, and the more she searches for her whereabouts and thinks about Church, the more she loses touch with reality.
Setting the movie during the Thatcher years is an apt choice for how the PM's scapegoats for the U.K.'s problems mirror those who do the same for the era’s extreme horror flicks like Don’t Go Into the Church, commonly referred to as "video nasties." It helps that the production design and touches like changing the aspect ratio to one found in such movies captures the '80s so well. The touch-tone phones and boxy TVs are definitely my favorite touches. I also like the many ways the movie asks if horror is to blame for the country's crime wave or if it's merely a reflection of it. The highlight is a subplot involving a murderer whose method of killing resembles one in another movie Enid watched. Speaking of Enid, Niamh Algar does a great job at capturing her understandable coldness and unwillingness to connect with others, but it's Michael Smiley's turn as a sleazy producer who gave my favorite performance. It also goes along with another theme the movie explores for both laughs and cringe: how patriarchal and full of mansplainers the industry is.
Is this movie just a vehicle for a bunch of commentary? Definitely not. It's just as unsettling as it is mind-bending for how it makes you question what's real and what's imaginary as much as Enid does. I've seen several movies about people who makes discoveries in their jobs that throw their lives into chaos from Blow Out to The Final Cut and this one is neither the best nor does anything that novel with the formula. I still highly recommend it, especially if the last season of The Crown didn’t get every last bit of Thatcher hatewatching out of your system.