Directed by John Michael Elfers. Starring Suthi Picotte, Carolyn Hauck, Elizabeth Holmes. Cert : 18 Genre : Horror, 89 mins.

Release Date 28th March 2011 RRP £15.99.

An ambitious indie horror film that enjoyed some prime exposure at last year’s Frightfest on the “Discovery” screen. It’s the feature debut for writer-director John Michael Elfers, whose influences evidently veer from the collected works of Bava and Argento through to certain elements of Clive Barker’s prose, with a dash of Polanski thrown in for good measure.

It begins with effectively nightmarish confusion as a terrorised young man seems to hang himself at home. As his surviving family rapidly falls apart, his grief-stricken mother comes to believe there is more significance to the wrecked furniture and blacked-out mirrors in his house than mere destruction brought about by his pre-suicide delusional state. While the dead lad’s younger sister wins a prominent role in her theatre class, Mom freaks out at a dead raven nailed to her son’s gravestone and starts to experience harrowing demonic visions. And just who is that creepy female stranger lurking ominously in the cemetery?

FINALE is a professionally assembled fan boy ode to the aforementioned legends. The heightened sense of style displays a huge allegiance to some of the benchmarks of Italian horror. Kinetic camera moves, surrealistic compositions, fleeting images of malevolence, sinister use of dummies, skewed angles and a visual palette bathed in vivid primary colours combine to make a heady brew of homage. Like its Italian cousins, it’s stronger on visuals than it is on either coherence or dialogue : what amounts to a yarn about a ROSEMARY’S BABY-ish cult conspiracy summoning a demon at will is sometimes weighted down by awkward domestic scenes and theatrical pacing. It’s imperfect, for sure, and one sequence revives unfortunate memories of MIRRORS as the distraught mother conceals everything reflective in the house with black paint. If you bear with its borderline pretentiousness and the lack of any recognisable human figure to sympathise with, there are rewards to be had : Elfers makes particularly atmospheric use of sound, and a healthy portion of genuinely striking moments makes amends for the longeurs.

Steven West.

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