The Canal ***
Dir: Ivan Kavanagh. With: Rupert Evans, Antonia
Campbell-Hughes, Hannah Hoekstra, Steve Oram. 92 mins. Cert: 15
There’s a fair bit
floating around in this smart, slowburn creepout, which for a long while
withholds the exact nature of the demons circling its central character: a film
archivist (Rupert Evans, nicely rattled) haunted both by suspicions his wife is
having an affair, and that their new canalside residence may have been the site
of a bloody murder a century before. Traces of Europudding persist in its
mishmash of accents (Dutch, Irish, Steve Oram as a slovenly Brummie detective),
but writer-director Ivan Kavanagh and cinematographer Piers McGrail fashion something
properly cinematic from their watery, nondescript locations: an overcast,
portal-like towpath, a dilapidated public loo that provides an unusual and
effective locus of fear. If it can’t quite match the full-pulp heft of its
influences (2012’s Sinister, Hideo
Nakata’s J-horrors), it does something not dissimilar with its protagonist’s
mounting obsession, and has a genuinely unsettling manner of undercutting his –
and our – certainties.
The Canal opens in selected cinemas from today.
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