You gotta admire the willingness of Nicholas Cage to keep doing so many lower-budget-but-interesting movies. This one appeared on Sky Movies fairly recently and while it’s nothing earth-shattering, it’s a solid little family drama with post-apocalyptic sci-fi/horror elements. Definitely feels like the more down-to-earth, slightly more arthouse cousin to films like A QUIET PLACE.
Taking place 15 years after a mysterious calamity has wiped out most of humanity, a father raises his two orphaned sons at a farm. Every night they must retreat to the fortified farmhouse as it comes under attack from terrifying nocturnal predators. It’s not a wholly original scenario, but there’s some pleasingly fresh takes on the genre in there. The creature design is genuinely quite disturbing and possibly the most strikingly original monster design I’ve seen since THE RITUAL. Not just how they look, but how they move and act. You never see too much of them (which I can imagine was also dictated by the budget) but all their appearances are very effective. Hats off to the (small) Visual Effects and prosthetics team who brought them to creepy life.
Shot in Ireland with a mixed American and British/Irish cast, the performances are strong and the characters are plenty relatable. It’s one of the more restrained roles for Cage, and he doesn’t go full crazy Nick at any point. Well, mostly not. I wasn’t such a fan of the slightly relentless shaky-cam filming style, which felt a bit too much like it was showing off its indie credentials. But the naturalistic filming style certainly had a lot to like about it, shooting mostly in natural light.
Anyway, I enjoyed it. It’s got a John Wyndham-esque vibe. The exact nature and origin of the threat is kept deliberate vague. Instead, it remains a quietly compelling, rural eco-apocalypse.
