Bereavement   Starring: Michael Bien, Alexandra Daddario and Nolan Gerrard Funk High Fliers Films RRP: £14.99 HFR0197 Certificate: 15 Available 01 October 2012

In the prologue sequence a little boy, who has a disorder which means he feels no pain, is abducted from the front garden of his home. After the death of her parents in a car accident, teenager Allison is sent to live with her uncle’s family in a rural district. Falling foul of her uncle’s incessant house rules, she finds solace in her daily runs. They take her past a disused meat packing plant, which she is later informed is occupied only by a male recluse who used to work there. However, her suspicions are piqued when she catches a glimpse of a young boy looking out of one of the windows. Curiosity can be enlightening or disastrous; Sutter is a dangerous psychopath who uses the boy’s genetic disorder as a guide to his twisted actions. Allison finds a captive woman, and unwittingly starts a chain of events which drags her and everyone around her into a living hell...

Bereavement is a curious name for a film - even a horror one. It doesn’t necessarily point to that genre, but then neither did Hush, and that was one of the most inventive and nerve-wracking horror flicks to emerge in some time. So, talking about Hush, let’s talk about influences. The psychotic killer reminded me of the one in Hush, who also abducted and chained-up women. Then there’s Jeepers Creepers, and in particular the rusty but menacing-looking small truck driven by the perpetrator. There’s even a similar scene wherein the protagonist watches the killer drive away before exploring the property, only to have the truck return earlier than expected. The promotional blurb tries to invoke Halloween and Psycho for comparison, but in a lot of ways the film is closer to the feel of Frailty, an excellent movie in which a father believes he is on a mission from God to seek out demons in human form and gets his own young sons involved.

One thing you can say about Bereavement is that by its conclusion it becomes much more than the sum of its parts. By that I mean you are presented with precisely what you think you are getting, but the plot does evolve much more than many films of this ilk, so that I would challenge anyone to predict exactly what happens in the last quarter. In one respect, it does borrow from one of the Halloween sequels for one of the final turns.

The film should satisfy those viewers who crave a little blood and violence, but I’m happy to say it’s much more than that, purely in terms of the unexpected.

7

Ty Power