CARMILLA | FILM REVIEW
Dir: Emily Harris (15, 94 mins)
A classy low-budget adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu’s 19th century novella about obsession, love and coming of age, well acted by its small cast. Hannah Rae is Lara, a 15-year-old in a country house, closeted and controlled by her stern governess Miss Fontaine – played by Call The Midwife’s Jessica Raine with evil relish. Lara is suffocated with religious dogma by her governess, even forbidding her to use her left hand by binding it, whilst her grieving father (Greg Wise) watches on, seemingly powerless.
Rumours of ‘supernatural’ forces at work in the nearby town, causing girls to fall ill, are whipped up into a frenzy, much to the puzzlement of local doctor Tobias Menzies. Lara’s father was due to take in a poorly local girl as a companion for Lara, but these plans are thwarted. Is this down to genuine illness, or local paranoia and hysteria? A carriage crash nearby brings another young girl to the house, whom Lara names Carmilla (Devrim Lingau). She is sensuous, unwilling to conform and unable to answer questions about her past due to apparent accident-related amnesia. She impresses Lara mightily with her strength of character and passion, and they are drawn together, but is she more than she seems, a lost, vampiric soul from the spirit mounds in the countryside nearby?
Writer/director Emily Harris manages to keep the ambiguity going throughout as the innocent Lara discovers herself, but the cost will be heavy and tragic. Handheld camerawork adds to claustrophobia and the film is often dreamlike in its storytelling. Cutaways to insects, from ladybirds to maggots and slugs, hints at something rotten underneath everything, adding to the unease, as do some gory dream sequences as Lara’s mental state fluctuates. It’s a slow burn of a film, heavy on atmosphere, but it works well – thanks to the central offbeat pairing of Rae and Lingau, and Raine’s repressed, questionably intentioned governess.
words KEIRON SELF
In cinemas now