A slow-burning horror that makes chilly use of its Scandinavian setting, Alex Herron’s Leave, currently streaming on Shudder, sees a young woman go in search of her birth parents. Abandoned as a baby in a graveyard, wrapped in a blanket covered in Satanic markings and wearing an apparent inverted crucifix – or Wolf’s Pendant – the now-grown-up Hunter (Alicia Von Rittberg) wants to know how she got there.
Deceiving her adopted kindly father, she heads to Norway to get to the root of her ermm…roots, finding after a DNA test that she is mostly Scandinavian. The film then meanders about the Norwegian countryside as various red herrings are flaunted; there are spooky families with obviously creepy offspring, heavy metal bands, haunting/flashing/fiery images, visits to asylums to meet biological fathers and a supernatural presence warning her to leave.
Unfortunately, in its final section Leave veers into disappointingly obvious film territory, and although Rittberg is an amiable heroine, her journey is not a gripping one. The languid pace fails to exude much dread, making this horror more ho-hum and humdrum than horrific.
Dir: Alex Herron (15 107 mins)
Leave is streaming on Shudder from Mon 20 Mar
words KEIRON SELF
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