Below is the final draft of our film review. We altered this review from the original draft in order to make the review appear to be more humble and balanced and less biased. We also included quotes from us as the directors of the film in order to offer a deeper, behind-the-scenes insight into the making of the film, which we feel added a richer layer to the final film review and gave our audience an insight into our intentions and motivations behind making the film. As always, we attempted to make the review as convincing and authentic as possible, maintaining impeccable standards of vocabulary in keeping with the conventional journalistic devices and disciplines of quality film magazines like Empire.
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Horror thrillers, they're available in bucket loads. Some, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween are classics, fantastically frightening and still hold their own after so many years, never failing to deliver in the scare department. Others, such as the recent Prom Night remake and the Hostel series are nothing short of dreadful, made for an audience that considers blood, guts, gore and babes to be the essential ingredients for a horror film.
In a day and age where good thriller films are excruciatingly hard to come by, it’s refreshing to see that new talent can match the best of Hollywood competition and create a film which is surreal, shocking and certainly scary. This new talent comes in the shape of Ahmed Honeini (Time Out of Mind) and Dammy Laoye (Beyond Reflection) whose new film Hell is Round the Corner is due for general release this week. With their excellent symbosis of script, cinematography, score editing and, of course, the brilliant performances by both Laoye (who, in his acting debut, gives an award-worthy performance as a naive, doomed youth) and Steven Williams (who gives a chilling performance as an unnamed, Grim Reaper type character, who delivers a blow-to-the-head to the naive way in which Laoye’s character lives his life), Honeini and Laoye are definitely ones to watch as up and coming directors who have gone on record as saying their intention was to “create a film that combined surrealism with the everyday, the bizarre and the fantastic with the mundane and boring. With the opening shot, we tried to establish an orgy of blood, a heightened sense of reality that the audience has never been subject to before.”
The film begins with a pair of bloody black hands pointed directly at camera, a shot which has classic connotations of death and danger, and also sucks the audience in and mystifies them. We are then given our formal introduction to our main character, Dammy, who is seen rising out of one last slumber to answer a phone-call which will, ultimately, lead to his demise. Honeini’s flowing cinematography and almost-exclusive use of natural lighting, Laoye’s happy-go-lucky yet profoundly paranoid performance and the use of locations (a single bedroom, all very warm and comfy and cosy which contrasts with the long, seemingly unending streets which twist and turn into one another and lead Dammy to be confronted by a bunch of manically scary, giggling children and a rabid, snarling, dog which scared the living hell out of this reviewer!) and the script’s use of interior monologue (which offers us an insight into Dammy’s thought process and a distressing look into his terrified and perversely paranoid state of mind as the film unfolds) creates a very realistic and grounded atmosphere.
It is here where the film’s key strengths lie. At times, the film is very realistic, almost as if we are watching documentary footage of a regular youth going about his day. It is only when the bizarreness of the film’s subject matter kicks in (through the use of blooded wallets, coats and a murderer with a cold, hard stare that would make the meanest of souls crap in their pants!) that we begin to realise that, on an aesthetic level, Honeini and Laoye have used every shot and cut, every facet of their leading performances to create a film which successfully shifts from the real to the bizarre so that, when the leading character’s fate finally occurs, we are shocked into believing the unbelieveable.
The film, at times, seems very consciously film literate, with references to such classics as The Seventh Seal and The Godfather which, as the directors themselves have said, were used so that “we could create a film which has a very classic, clever feel to it, using influential examples of death in cinema (both figuratively and literally) to make our own depiction of life and death colliding on a random day in West London all the more compelling, credible and watchable.” Not only that, but the film’s soundtrack shifts from songs which firmly affirm the film’s urban roots to piercing strings reminiscent of the theme from Hitchcock’s Psycho give the film a mesmerising combination of contemporary raw energy and classical gravity. It’s definitely a film worth watching, a sign of good things to come from new British talent.
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