IIFF 2007 -- THE LIVING AND THE DEAD review
Visceral and at times almost unbearably intense, Simon Rumley's phantasmagoric meditation on age and mortality The Living and the Dead attacks viewers with a succession of powerful (and often powerfully unpleasant) concepts, the proceedings heightened by staccato visuals and a driving soundscape. The film is anchored by three amazing central performances, most notably Leo Bill's psychically draining turn as the mentally handicapped man-child James.
Set inside an isolated, disintegrating manse somewhere in the English countryside, The Living and the Dead calls to mind films as diverse as Corman's psychedelic adaptation of The Masque of the Red Death and Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream in its study of all-encompassing decay, transfixing our attentions where those in their right minds would look away. The film is an achievement, a volatile treatise on the emotional and physical burdens we place on loved ones throughout life.
With bankruptcy looming, Brocklebank patriarch Donald must attend to business away from the family's expansive estate. Unable to leave his bedridden wife in their son James' care (he hasn't developed mentally past age five or six), Donald arranges a nurse to attend to his wife much to James' agitation. Through his increasingly rash actions James' wish of becoming “man of the house” is fulfilled and, going off his meds and applying his warped logic to curing his mother's illness, he embarks on a violent, spectral odyssey culminating in the forcible return of his father and a rash of tragedies.
From the performances he elicits to the blasts of sight and sound that visualize James' mental breakdown, Rumley controls every frame with precise moves designed to further agitate audiences' psyches. Under less skilled hands this sort of film invariably fails -- Rumley proves himself a talent to watch by grace of the fact that not only does The Living and the Dead hold together, it coheres into something unique, equal parts terrifying and moving.
James is the sort of character which can quickly turn to caricature, and it's again a testament to those involved, specifically Leo Bill, that he ends the picture as a fully-formed being. Roger Lloyd-Pack and Kate Fahy, as James' worn father and desiccated mother, help tether Bill's performance by their gentle interplay.
Whatever inspirations can be cited, The Living and the Dead is a unique film; part horror, part psychological drama, part tragedy, it oversteps genre bounds again and again to dizzying effect. There isn't anything quite like it out there, which is always a wonderful realization.
The estimable Peter Martin already took on Rumley's film in these parts here, and his review offers a nice counterpoint to my reaction.
