Outcast
A horror
movie with bite…
Most people, when they think of Edinburgh,
they think of the Castle; dark and brooding, glowering down at the city from
atop a volcanic plug. They think of the Festival; students putting on a show,
comics looking for their big TV break, slow-moving tourists wandering along
Princes Street. They think of Trainspotting’s eloquent
junkies, Miss Jean Brodie’s genteel fascism. But there’s
another Edinburgh, a darker Edinburgh, where the ghosts of Deacon Brodie and
the Resurrection Men, Burke and Hare, still walk
the cobbles searching for fresh victims and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll
and Hyde haunt the imagination. A world of the occult, of
ghosts and faeries, of the supernatural. A world where a single mum is inspired
to sit in a café and pen a story about a boy wizard’s school days. Tapping into
this darkness and magic is Scottish horror movie Outcast.
A mysterious pair of Irish travellers, mother
and son Mary and Fergal (Kate Dickie and Niall Bruton), on
the run from their past, settle into ghetto
life on one of Edinburgh's less salubrious high-rise estates. They’re quiet,
keep themselves to themselves, don’t attract much attention. But there’s
something a little strange about them. Maybe it’s the unsettling closeness of
their relationship. Or maybe it’s Mary’s taste in décor: stripping naked to daub
magical symbols on the walls in her own blood. Or
the curse she puts on the local Housing Officer. Steeped in dark
magic and bloody ritual, they are exiles of
an ancient Celtic tribe of sorcerors. When Fergal
catches the eye of ballsy local beauty and literal
girl next door, Petronella (the excellent Hanna Stanbridge), romance
blossoms despite the warnings of the creepily over-protective
Mary. But something has followed Mary and Fergal, something evil,
something that hunts by night, tearing the
locals to pieces, (Doctor Who's new assistant Amy Pond, Karen
Gillan, among them). And two menacing strangers, Liam and
Cathal (Ciaran McMenamin and James Nesbitt), are closing in on Mary and
Fergal...
While it doesn't make a lick of sense and
Kate Dickie’s accent is as dodgy as her nudie witch-dancing, Outcast is
a ferocious little horror movie, a dark adult
fairytale where the deep, dark woods the beast is stalking is
our modern urban wasteland. Drawing on the rich mythology of Gaelic folklore,
particularly the legends of the Sidhe (Ireland’s
faerie folk), director/co-writer Colm McCarthy has fashioned an occult
fantasy grounded in the social realism of modern ‘Broken
Britain’. The bleak, decaying housing estates and insular
camp-sites the characters move through are desperate, foreboding
environments inhabited by the marginalised outcasts of
society; the local hoodies as much of a threat as the witches and
shape-changing werewolf-like creatures that drive the
film. By never revealing too much or handing the audience easy explanations,
McCarthy succeeds in creating a mystical world that feels real, where magic and
the supernatural are an integral, everyday aspect of the character’s lives, where
the fantastic can coexist with the gritty and the squalid.
Professional leprechaun James Nesbitt is
positively unhinged as bad guy Cathal, the werewolf hunter who's hairier
than the beastie he's after. For too long the bland cheeky chappy of
Sunday night telly and commercials, Nesbitt delivers an instinctive, feral
performance of brutal intensity. Burning with the white heat of
psychosis, drunk on booze and magic, Nesbitt is an
implacable force of vengeance, consumed by bitterness
and his perverted desires for knowledge and power. Dodgy
Oirish accent aside, Kate Dickie’s Mary is equally intense; her flinty,
over-protective mother a study in controlled ruthlessness and
quiet insanity. While Niall Bruton is likeable as Fergal
and there’s a pleasingly queasy incestuous undertone to
his mother/son relationship with Dickie’s Mary, it’s newcomer Hanna Stanbridge
who impresses most as the gorgeous and feisty Petronella, a damsel who's perfectly
capable of saving herself. Strong and sexy, Stanbridge’s performance is confident and
natural, her exotic beauty intensified by
her unforced earthiness.
Like all the best fairytales, a dark
undercurrent of eroticism runs through Outcast. Sex and
sensuality drive the story; Fergal's desire for Petronella
quite literally bringing out the beast in him and
their scenes are suffused with the naïve longings of young love while the
scenes between Cathal and Mary have an aggressive carnality,
love poisoned by bitterness, hate and regret, their final confrontation the
ultimate consummation of their twisted
relationship.
Moodily shot with a mounting atmosphere of
dread, Outcast is a rarity in modern British cinema; a
dark, melancholic little movie that's actually genuinely twisted and
unsettling. Probably the best British horror movie since Neil
Marshall's The Descent (and that was five
years ago), its bold, ambitious and
refreshingly downbeat.
The British film industry (and British
audiences) needs more films like Outcast.
We won't get
them though.
We'll get unwatchable middle-class, Middle England drivel like Made
in Dagenham.
Enjoy.
David Watson
Director
Colm McCarthy
Writer
Colm McCarthy, Tom McCarthy
Cast
Hanna Stanbridge, James Nesbitt,
Kate Dickie, Niall Bruton, Ciaran McMenamin, James Cosmo
Country
UK
Writer
Colm McCarthy, Tom McCarthy
Running time
92min
Year
2010
Certificate
18
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