Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Chad Archibald
Starring: Ashley Greene, Shawn Ashmore, Ellie O'Brien, Shayelin Martin, Julian Richings, Juno Rinaldi, Mark
Taylor
It's easy to roll your eyes when you realise yet another horror movie is
about "grief" and (deep breath now) "trauma." Recently it seems a lot of
genre filmmakers can't help but burden their protagonists with such
emotions, but grief and trauma are usually employed as a cheap way of
adding character backstory. If a horror movie protagonist finds themselves
in a life-threatening situation, it's now almost a certainty that we'll
get flashbacks to some traumatic incident from their past.
Writer/director Chad Archibald's It Feeds is loaded with grief and trauma, but those states are skilfully
interwoven with the movie's monstrous metaphor. The grief of its central
characters is buried and largely unspoken. It's something to be dug up
from the soil of their psyches over the course of the film. It's not
simply a lazy way of padding out the runtime with flashbacks.
Cynthia (Ashley Greene) is a psychic who uses her gift as a form
of therapy for patients who can't be healed through normal means. Her late
husband did likewise, that is before he passed away in circumstances
somehow related to his profession. This has kept Cynthia on guard, well
aware of the evil forces her powers might expose her to. She's
particularly wary of her teenage daughter Jordan (Ellie O'Brien)
seeing the horrors her powers have often made her witness, and so she
refuses to teach Jordan the family trade.
Cynthia's protectiveness proves justified when a teenage girl, Riley (Shayelin Martin), barges into her home and demands Cynthia's help. Riley's arms are
covered in strange scars and she's clearly in distress, but when Cynthia
sees the demon that has attached itself to the girl, she refuses to get
involved. This pisses off Jordan, who decides to go behind her mother's
back and help Riley. In doing so she puts herself, and potentially many
others, in grave danger.
If the title of Archibald's latest chiller evokes It Follows, you'd be right in assuming it follows a similar setup. Once again we
have an entity that attaches itself to a human host, and the only way to
be rid of it is to pass it onto someone else. Archibald doesn't have David
Robert Mitchell's talent for creating dread and atmosphere, and It Feeds is never quite as scary as it really should be, but unlike so many
of his contemporaries in the horror field, Archibald is at least able to
do something interesting with this concept. Like It Follows, It Feeds deals with the guilt of passing your burden onto someone else, but
it also explores the ethical sacrifices parents are so often forced to
make to ensure their children's safety. Cynthia refuses to help a
desperate teenage girl because she knows the potential harm it could bring
to her own daughter. The movie's most tragic figure is Riley's father (Shawn Ashmore), who has forced himself to commit unspeakable acts to ensure the beast
that has targeted his little girl doesn't go hungry and continue feasting
on Riley.
It Feeds stands out from most low-budget horror in its acting and production
design. Greene has struggled to find notable work since breaking out in
the Twilight series, but she's gifted a meaty role here that allows her to show
her talents. She's convincing and sympathetic as a mother trying to
balance saving her daughter with doing the right thing for the greater
good. Between this and her enigmatic turn as the villainess of the recent
underseen thriller Some Other Woman, Greene deserves more mainstream attention. In her first major role,
O'Brien is equally good at portraying Jordan's spirit and heart. The great
character actor Julian Richings makes a welcome cameo as
a former doctor left spooked by an encounter with the entity.
The production design gives It Feeds the appearance of a bigger budgeted production. When Cynthia enters
others' minds it's visualised as a sort of riff on "The Further" of
the Insidious movies but Archibald and his team make this far more visually
interesting than James Wan's version.
Late in the movie we get a neat horror spin on the old Barbara Mackle
kidnapping trope. In 1968 Mackle was abducted and buried in a box while
her kidnappers awaited their ransom, but it took three days for the burial
site to be located, the ongoing story dominating the American news cycle.
The case has inspired several movies, most notably The Candy Snatchers, The Longest Night and a Quentin Tarantino-directed episode of CSI. Here a character finds themselves buried underground, provoking a
search, but the twist here is that their primary concern isn't running out
of oxygen; they've been buried with a demonic entity. It's an idea that's
so good it should probably have fuelled its own movie, but it's somewhat
wasted here and Archibald never quite mines its potential for
claustrophobic terror. That said, it is a nice way to visualise the film's
message that grief isn't something you can simply bury.
It Feeds is on UK/ROI VOD from
May 12th.
