Written with Anthony Fletcher. It's the 1980s. Niamh Algar is a film censor of video nasties, suffering from the childhood loss of her younger sister, and thinking her parents Andrew Havill and Clare Holman secretly blame her. The moment she accidentally kills pervy film producer Michael Smiley is funny - "Thank you for the whisky. I'll see myself out." Then things go really crazy when she imagines her sister is in a horror film, and joins the cast. The design is good, film has a diffused quality and starts changing shape when we get into the craziness of the story - ending up in 4x3, appropriately for the material.
Niamh in interview said she was normally good at leaving the character on set but found this one less easy to let go - maybe the list of horror films the director had given her as research didn't help matters! She's typically completely convincing and subtle. "The camera catches everything," she says, "You don't need to do anything. Just thinking, and you can see it on screen." Yes, I'm not sure that it's as easy as it sounds. I think probably one of the hardest things to do when you're an actor is not to act.
Nicholas Burns, Vincent Franklin, Sophia La Porta, Adrian Schiller, Felicity Montagu, Clare Perkins.
Suitably creepy music from Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch (Living, Rocks), DP Annika Sommerson (Breeders), editor with tricks Mark Towns, production designer Paulina Rzeszowska.
It's quite daft, but only in so much as most horror films are, and quite stylish.
The director's earlier short Nasty (2015) seems to cover similar ground.
I was going to say I'd watch Niamh in anything, even hanging out the washing, but that sounds a bit dodgy. So I won't.
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