Starring Eva Green, Mark Strong

Directed by Lorcan Finnegan

Vertigo/Shudder, in cinemas now

A fashion designer with a mysterious illness seeks help from an equally mysterious Filipina au pair.

My hopes weren’t high for Nocebo. I’d seen that it had garnered a few lukewarm star-ratings, but I was interested to watch it for myself as I knew that, unusually, it was an Irish-Filipino co-production tackling the murderous exploitation that underpins parts of the fashion industry, factors that at least promised an attempt to do something thematically and stylistically original. This has been a great few years for intelligent horror digging deep and daringly into the zeitgeist in ways that conventional dramas often fail to do. Sadly, however, Nocebo is something of an embarrassment to the genre.

After just five minutes, despite a glimmer of an interesting story, the already sputtering flame of hope was completely extinguished. It doesn’t help that Nocebo’s final reveal is blindingly obvious from the opening sequence.

I really, really don’t want to be unkind about Eva Green’s portrayal of the emotionally fractured Christine, but it’s dialled up to eleven from the inciting incident with nowhere left to go for the next ninety minutes except into the realms of overblown hilarity. It doesn’t help that the dialogue clunks like the gearbox from an old Austin Maxi. Does anyone exclaim, ‘you’re a pitiful wretch!’ anywhere other than in a Victorian melodrama?

As Christine’s hapless husband Felix, the normally excellent Mark Strong looks embarrassed about the whole enterprise, an attack by a giant papier-mâché tick being the final indignity. It doesn’t help that the movie has the editing finesse of Ed Wood with a pair of scissors. At times, it looks as if Mr Strong’s reaction shots were filmed three weeks later and inserted with Sellotape. The horror denouement, which is striving for something profound, is from the youth-group school of video making where you whizz the camera around in circles to show how agitated someone is.

I can see what they were going for with the gamelan-style score, but I humbly suggest that no one is going to be particularly scared by the multi-coloured glockenspiel of doom, no matter what angle you film it from.

On the plus side, talented child actor, Billie Gadsdon, as the ill-fated couple’s young daughter, Bobs, is the least self-conscious screen presence, and along with Chai Fonacier (well-pitched as the mild mannered but vengeful au pair) they offer some respite from the movie’s many failings.

I take no pleasure from being this negative about a film, especially when it is trying to do something worthy, but it’s painful when the worthiness of its subject matter is all it has going for it. These deeper themes deserve better, and in more skillful hands there are elements to this script which could have worked rather well and added to the canon of important new horror.

Verdict: Nocebo is a clumsy, often comical mess, and I am honestly baffled as to how it got a general release. Although, to be fair, it might take me a few weeks to get over the sight of Mark Strong and a giant papier-mâché tick, complete with wiggly legs. 2/10

 

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com