It’s bad enough that boarding school students Samantha and Clara can’t go home for the holidays, but things take a deadly turn when a murderous gang arrives on their doorstep – just in time for Christmas.
Grimmfest Says: Writer-Director Jenn Wexler’s startling second feature offers a cunningly choreographed call back to an earlier era of horror cinema. Set in 1971, it’s a whip-smart, cineliterate homage – and subtle reinvention – of classic genre tropes; a devious, mischievous mash up of home-invading Satanist psychos, sinister girls’ boarding schools, and alienated, victimised teens with dark secrets. It’s a film which takes its familiar components and tweaks them, playing on the expectations of a hardened genre audience with deft timing and dark cruel wit, slyly signposting several of its narrative twists early on, so that the viewer can savour the anticipation of seeing how and when those twists will fall into place, and what will happen as a result. Grounded by an unobtrusively effective and authentic sense of period – created as much by the lighting, framing and composition choices as by the production and costume design – and by the pitch-perfect performances of a strong cast, making the best of some pungently witty dialogue, this is a knowing and self-aware film which nevertheless plays it admirably straight-faced, and benefits hugely from an amoral, meanspirited willingness to do horrible things to sympathetic characters when the audience least expects it.