Recasting ‘The Midwich Cuckoos‘ with vicious, toy-wielding toddlers, Waz director Tom Shankland‘s traumatic horror is every parent‘s nightmare Self-obsessed and incapable of reason, young children lack conscience and the ability to marshal their desires. Exactly the same could be said of most psychopaths, although mercifully few examples of either category graduate to the stabby excesses on display here.
We begin in the land of the country casuals catalogue, as two sides of a fractured, upper-middle-class family gather for the "best New Year‘s Eve ever!" in a mock-Tudor mansion. On the one side is young mum Elaine (Birthistle) and new man Jonah (Campbell Moore), their two pre-schoolers, plus stroppy teen Casey (Tointon).
On the other are smug marrieds Chloe (Shelley) and Robbie (Sheffield) and their home-schooled offspring. Horror fans will recognise Sheffield as the yuppie rapist from Creepsomething highly unpleasant is about to be unleashed.
Unfortunately he can‘t quite keep hold of the reins when the number twos so memorably hit the fan. As the kids attack and the adults break ranks, it‘s tricky to keep track of who‘s where and doing what to whom. Grievous injuries fix themselves at the sniff of a plot-hole and the house is revealed to be a veritable death-trap of shonky design, the parental admonishment: "You‘ll have someone‘s eye out with that" gaining grim new currency.
Short of using stunt midgets (which David Cronenberg did in The Brood), there‘s no conscionable way for Shankland to show his child actors committing the atrocities the script requires. The sense of fragile bodies sinking onto sharp objects is horrifying but the directorial sleight-of-hand required to achieve these (off-screen) effects rips us out of the movie, even if the thought of youngsters doing unspeakable things to people‘s faces remains uniquely distressing.
Like James Watkins‘ flawed but fearless Eden Lake, this is a topical, taboo-breaking British horror in which a chillingly apposite ending and some fantastic young actors pardon the awry plotting. Watkins is the better writer, Shankland the better director; should they ever team up to make ‘When Foetuses Attack‘, tears before bedtime are a dead cert. , although he‘s probably best known for the 2008 car ad in which he exploits the Anglo-French cultural divide to try to get laid.
Outside, the forest creaks with wintry menace, but inside it‘s all happy families and gold stars for good behaviour. Indeed, the greatest danger seems to be that Jonah will try to sell us broadband.
Then the little ones start getting sick and acting up, Sheffield takes, what footballers would term "an early bath", and it becomes all-too-apparent that the kids are far from alright. Murderously far, as it happens. Besides its refusal to explain exactly what has infected these youngsters, the reason the first 30 minutes are so effective is because writer-director Shankland understands the essential otherness of children. Nailing the unnerving split between screaming fits and sudden stillness, he shows how the ever-shifting limits of their agency frighten even themselves. An insert of frozen frog spawn lying, alien and insinuating, on the forest floor speaks volumes:
