FRIGHTFEST 2002 FESTIVAL REPORT
DAY THREE: SUNDAY 25 AUGUST

The third day of Frightfest 2002 began with Alan Jones taking to the stage with some excellent news - the day was going to end with an unscheduled bonus, the chance to see the first 20 minutes of the new Danny Boyle post-apocalypse thriller 28 Days Later... [2002]. We were then due to watch the directorial debut of Duncan Jones, the son of David Bowie, whose short Whistle was supposed to be getting the day's proceedings under way. Sadly, a glitch with the Prince Charles' digital projection system mean that we were going to have to wait and instead, the day kicked off with Swimfan [2002] which, as Alan Jones noted, was effectively a world premiere as it wasn't due to open in the States for another two weeks.

I hadn't really expected too much of Swimfan which was being pushed as a teenage variation on Fatal Attraction, so I wasn't overly disappointed when it turned out to be a rather dull and forgettable thriller. It's well enough made - the photography in particular is impressive and it's slickly directed and surprisingly well acted - but it never really engages the way a good thriller should.

Jesse Bradford plays Ben, an outstanding swimmer who seems to have it all - a beautiful girlfriend, Amy [Shiri Appleby], a solid group of friends and a bright future ahead of him if he can impress the talent scouts from Stanford university who are due to visit his college in a few days. But then he meets the beautiful Madison [Erika Christensen], a new student, who seduces him in the pool one night. This one moment of weakness changes everything as Ben finds himself being stalked by the clearly deranged and obsessive Madison.

Director John Polson gives the film a slick, glossy look, but he never manages to quite convince us of what's going on. The cast do their best with derivative and under-developed material but the script relies too heavily on people simply not beiaing able to see what Madison is doing which stretches credibility too far at times.

Far better was the aforementioned Whistle which we finally got to see when the digital projection system came back on line. Jones' confident and assured debut is a science fiction thriller about a hi-tech assassin who uses satellites to target his victims in London from his home in Switzerland. But when a mission goes tragically wrong, the assassin is so consumed by guilt that he abandons his family to travel to London only to find that he has become the next target...

One of the hallmarks of this year's Frightfest has been the generally high standard of the shorts on offer and Whistle proved to be the best so far, boasting a strong cast, an intriguing story and a fantastic closing shot. Jones is another director whose future could well be bright and rewarding - here's hoping that someone bankrolls his debut feature very soon.

Equally impressive was Christopher Morris harrowing 3 Minutes of Torture, based on a true story of wartime atrocity that is absolutely impossible to discuss without entirely ruining it. Suffice to say that these are among the most powerful three minutes of film you'll see this year and, although I'm sure we're all aware of the shameful difficulty in accessing short films, it's one you should definitely go out of your way to track down.

Alan Jones took personal responsibility for the day's second feature film, having selected Tuno negro [2002] after seeing it at this year's Fantasporto Festival in Portugal. A smart and clever slasher, Tuno negro is far better than the negative reviews it's received in its native Spain would suggest. A killer dubbed Tuno Negro [the Dark Minstrel] is roaming Spain slaughtering students who fail to pass their exams. Alex, newly arrived at the University of Salamanca, starts to receive threatening emails and internet chat messages from the killer and teams up with several other students to find out who's behind the killings.

Clearly inspired by both Dario Argento's gialli and Scream [1996], Tuno negro's tongue is never far from its cheek as it plays clever games with audience expectations. An excellent performance from Silke as the resourceful Alex holds together a refreshingly strong cast and the direction by Pedro L. Barbero and Vicente J. Martín rarely puts a foot wrong. Anyone who claims to have guessed the secret identity of the killer is lying - the ending is the film's best shock and it's perhaps no surprise that Tuno nego 2 is already in production.

Two of the titles that I'd been most highly anticipating were up next. Director Jeremy Dyson and star Mark Gatiss, two thirds of television's wonderful The League of Gentlemen [1999 - ], were on hand to introduce Dyson's debut short film, The Cicerones from a short story by Robert Aickman. Dyson cited the BBC's A Ghost Story For Christmas series as a primary influence and there was a hint from Gatiss that the BBC's once traditional Christmas Day ghost story may be on its way back - let's hope he's right. The Cicerones, just 12 minutes long, begins well with Gatiss cast as an Englishman abroad, exploring an Eastern European church where he hopes to find a particular painting. Instead, he meets a group of extremely strange and really rather worrying people...

Sadly, The Cicerones doesn't quite work. Gatiss' exploration of the church has some creepy moments and there's an unsettling atmosphere throughout, but the ending doesn't really work and feels decidedly anti-climactic. It's clear though, both from the film itself, the often grotesque goings-on in Royston Vasey and by comments made from the stage, that both Gatiss and Dyson love horror and one can only hope that they give the genre another shot - preferably as part of any revival of the TV Christmas ghost story.

One of the great joys of the past few years has been the chance to catch up with the back catalogue of the Japanese director Hideo Nakata, still best known in the West for the first two Ring movies, but also director of the superb thriller Kaosu [1999] and an earlier, rarely seen ghost story, Joyuu-rei [1996]. Dark Water [2002] - based, like Ringu [1998], on a novel by Koji Suzuki - is his latest offering and sees him back in Ring territory with another terrifying tale of a young child returning from the dead.

A recently divorced woman, Yoshimi [a cracking performance from Hitomi Kuroki] and her her young daughter Ikoku [Rio Kanno] move into a new apartment only to find that the entire block seems to be dangerously waterlogged. A small damp patch on their bedroom ceiling grows at an alarming rate, it's always raining and a child's bright red satchel keeps turning up on the roof, no matter how many times it's thrown out into a rubbish bin. Someone appears to be running around in the flat upstairs, but no-one seems to live there since the woman who lived there ran off, leaving her young daughter Mitsuko alone - until she too mysteriously disappeared...

It's been a long time since I've been this genuinely terrified by a film. Dark Water almost seems at times like an even creepier reworking of Ringu - both films feature young girl ghosts, a watery grave and a mother and child being targetted by the haunting presence. But, much as I adore Ringu, Dark Water far surpasses that earlier film and firmly establishes Nakata as - in the words of fellow Frightfester Steve Jenkins - "the master of the ghost story."

But as well as being flat-out scary, Dark Water is also deeply affecting - the epilogue in particular is achingly sad and the mother-daughter relationship is beautifully drawn, easily the most convincing study of a mother's all-encompassing love for her child ever filmed. Yoshimi battles not only the supernatural in her efforts to make a better life for her daughter, but also an uncaring ex-husband and a sense of isolation and loneliness that makes her climactic and heart-breaking decision in the elevator all the more moving. Yoshimi is a tragic figure trapped in a world far more terrifying than any supernatural manifestation and it's predicament that makes the film all the more effective. By far and away the best film of the festival so far, Dark Water is being released in the UK soon by Metro Tartan - hopefully the rest of the world will pick up this amazing film soon.

Author Patrick McGrath was on hand to introduce David Cronenberg's adaptation of his novel Spider [2002], the story of a schizophrenic man, Dennis 'Spider' Clegg, who is released from psychiatric hospital and goes to live in a halfway house in the East End of London, not far from his childhood home. There, he strats trying to make sense of the traumatic childhood events that led to his current condition - his father murdered his mother and replaced her with a tarty lookalike. But how reliable are Spider's memories and is the blurring of fact and fantasy concealing a much more upsetting truth?

One thing you can always rely on is that a David Cronenberg film - even his worst - will be daring, innovative and unpredictable and Spider is no exception. It's his best film for years, with an outstanding performance from Ralph Fiennes whose portrayal of Spider is the best depiction of schizophrenia we've ever seen in a film. Virtually the entire film takes place in Spider's fractured psyche as he trawls his unreliable memories in search of the truth about what happened to his mother. It demands the audience's full attention throughout and rewards them with a film quite unlike the rest of Cronenberg's work. The supporting cast are also excellent [particularly Miranda Richardson who takes on three roles as Spider's confusion over his mother deepens] but all are overshadowed by Fiennes' astonishing performance.

Spider seems to have effectively split the critics between those who love it and those who who are simply left cold by it. Which is pretty much what you'd expect from Cronenberg, who has the ability to polarise his audience like no other director. The slow, deliberate pacing of Spider won't be to everyone's taste and the need to pay close attention to what we're seeing will alienate many. But Spider is a film that deserves a chance - approach it with an open mind and you'll find one of the most intriguing and original films of the year.

Patrick McGrath returned to the stage for an all-too-brief and fascinating questions and answers session where he fielded audience questions [he dealt with the comparison to Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman with commendable good humour!] and explained some of the subtleties of bothhis script and screenplay.

The day ended with that bonus attraction, the chance to see an almost complete assembly of the first reel of Danny Boyle's post-apocalyptic epic 28 Days Later. Boyle and his his long-time producer Andrew Macdonald [they've worked together on everything from Boyle's debut, Shallow Grave [1994]] were on hand to introduce the film, noting that the sound wasn't quite right yet and that there were a few fixes to be made to the visuals.

Even here, in a relatively rough form, and with only the opening 20 minutes to go on, 28 Days Later is shaping up as something quite special. The film opens with a group of animal activists trying to free a group of apes from a research lab, not realising that they've been infected by what a lab assistant calls "rage." The liberation attempt goes horribly wrong when one of their number is bitten by a chimp and becomes a snarling, blood-spitting maniac who turns on her colleagues.

Cut to Jim [Cillian Murphy], lying naked on a hospital bed and hooked up to drips and monitors, He wakes to find himself alone, the hospital completely deserted as, it seems, is most of London. While exploring the abandoned city, he finds a church full of dead bodies and a group of deranged victims of the virus who pursue him through the streets. He's rescued by a group of apparently uninfected survivors who fire bomb the pursuing maniacs before blowing up a petrol station. And then...

...the reel ends and the Prince Charles echoed to the sound of dozens of anguished groans from the crowd! It's impossible, of course, to judge accurately from a not-quite-completed reel I'll stick my neck out and suggest that 28 Days Later is going to be the genre movie event of the next few months. It opens in the UK at the beginning of November but in the meantime be sure to check out the trailer at the official site, www.28dayslaterthemovie.com/mainflash.html [which makes excellent use of Brian Eno's haunting An Ending [Ascent] from the Apollo Soundtracks album].

The third day of Frightfest 2002 has been the strongest so far - only Swimfan really failed to rise to the occassion but the rest - particularly Dark Water and Spider - more than made up for it. Day Four has a potentially very strong line up, but it's going to have its work cut out to top today's outstanding offerings.
KEVIN LYONS