Director Brian OMalleys first feature is an evocative, stylised, beautifully photographed piece of work, a small but perfectly formed horrible delight. Theres some artistic homage to early John Carpenter here and there, most notably in the atmospheric score and in some riffing on the authority-under-siege trope made notorious in Assault On Precinct 13. Essentially though, its High Plains Drifter relocated from Lago, Texas to the fictitious Inveree in Scotland. As with the Clint Eastwood western, everyone in the immediate vicinity has done terrible things, and a stranger has come to punish them, here known only as Six (played with a cynically deadpan gravitas by the wonderful Liam Cunningham). Of course, since this is a blood n bones lo-fi British horror, terrible things are actually Terrible Things: the supporting cast are the worst of the worst. Everyone is mad and/or bad to varying degrees. Well, almost everyone. WPC Heggie (a never-better Pollyanna McIntosh) is a victim, not a perpetrator, and so fulfills the role of the final girl in this film. Shes a victim in name only, though: scuttlebutt (like gossip gone to Hell) says that the redoubtable McIntosh, one of the UKs best kept secrets, made sure that the script was rewritten to portray Heggie as a strong, capable survivor of abuse, not a quivering mess beset by the return of the repressed. The film is all the better for giving us a female protagonist the equal of any of the raving nutters and bad men lurking about the cells including the creature theyre trapped in there with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5Cskj8Asas Subtlety has no place in this kind of claustrophobic, Grand Guignol horror, and Let Us Prey makes it as clear as possible (without adding horns and a pitchfork) that Six is the Devil himself. But this is Old Nick recast as Gods fixer, not his foil: in an almost Catholic mise en scène of sin and punishment set around broken authority figures and an absence of law in a damned police station, its the fallen angel that is the upright man here, doing Hells work in the name of Heaven. Its a difficult trick to pull off, getting sympathy for the Devil, and its hard to imagine anyone except the magnetic Cunningham making the role work this well. That Six ends up as such an extraordinary creation is a testament to the mans sheer presence and masterful delivery even some of the wonkier lines the screenplay feeds him sound like Shakespeare when hes through with them. Let Us Prey isnt really a two-hander: the supporting cast are all brilliant in their own individual ways. But this strange, idiosyncratic film belongs to McIntosh and Cunningham, which makes the somewhat divisive ending all the more appealing.
Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.
