Review: WAKE WOOD - Drags Hammer Kicking & Screaming Back to its British Horror Roots

rating: 3.5

Welcome to the town of Wake Wood: an isolated close knit community inhabited by backward folk who are reluctant to welcome newcomers and cling to ancient pagan rituals. Where the revamped Hammer debut Let Me In was a decidedly Hollywood cinematic affair with glossy horror enhancements, this second feature strips the post production gleam and drags the studios kicking and screaming back to their raw British horror roots. How refreshing it is, then, that director David Keating does such an admiral job of pulling off proceedings. The story focuses on Patrick and Louise Daly, a young couple who relocate to the titular village to recover from the death of only child Alice, who died at the jaws of a crazed canine. After stumbling upon a secret ritual they are offered an opportunity to be reunited with their lost daughter, provided that is, that she died within a year and they agree to return her body back to the world of the dead after three days. It doesn€™t take much foresight to suspect the couple may be bending the truth to gain parental access. And it isn€™t long before something is blatantly amiss with their reincarnated kid, which arouses local suspicion and spirals events out of control. Although marketed as a traditional urban myth akin to other ordinary-seeming small town terrors like The Wicker Man and Hammer€™s own The Witches, the film that Wake Wood most prominently recalls in its desperate parental predicament is Don€™t Look Now. There€™s even a cross-cutting stress release sex scene that mirrors Nicholas Roeg€™s masterful supernatural chiller. Unfortunately Eva Birthistle and Aidan Gillen as the grief-ridden couple are no Sutherland or Christie and as a result the film lacks the deep heart-rending character investment required to make their ordeal truly unsettling. Despite this newcomer Ella Connolly as Alice is brilliantly unnerving, ensuring situations are nicely unbalanced. Her performance joins a recent plethora of creepy kids in the likes of Orphan and The White Ribbon. While Timothy Spall€™s interfering village patriarch agreeably echoes the tradition of spooky British horror supports, even if his character occasionally verges on League of Gentlemen parody. There€™s also ample gruesome imagery for Hammer fans to sink their teeth into including a painfully palpable death-by-cow-crush and several gloopy re-birth sequences, which thankfully shun CGI for pleasingly raw, done-in-the-flesh aesthetics. An agreeable back-to-basics Hammer horror affair, what Wake Wood lacks in star spark and shocks it more than makes up for in gruesome gory details. Wake Wood is released in the U.K. today.