Review: AN UNQUIET GRAVE

Ava meets her brother in law Jamie at his wife's and her twin sister's grave. She is bratty and callous and their conversation is fragmentary. As he is about to go she asks if he really can do "it". He nods and walks off. Months later the pair are driving along a country road at night and they talk about the accident that ended Julie's life. They stop when he recognises the scene of the tragedy, get out and perform a midly unsettling ritual. At the other end of this Julie has reappeared and Ava has vanished.

This extension of the Monkey's Paw story does two things well: it keeps everything lean and keeps to its conceit, however odd. By lean I'm talking minimal settings, sparse dialogue, no more effects than needed and room for the viewer's mind to move around the words and deeds of the characters. There is too much to spoil here for me to reveal any more plot but it if you were iffy at that description about the motivations of Jamie you should be. Also, you'll probably guess that the occult trick does not go as planned. But what might entice you is how committed the performances are. There are three characters only on screen and two of those are in the same body at different times (or are they?) and the sense that the black magic of it could not only happen but be enacted by these people.

The Monkey's Paw by W. W. Jacobs (who on earth gives their child a double late alphabet name?) is a wish story and wish stories go like this: wish 1 is solely to prove the power, wish 2 is more than wanted and wish 3 is to undo wish 2 and the lesson is "don't meddle". In the case of the old couple in the Jacob's story you might add "get over it". We have all grieved for something but what if your grief was so debilitating that it drove you to the impossible to ease it, to actually wish the dead to live again? For now, imagine the hurdle of that actually happening and ask what your real motives might be. Would you genuinely want the foreshortened life to continue or are you just wanting a vanity shot, a lifelong affirmation, someone to come back alive to thank you at every moment for their deliverance? What pain could be relieved by that? This film doesn't just go beyond The Monkey's Paw lesson to examine this it also avoids the overstatement that a big budget, high concept Hollywood reading would make. This is a quiet film with a big loud heart.

Currently on Shudder