There’s a very ominous opening to THE SCHOOL and the first big scare is just a few seconds in. A woman emerges from a vile, free standing bathtub. It’s gross, saturated colour looms all around … and there’s a creepy out-of-time kid. It seems the befuddled, blank-seeming woman who finds herself in this misbegotten place has no choice but to follow him. Just as the audience will be compelled into the bizarrely superstitious world crafted with detailed assurance by Writer/Director Storm Ashwood. THE SCHOOL is a disturbing, enthralling, dense film with a home grown pedigree. The universal fear of the half-dead, undead, not allowed to be dead is pervasive and makes for addictive watching.
Amy is the woman who has surfaced into this morbid situation and the audience will see this world through her eyes. And her memories. She is a doctor and mother to a child confined to the coma ward of her hospital. David drowned and has been absent life-signs for two years as his mother’s mental stability and professional standing have decayed. But in this empty, defying place named as a schoolhouse, she will become a reluctant surrogate parent at the same as her warrior is awakened to fight a terror of feral teenagers who haunt the halls.
Megan Drury is brilliant in the lead role. Conflicted, spookily irrationally composed, she gives Amy a calmness of exterior complemented with logical, measured decision making. The occasional contrasting outbursts of violent grief and loss draw the empathy of the viewer and immerse one even deeper in the weirdness around her. Drury helms the film with charismatic suffering and maternal strength of will as the mystery elements of the narrative overwhelm Amy and narrow her options.
Drury is accompanied for much of the film by two child actors playing the little boy and girl for whom she has assumed responsibility. As Timmy, Jack Ruwald has an ambiguous, enigmatic knowingness, he has been in THE SCHOOL long enough to forget his real mother. As has Alexia Santosuosso’s Becky. Both these children give lovely performances under Ashwood’s strong direction. They are unerringly in the moment and their considerable emotional range gives the jeopardy of Amy’s circumstances extra foreboding. Santosuosso has a lovely command of how her doll speaks truth to her, while Runwald brings a brave little man despite his fears.
The adolescent pack that is also trapped in whatever THE SCHOOL is, has a well created menace with a focussed stillness and with the hero worship well expressed. The maniacal Zac character (Will McDonald) has a toxic charisma, if somewhat overplayed. His expression of half remembered children’s songs is macabre and malevolent. But this is Amy’s story, we are inside her head.
And it’s pretty nightmarish in there. Conceptually the film ignores genre barriers to keep an audience off kilter and on guard. There are plenty of shocks. The bloodletting isn’t gory yet the realism of assaults and wounds feels worse. There’s a constant ratchet of tension until the mythical and mystical takes over. That claustrophobia of the last twenty minutes never lets go!
The storytelling is paramount and Aaron McLisky’s cinematography avoids tropey or flashy horror movement or cutaways, there is a sturdiness and stability to the shot selection that allows an increasing unease as events unfold. THE SCHOOL is tightly edited, too, but with time to linger on faces and absorb the environment. (Marcus D’Arcy, David Ngo)
The production design (Nicola Stillone) is stellar here. The brightness of the white hospital fading into the washed out, pallid, greys as Amy’s experiences inch closer to each other. And there is an evocative restraint of palette in a gloomy opaqueness of green and blue colours in the school. Also very haunting and avoiding clichés, the music (Michael Lira) has a whispery, whooshing quality that murmurs of vulnerability and of the unspeakable.
It begins nasty and ends soulful, it scares and it nurtures, it haunts and harks but above all, it gives us a protagonist to care about. THE SCHOOL is an Australian film that defies easy description but right from that first heart stopper it knows what it is, as surely as there are monsters in our sleeping.
THE SCHOOL from Bronte Pictures [Facebook] distributed by The Backlot Films [Facebook] opens in select cinemas nationally from December 6, 2018. You can see the very creepy trailer here.
