By Todd Garbarini
Ivan Kavanagh’s The Canal (2014) is the one of the creepiest, most brilliantly
photographed and edited psychological studies I have seen of late. An utterly frightening and unsettling concoction,
The Canal, which screened last month
at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival, pulls no punches in creating an overwhelming
feeling of dread while constantly keeping the audience on its guard.
David (Rupert Evans) is a film
archivist who appears to have a wonderful home life. He and his expectant wife Alice (Hannah
Hoekstra) visit a prospective house, with a canal not far off, to settle in. As Alice inspects the layout, David sees what
appears to be someone walking through the first floor. Vexed, he swears that he saw someone. Or did he? Five years hence their lives appear ordinary with the addition of their
young son, Billy (Calum Heath). Alice
keeps telling David she loves him prior to leaving for work or following mechanical
sex. It arouses suspicion; at a dinner
party, Alice rushes off to speak with a client, Alex (Carl Shabaan), but David
notices intimate exchanges between the two and when she returns to dance with him,
and we see the estrangement on their faces.
At work, David’s work partner Claire
(Antonia Campbell-Hughes) tells him that new footage has come in and needs to
be viewed for archiving. He is shocked
to learn that it is a detail of a 1902 crime scene that took place inside the
bedroom that he and his wife now occupy (this is a point that the estate agent
naturally neglected to impart to the couple.) The footage has the look and feel of authenticity (the effect could have
probably been created in post-production on a computer utilizing a high brow
software package) and director Kavanagh shot the crime scene aftermath with a 1915 Universal movie camera by using the
lowest speed black and white 35mm stock that he and his crew could find. The film delves more into a ghost
story that recalls The Shining
(1980), The Ring (2005), and The Innkeepers (2011) in terms of
imagery and mood. Veteran composer Ceiri Torjussen provides a brilliantly
effective, frightening and memorable score.
David starts to become unhinged. When his wife prepares to go to work, David
pleads with her to come straight home and she promises to. After work, David follows her as she and
Alex, their affair now obviously confirmed, walk to Alex’s house which is
opposite a canal. David follows them
from a distance, and catches them in the midst of sexual passion, leaving him
feeling betrayed and disillusioned. He
stumbles into the worst cinematic toilet seen since Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996) and begins to see
flashes of the murder that occurred well over 100 years ago. Like the best ghost stories, The Canal presents us with images that
give us pause to determine if they are real or if they are just happening in
the mind of the protagonist.
When David’s wife goes missing, he
contacts the police and tries desperately to locate her. The lead officer on the case (Steve Oram)
immediately suspects David killed her and asks him straight out; David is
bewildered by the inquiry. His son Billy
is too young to understand the concepts of disappearance and death; Sophie the
nanny (Kelly Byrne) is concerned for Billy’s welfare but is also afraid for her
own safety and as David becomes more and more frenetic she feels the need to
leave.
The film is beset in imagery that
references pregnancy and childbirth; water, as it did in Robert Altman’s
dreamlike 3 Women (1977), plays a big
factor, as does duality. The references
in The Canal are two-fold – there is
the canal where David’s wife’s body is found, and the birth canal is referenced
in a scene of unnerving horror.
The
Canal had me watching the end
credits in silent anticipation, holding my breath until the final sounds on the
soundtrack ended abruptly. It is a
visceral, gripping film experience, one to be ideally experienced
theatrically. Viewers will get that
chance in months to come when the film is released in 20 market