The Living and the Dead

Ignore the previous comment by 'perisho', but I would take something from the others thereafter, both positive and negative.

Firstly the negatives - yes there are gaping holes in the plot, seemingly situations that wouldn't happen, possibly too long for its plot subject. Right, the positives - great acting, good use of dialogue (often repetitive and therefore affecting), good use of ambiguity (which helps convey the mental health issues that the family have) and possibly explain the seemingly apparent plot holes (is all we see really occurring?), brilliant cinematography, and it's a brave attempt at a all too often patronised subject matter.

Furthermore, it is made on a tight budget in Britain. A rare commodity nowadays. Only a handful of directors in the UK work outside of the mainstream, and Rumley's effort should be applauded. Even the film factory that is the Hollywood machine can't achieve this level of skill (A Beautiful Mind, Rainman...please!). Only say Keane, Devil & Daniel Johnston and Julien Donkey Boy have we seen schizophrenia in the manner with which we see here. Yes, not everything works, but when it does, this film is powerful and touching as anything else in cinema dealing with mental illness.

Well done to the director and may your second feature be as strong.

Imagine a retelling of "The Shining" (1980) by Stanley Kubrick - but instead of Steven King's menacing snow storm and ghosts of the dead at the Overlook Hotel - this nuclear family is threatened by the bankruptcy of the landed aristocracy by health care, death by terminal cancer, and an over-protected adult son who is permanently child-like and requires vast infusions of anti-psychotics. Add to this helplessness, depression, anxiety, guilt, anger, and an oedipal-complex repressed by English manners, and you have the explosive makings for "The Living and the Dead" (2006).

Kubrick's famous emotional distance from the story is replaced by Rumley's intense personal need to pull the audience into the madness which modern medicine creates with false hopes and budget efficiencies, and especially, its patent inability to assist the emotional needs of both the terminal patient and their families. Rumley succeeds where others fear to tread by plunging the audience into the thick of it.

'The Living and the Dead' portrays the lives of a British noble, his wife and their adult son set in a spectacular country estate. The good days are long past. The estate is in disrepair and at risk of forfeiture, the wife bedridden most of the film and the son clinically psychotic. That sums up the bulk of what can be said with relative certainty about the plot.

The rest is a tumbling mash of conflicting alternate realities, displaced time-lines, hallucinatory visions and fast motion. Director/writer/producer Simon Rumley loves the fast motion. Leo Bill as the son spends much of the film at ten-fold speed, racing through vast expanses of interior, arms and face animated in a failed attempt to impart the viewer his perspective. It doesn't work, quickly growing tiresome and obvious. Rumley's so committed to the technique that clouds, the advancing sun, branches, vehicles, doctors and nurses eventually join the fray. Repeatedly. It's difficult to comprehend why since it has no bearing on the quiet desperation Rumley's grasping at, instead evoking the feel of an Eighties music video or a VW commercial.

It's symptomatic of the film's jettisoning coherency for atmosphere. The first half contradicts the back with no hint of resolution offered. The son proves more criminally insane than clinically yet no reason offered why he wasn't institutionalized. Early in the film when still portrayed as a happy idiot the father is constantly abusive and stern. Fatherly warmth doesn't appear until unconscionable acts are committed. The son roams free past the point any modern Western nation would have seen him incarcerated. We never know why. Likewise the rest of the plot is so artificial and bent to the requirements of intense moments all believability is lost and with it any concern for the characters. The one bright spot is Kate Fahy's terrific portrayal of the wife. She creates the few and fleeting scenes in which the film works as intended. Not content with these minor successes Rumley brushes them aside to make room for more mind-bending plot twists, snatching total failure from the jaws of mediocre success. A movie for the patient only.

I saw this film at Fantasia quite recently and it completely blew me away. Me and my girlfriend were gonna take in The Lost afterwards but were so exhausted that we just went an' had a few drinks afterwards. This is an extremely unusual film - about a retarded kid who looks after his really ill mom when the dad goes away on business - and incredibly bold an gutsy I think. It starts slowly using locked off wide shots, establishing characters etc, kind of like a poor man's Merchant Ivory (the family in question are on their last legs and so there's next to no furniture etc), and then when you think you've got a hold on it Rumley says f**k you and takes it in a completely stylistic direction with crazy editing, music, camera etc. Initially this is quite jarring but it works within the context of the characterisation and the mental break-down that the retarded kid's going through that in the end I thought it's quite a brilliant device. Ultimately the film is a real emotional grind and deeply tragic but it tackles, albeit in an extreme, visceral way, what most of us at some time, I guess, will have to go through and that's having to look after ailing parents or relatives. There's no monsters in the closet or serial killers here, it's just a very stark consideration of the scariest thing around: the reality of death. This film disturbed the s**t out of me - and I wouldn't recommend it to the feint-hearted but definitely check it out if you're hard enough

This is possibly the worst film i have ever seen. I actually saw the premiere in Rotterdam Film Festival, and whilst many people walked out I stayed to the bitter end. But that was mainly because I didn't want to lose my friends. Self indulgent is a word often overused in the arts, and some of the best music and film is incredibly self indulgent, but behind that indulgence there is often genius. Unfortunately here there is nothing, not even a plot. The mistake the director Simon Rumley makes is to dwell on the suffering of the characters, all in a kind of 'gross out' adolescent way, without any insight, or any freshness. All the best films now tend not to be so mawkish, making The Living and The Dead seem like a bad student project from the 1970s. There's no lightness of touch here and no humour. Perhaps we're supposed to laugh at mentalist James in the same way we laugh at Julian Donkey Boy. But he's just not that funny and he has none of the demented hilarity of Donkey Boy. Like the rest of the cast, he's just a stereotype, an extremely annoying stereotype. All you'll learn from The Living and The Dead is that some people clearly have much more money than sense. And I'm not talking about any of the characters in the film here.