Films

After the death of the family patriarch, Barbara and Megan, mother and daughter, face the collapse of their already fractured relationship. When Barbara unilaterally decides to enlist a complete stranger to bring her husband back to life through a ritual, the two must unite and confront potentially lethal hidden forces. The dead are never far away in this somber contemplation of loss and generational trauma, as it is in the mother-daughter dynamic that director and screenwriter Julia Max finds the anchor for her debut film. A sense of impending doom permeates this work, which, never straying far from the family home, the cradle of all that remained unsaid, contains moments as dark as they are mundane. It is in achieving this balance that it seizes to make us question: can the curse also be the cure? Does grief represent the greatest of horrors, or is our inability to cope with it even more terrifying? A film that is pure horror therapy.