At first glance "Possum" is the kind of small, independent horror movie that the Brits do very well but which seem to crop up every couple of weeks; movie-making on the cheap that stand or fall on their writer's and director's imagination. Here the writer and director is Matthew Holness and this is his first film. Fundamentally, it's an actor's piece and there's really only two of them in it. Sean Harris is the seemingly crazy pupeteer, (Possum is his puppet, a spider-like thing that he carries around in a bag), and Alun Armstrong his possibly just-as-crazy uncle and the setting is a terrace house on the wrong side of derelict and some not very hospitable marshes.
This is the kind of thing that Samuel Beckett might have written and once upon a time it could have been a play on television. Of course, the idea of a puppet with a life of its own is nothing new and has been a staple of horror movies certainly as far back as "Dead of Night" but seldom, if ever, has it been done like this and never, to my knowledge, with a spider, albeit one with something resembling a human head. That it is genuinely disturbing is down in no small measure to Holness' direction, the utterly brilliant performances of Harris and Armstrong and a terrifically discordant score by The Radiophonic Workshop and being something of an arachnophobe myself I am sure it will give me nightmares. It may not burn up the multiplexes on a Saturday night but it's definitely the kind of edgy and intelligent cinema we should cherish.
