FILM REVIEW: ​THE NURSERY

A decent spookfest from Uncork’d Entertainment.

“From filmmakers Christopher A. Micklos and Jay Sapiro comes the story of a young woman whose run-of-the-mill Saturday night quickly turns into a confrontation with unspeakable horror!”

Yep, that’s about right.

Ranae (Maddi Conway) takes on a job babysitting in a secluded house. The baby is already asleep when Ranae gets there. Not long into babysitting she gets a picture sent by text message from her best friend Calista’s phone, it’s a rather unpleasant picture of Ranae’s dead Mom and Ranae is freaked out by it. She rants at Calista (Emmaline Friederichs) who insists that she didn’t send the picture and also insists that she heads over to see Ranae, which she does, bringing her two friends Grace (Carly Sauer) and Jeremy (Claudio Parrone Jr) with her. The film makes good use of technology as things take a turn for the creepy, the incident with the text picture being the least of it as phantom figures are seen over webcams and the goings-on over the video baby monitor are somewhat disturbing.

“There’s no such thing as ghosts, do I really have to say that out loud?” Says the only guy in the room, but Jeremy isn’t the sharpest tool in the box as it soon becomes apparent that there are such things and those things are dangerous.

There is an indicator very early on things will get freaky in a traditional way as the baby’s parents are Mr and Mrs Belasco (Deanna and David Sapiro), if the name Belasco (pronounced Blasko) means nothing to you then your reading on the wrong website. The more famous Mr Blasko makes a little cameo appearance in the film they are all watching when things start to go awry, but that’s the only reference I spotted. When it becomes apparent that there’s something spooky going on Ranae consults her younger brother Ray (Marco Lama), who spends much of his free time in Paranormal based chat rooms, Ray gives Ranae a few pointers on the expectancies with ghosts, which doesn’t stop the foursome from being manipulated and dispatched by supernatural forces, mainly in the guise of ‘The Nanny’ (Monica Bahr), who is unfortunately yet another Samara clone. There’s another important character called Rose (Nadia Horner) who comes into the story much later on but is integral to proceedings, it’s a minor role with a major impact with a heavily restrained performance adding to Rose’s effectiveness.

As far as horror is concerned it’s not a gorefest, choosing instead to ramp up the creepiness to greater effect than spooky movies generally achieve. I have seen quite a lot of dross recently, so it’s nice to be able to say this is a film I’m actually able to get into, which is not to say it is by any means perfect but it has still got enough about it to hold my interest. The acting is good enough, story is fine with some routine stuff alongside other rather more novel aspects, dialogue credible and the technical aspects are okay even if there is the occasional shaky camera or a little intrusive background music here and there. Nothing that ruins the enjoyment of the film though.

There are some good twists, a lot of atmosphere and a general air of gloom in ‘The Nursery’, so all in all it’s not a bad film to spend 90 minutes in front of with a bag of popcorn and the lights off.

The Nursery is available on VOD from June 5th and on DVD from August 7th, so be sure to put those dates in your ‘Ones to watch’ diary.

BOOK REVIEW: THE DETAINED BY KRISTOPHER TRIANA
FIVE MINUTES WITH AUTHOR TERENCE HANNUM

Comments