★★★
Alex Kahuam’s sophomore feature is a gloriously committed domestic horror: a household in psychic and physical decomposition, held together by grief, denial, and one very bad herbal remedy.
Director Alex Kahuam announces his intentions with an opening sequence that operates in a double register. A man leads a police officer into a bedroom. A shadowy figure on the bed immediately ensnares the cop in a psychic chokehold before snapping his neck and leaping for the door, tentacles flailing. The Remedy presents all of this both as one of its protagonist’s recurring nightmares and as a prefiguring of things to come. The film is content to leave that ontological conflict unresolved; a sustained ambiguity designed to keep you from ever quite finding your footing.
The house at the film’s centre is a claustrophobic space crammed with the detritus of a family that has been decaying long before anything supernatural takes hold. Timothy Granaderos plays Jason, a devoted but increasingly hollowed-out son caring for his terminally ill mother while managing the return of his estranged sister Rachel (London Thor), whose fragile mental state brings its own compulsions into an already pressurised home.
Grief makes desperate people do desperate things, and Daniel Kuhlman’s script is shrewder than its premise suggests about the particular delusions available to those who cannot accept a natural death. Before long people are going missing, as conflict arises from Jason and Rachel’s competing approaches to healthcare (especially, voodoo charms from her, cosmic parasite ingestion and a spot of light cannibalism courtesy of him). Hospice care, you find yourself thinking, would probably have been preferable to infecting your mum with a cosmic psychic squid demon, but that is the point.
The one possible miscalculation is that the opening scene plays too many cards too early, and the rest of the first act sustains a pitch of disorientation that tips into overreach, the need to hook an audience with too much early hysteria and then sustain that pitch, when perhaps a slower build would have got the audience to lean in.
But The Remedy earns back all its good will, and when the horror pays off it pays off fully. A Fulci-adjacent sequence of maggot-riddled decomposition and some bracingly committed foot-eating push the film into territory that owns its genre credentials without apology. Doug Jones, operating somewhere between physical performance and elemental presence, is the right kind of wrong. The Remedy is engrossing, unpleasant and unnerving. Recommended!
The Remedy played at SXSW London