Ghost hunters chase Jack the Ripper with an 1888 pinhole camera, in a slow-burn found-footage horror that rewinds the format to the birth of cinema and finds the real monster hiding in Victorian society itself.
For history-of-film aficionados, the premise of Snapshot requires a little suspension of disbelief. In Whitechapel, 1888, as the Ripper killings begin, an amateur inventor – Tamworth, played by Tom Stourton – builds one of the first moving-image machines, a pinhole camera fitted with wax cylinders for sync sound, and turns it on an all-women secret society of ghost hunters. Their ranks run from sex workers to a respectable lady, and they are convinced the murders are the work not of a man but of a violent spirit.
A debut for both director Joseph Archer and writer Cathy Wippell, who also appears among the women, the film reaches us as recovered footage, an opening title presenting it as a bequest to the British Film Archives, left in the will of one Mary Tamworth and surfacing only in April 2026, well over a century after it was shot.
The visual approach is the real draw, with the pinhole conceit yielding that delightful rarity, a circular aspect, along with sepia tones and a pleasing crackle in the image. However, this is plainly a digital effort, the vignette, sepia and scratches applied after the fact, and the notion of perfectly synced sound and a steady frame rate from an 1888 camera will not bear much scrutiny. The film asks only that if we go along with it, we will be rewarded.
A note at the outset warns that the material has been tampered with, and so it proves: subliminal frames, jolts of montage, sudden collages of screaming faces. Something has been at this footage – but who, or what? Rather than the shocks and jump scares of so much found footage, Archer delivers an unsettling study of patriarchy, its women gradually succumbing to one threat or another. It turns over journalistic integrity, mob hysteria, the male gaze, and the right to look. There is even an early Ripper tour, running while the killings are still under way, on which the public want none of the backstory, only the gruesome details and the precise locations of the bodies. For all the dismembered corpses on display, the monster the film settles on is Victorian society.
Yet for all its doom and discord, its unsettling, flashes of terror and notes of melancholy, Snapshot is often very funny. I particularly enjoyed the negotiation with a grandstanding witness who will reveal what the Ripper looks like in exchange for a handful of cash – and who then takes a deep breath and simply runs away.
Snapshot has its world premiere in competition at Edinburgh before playing FrightFest at the end of the month. With shades of Peeping Tom meets The Elephant Man, anyone drawn to Victoriana, found footage or formally playful cinema should keep an eye out for it.
Snapshot played at the Edinburgh Film Festival today and later in the week.