★★★☆☆
A handsome, superbly acted sealed-room puzzle about twins raised by a voice behind a locked door, that promises much and delivers… something.
The sealed room is a recurring laboratory in genre cinema, from the lethal geometry of Cube to the domestic dread of Await Further Instructions and last year’s Brick, and Casey Walker’s second film in the programme, after the Hammer wendigo Ithaqua, belongs to that lineage.
An opening tracking shot glides through a dim, bunker-like interior and settles on two swaddled infants, one in red, one in blue, before cutting to them a dozen years on: Red (Emma Ho) and Blue (Ian Ho), still enclosed in the automated dwelling that is the film’s only setting. Provisions appear in the fridge on request and transform in the microwave; videotapes of a puppet show arrive unbidden; their vocabulary has hardened into private usage, catch becoming “ball catch”. Order comes from Papa, a disembodied voice behind a locked door with a glowing window, transgression against which has left a scar on Blue’s hand.
The hook of the film is the mystery of the dwelling, and the bond between the siblings, which begins to fracture when a monthly “Noël” delivers the gift of Pal (Ess Hödlmoser), a wordless, androgynous presence. Red calls Pal her; Blue calls Pal it, and that small grammatical split widens into a chasm.
The Ho siblings are excellent throughout, and Chareese Steinhoff’s production design stays tactile and strange, a sequence in which Red is swallowed by a maggoty heap of garbage reaching outright horror. Sadly the resolution serves up roughly what you had guessed lay outside the door without providing the explanation necessary to satisfy. Nicely styled and finely acted, if finally just slightly hollow, it promises much but delivers a little less.
Home Bodies played at Tubi FrightFest in London.