★★★☆☆
A couple’s breakup collides with a devastating diagnosis and a pack of masked killers: bewildering, in the best way.
Codey S. Wilson’s feature debut, seen at Panic Fest before this, refuses to pick a lane, but is perhaps stronger for the discord. It opens on a relationship already ending: Houston (Alexander McPherson) and Lise (Elsa Ames) are quietly uncoupling when Houston is handed a devastating neurological diagnosis, and Lise chooses to stay and support him.
The pair retreat to an isolated house to begin treatment, at which point a group of masked assailants turns the film into a home invasion. Then something stranger takes over and the hunters find themselves hiding from a threat nobody saw coming.
Wilson uses the genre furniture to get at something more painful, the way illness and fear corrode intimacy, the afflicted suffering in plain sight while trying to hide it. It’s boldly shot and cut, and for long stretches you often can’t tell what happens next, partly because it isn’t always clear what’s happening now. That disorientation is both what sets it apart and what trips it up: some passages tip into incoherence, though by the end you can piece together what’s been going on, more or less.
McPherson and Ames sell the fraying marriage with real conviction, which keeps the weirdness grounded. The low budget and first-feature roughness show, but the ambition is bracing. A bewildering watch in the best sense, if you like a horror film that won’t sit still or explain itself too fast.
Lesions played at Tubi FrightFest in London.