SALVAGE
UK, 2008, 79 minutes, Colour.
Neve Mc Intosh, Shaun Dooley, Dean Andrews, Lindzey Cocker.
Directed by Lawrence Gough.
If you have seen George A Romero's The Crazies (1973) and/or the 2010 effective remake with Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell, the plot of Salvage will seem quite familiar: a mysterious virus, military intervention, citizens at peril.
The difference here is that the setting is around Liverpool, with suburban housing estates and beaches, a British version of being frantic rather than frantic American franticism, and the action after the opening car ride in the bright light of Christmas Eve, is confined to the interiors or houses, a bit on the streets outside and the woods behind the houses. This makes for claustrophobic terror rather than horror, although there are several gruesome deaths and mutilations.
This is above average terror. The film is brief, sets up the personal side of the story as a separated father drops his 14 year old daughter, she very unwilling, to stay with her mother. They clash, but there is little time for anything to be done towards reconciliation because the terror piles on almost at once. We have seen a puzzling scene where a neighbour goes berserk pursuing a paper boy – fatally - but during the film we hear what has happened with a container that has landed on a beach and the army have been trying to contain the contamination (without scruple in killing risky civilians).
The burden of the dramatic terror falls on Neve Mc Intosh as the mother. A strong personality, she is persuasive as the frightened woman, the mother desperately searching for her daughter, willing to go into risky situations. Audiences can identify with her – reinforced during a welcome lull in the terror when she explains to the man with whom she is trapped what she has done and why she has alienated her daughter.
The man, as the screenplay shrewdly and alarmingly suggests, immediately thinks that this is must be a terrorist attack and breaks into anti-Muslim rants, even when the woman explains that the man who went berserk next door is not Muslim but a Hindu doctor. Later, a wounded guard maintains the secrecy of what has happened and feeds information to the man that it is an Al Quaeda attack.
While it is not original in plot, it is effective in performances and in maintaining a sense of terror that is local and suburban enough to be credible – and alarming.
1. Small British thriller? The British tone? Horror? Science-fiction? Mutants, military experiments, fear and paranoia?
2. The title, the mutant, the experiment, the container, the mutant washing up on the beach, going on a rampage?
3. The Liverpool district, Christmas Eve? Homes, streets, ordinary, the musical score?
4. The sense of menace, becoming overt, blood and deaths, the effect, the military and the violence?
5. The paperboy, hearing the argument, the killing, going into the woods, his death?
6. Ordinary family, ordinary suburbs, characters, Jodie as a teenager, her relationship with her father, tangles with her mother? The divorce? The personality of her father? Attitude with his ex-wife? Jodie going to see Beth, finding her with Kieran, her reaction?
7. Jodie going across the street, Leanne, Beth creating a scene at the door? The arrival of the military, Mr Sharma being killed?
8. The crisis, the power going out, everybody indoors? The shutdown? The neighbour and the death of his wife, coming into the house, Beth going into the house, the kitchen? Kieran and his death? The fear of terrorism? The SAS arriving and their killing?
9. The explanation, the container, the experiment, the beach, the escape?
10. Kieran and his confrontation with the mutant? His death? Beth at the door wanting to find Jodie, Jodie in the house, the attack, Beth saving Jodie, but her
being shot?
11. The movement from ordinary to plausible to horror?
12. The atmosphere of paranoia, fear, violence, racist outbursts?
13. The film’s reliance on this kind of horror and mutant virus genre? Its effect?
