7 Keys (Frightfest 2024) Review

Lena doesn’t want to go home. She wants to run away from the troubles of her real life and recapture all the fun she’s missed out on. Using Daniel’s keys, the pair go on the ultimate tour of London – a wild weekend of getting to know each other intimately in other people’s homes.

Something about British visuals and landscapes hypnotises you when captured on film, as they can elicit grandness and claustrophobia, and merge grim grit with a darker beauty that brutalist architects dream of, late at night while conceiving their next imposing building. 7 Keys uses a British landscape to trace the stages of romance, peeling back the layers of identity and drenching us in moody lighting, with a tour of the underbelly and overhanging glitz of London in equal spades – the film has an unnerving adventure about it. You never know when the pressure cooker’s going to explode, but it’s fun to watch it build – especially in the hands of an assured and playful director working with a cast that understands the assignment down to the very last full stop.

Where other directors and writer focus on wider locations or bigger objects to explore our identities and the things we’d rather hide, Joy Wilkinson (The Everlasting Club, Doctor Who, Lockwood & Co, Suspect), uses keys – the unassuming thing we all take with us without a second thought every single day of our adult lives. They open doors and lock them, give us access to places (homes, warehouses, libraries, morgues, and more), and take it away, and while we ignore them, they hold more about us than we ever consider. Wilkinson plays off this by using keys as a vehicle for fantasy, high speed romance, and the peeling back of spiritual and psychological skin.

For Lena (Emma Macdonald), lost soul Daniel (Billy Postlethwaite), and his keys represent an escape from her life, the chance to live as someone else, and even the chance to truly live as herself. Can you truly be yourself around your loved ones, the people who are constants in your life, or around a stranger you may never see again? The keys hold more than the ability to turn the screws in locks as every stage of Daniel’s life is carved into the metal – who he was when he lived in the seven properties they visit for a spontaneous weekend. As the layers start to peel back, Macdonald and Postlewaite do a fantastic job of leaning into, and away from each other. The power dynamic between them constantly shifts, the tension building like steam on a shower screen that you can wipe away, only for it to collect once more, and making for a uniquely tense climax to the film. Lena and Daniel’s step into the fantastic gives them both the freedom to play their characters and put on masks, but you can’t help but wonder if it also emboldens them in their descent into terror. As romance turns to horror the game’s no longer under their control. They’ve peeled the layers back too far (or not at all?), and have to now run from themselves and the spaces they’ve invaded.

The cinematography is breath-taking at the more introspective parts of the film, playing with height and width to bring us into the weekend and what it means for both Len and Daniel. London is given the range it should be known for, and 7 Keys doesn’t compromise in showing both sides of the city. A solid score holds the film in all its moods (Lena and Daniel flirting, [another two scenes]), then sweeps us away into the finer points of the film – the real meat within the soup.

A thread that runs through the 7 Keys is this idea of intimacy, and the time we take to create spaces or homes for ourselves, and the effort, or lack thereof, we put into creating areas that we feel comfortable in, that we can retreat to. The concept of watching Lena and Daniel invade other people’s spaces, despite Daniel living in them previously, feels both unsettling and exhilarating. It brings back those memories of childhood – of breaking into abandoned buildings, or staying late after a place has been locked down and spending the night, but as an adult, you’re waiting for someone to walk in on them and reclaim the space. Would that save them from themselves and each other, or would it ruin the fun?

All in all, 7 Keys is a look into ourselves as much as Lena and Daniel, and asks if we’re still entitled to the spaces we made years ago? What about the people who live in them now? Do our memories matter more than their present? It also asks when we give someone the freedom to be themselves, what happens when we don’t like what we see? If we can’t put the lid back on, do we stay there in the eye of danger, or do we cut loose and cling to the comfort of a more mundane life?

Sampira’s Archive – 7 Keys