Dreaded Light (2022) Modern Day Play for Today (VOD review)

One of the pieces of advice given to prospective writers across any medium, whether visually inclined or literary, it’s to write what you know. Writer/director Mark MacNicol has used that vague counsel to write his debut feature, Dreaded Light – a deeply personal drama that sashays past some horror tropes to tell a story of spiritual mediums, infant death and suicide. A really bleak but characteristic affair from the writer/director with a background in directing for stage and using art to promote social causes.

Dreaded Light is a three-hander based around the estranged familial relationship between father, Duncan (Adam Robertson), and daughter, Michelle (Rachell Flynn), living with the spectre of grief hanging over their family home after the death of their wife and mother. Having personally experienced it recently, grief is one of the weirdest mental funks. Michelle has developed a fear of daylight and has become obsessed with watching and rewatching Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979). It’s a coping mechanism, I guess? Not that Duncan is doing much better. He cannot bring himself to go upstairs as everything there reminds him of his late wife, to the extent that one of his first scenes has him strip naked to get washed in front of the kitchen sink. So far, so dysfunctional.

Duncan is out one night looking for the family dog at the family-owned stables, where he meets a fledgling spiritual medium, Jen (Kirsty Strain). What follows is a mystery untangled by spiritualism as we learn more about the family history, the fractured relationships and how unresolved issues can become toxic, albeit framed with the implication of possession and threat of violence. That’s an implication, by the way, as if you go in expecting a straight horror film – you will be very disappointed.

More spiritualist than supernatural, Dreaded Light offers a very different take on what would be a more obvious possession and exorcism tale in the hands of genre talent, that and the personal stake of MacNicol having family history tied up in the DNA of the story. It creates a small, thoughtful and intimate three-hander about the dissolution of the family unit. Now, I will admit that this indie horror trope has fallen into disrepute to the extent that it has become self-parodical – lucky then, Dreaded Light is no horror movie. The title and vague set-up suggest horror, just as the poster does, but this is a straight drama, which – yes, has a looming threat hanging over the family home. There are two ways to process this, the more negative of which would chastise this as a horror film that doesn’t even come close to being scary. But with the film not engaging with horror beyond build up, it liberates the film allowing the characterisation to tell an emotional story.

Both parent & child are broken, and the introduction of a spiritual medium, fledgling or not, gives the characters a release from the depressive tension. As the film opens, MacNicol establishes relationship dynamics that suggest Michelle is a nightmare, experiencing a destructive brand of grief. And Duncan is a put-upon father struggling to keep his head above water. This changes as events progress, and credit to Adam Robertson and Rachell Flynn for offering two very raw and emotionally exposed performances. The film doesn’t present either as bad guys, even when they both do reprehensible things – acts that are believable for who the characters are through their performances and a quietly shrewd script. Not to leave Jen (Kirsty Strain) in the dark as she puts in just as strong a performance albeit a more reactive one, navigating the extreme ups and downs of the pairs’ toxic grief.

There can be no escaping the fact that Dreaded Light is a very low-budget film. Not in any majorly negative ways, more in the aesthetics than any storytelling limitations. Instead of looking cinematic, the visuals lack depth resulting in a televisual feel like countless short films in the festival space or serialised TV drama. Not that this is the fault of anyone involved, as a low-budget film can only work with budget-friendly technology – short, feature or otherwise. However, I think the televisual veneer works for Dreaded Light. It has the feel of the TV plays (for today) that were popular on British TV in the 60s & 70s, even if none of them had the freedom to hit plot beats as oppressively bleak as those touched on in Mark MacNicol’s promising micro-budget debut feature.

Dreaded Light (2022)