Spoiler warning!
“Heaven is still here, but it can’t be breathe.”
Cook’s cosmic journey into grief, family dynamics, and moral grey areas.
Who doesn’t love whiskey? With coke, on the rocks, with lemonade, it’s the drink that tastes good in every mood. Robert McClaw, a discoverer tasked with finding another ship on which on the crew got eaten, disappeared along with barrels and barrels of whiskey. Laying dormant for 143 years, Holace Cameron – the CEO of a whiskey conglomerate on the cliff-edge of bankruptcy, pays explorers to retrieve them. Opening a line of whiskeys to rival a competitor is the aim of the game in the Hyperborean (which played the Soho Horror Fest), but they may not survive long enough to play their winning hand.
Cook’s exploration of grief, family structures and money takes you on a funny, introspective and wonderful journey that constantly brushes all moral areas into grey. The set up of the ship’s history is animated, to give us a distance and an uncertainty. Is it real, or simply a folk-tale?
Reality soon draws us in, with the CEO’s family being interviewed by detectives and the company’s PR strategist, and the CEO’s life is seen through the lens of people who all have motivations. The children are interested in the inheritance and have been pushed through a contest for their father’s approval and money (he consolidates the family’s money into the retrieval of the whiskey barrels). The PR strategist is interested in maintaining the image of the company, and has very little concern for the children or the detectives – save for if they tarnish the family name which would affect the company brand. The detectives are interested in the truth, and whether there is foul play afoot.
We have a real distance from Holace, who is career driven and, now getting older, obsessed with legacy, doing the impossible, and oneupmanship. This drives him to his death, and Cook shows this through the physical and metaphysical world. The whiskey is clearly cursed, and with lighting ranging from bright and airy to dim and ominous, there’s a throughline of the whiskey being away from home. It’s wrong to unearth it from the depths, and no-one should touch it as the horrific fates of the crew and captain that went down with it have been distilled within the barrels as much as the whiskey.
As we descend into the darkness of murder and supernatural curses, hallucinations take place and the veil of this plane and other planes of reality become thinner and thinner – a commentary on drinks and hallucinogens in folklore.
The cast are funny when they need to be – with an endearing naivety and disconnect from the real world, yet they’re intense when necessary, coming to a crescendo at the discovery of John Boyle’s body, preserved for 143 years in one of the barrels. As we descend into the darkness of murder and supernatural curses, hallucinations take place and the veil of this plane and other planes of reality become thinner and thinner – a commentary on drinks and hallucinogens in folklore. The detectives and PR strategists have no idea what they’ve walked into, and when essences, living corpses and energy beams run amok, they soon find themselves as erratic as the family.
Sorry, there’s just some things a marketing outline can’t spin.
By the end I was left with a visual palette that was beautiful and vibrant in its understated hues, with bursts of colour that speaks to a team that were assured in their talents and not afraid to take their time. The decisions to frame the cosmic horror against an almost crime noir container – updated for the now, ups the stakes and pushes the family to tell the truth from their eyes. Can we trust their eyes when we know inheritance is involved? Do they have any hand in the events and how the dead bodies relate to them? Do the bodies feed off of their emotions? The film pushed me to make my own conclusions, something all great directors and creative teams do.
There’s a display of the unknown and our tendency to try to understand through our earthly experiences, but ultimately we’re always none the wiser. Cook and Burgess leave us to pick up the pieces, helping us along the way with the family’s despair and where that’s placed. Do they really grieve for their father? Are they covering for their own names and freedoms? Do they really know the severity of what happened and can they even articulate it to detectives who merely deal with facts in this world, not the next one or others?
The choice of mummies took my brain to other places given our tendency to put them on display, disconnecting from the fact these were people from a culture that believed in the afterlife and prepared their bodies for it. We drag them out of their resting places, dooming them to never reach the after-life and to walk the earth in this case, and although The Hyperborean approaches this with a great deal of humour and fantastical laser beams, the undertone of wrong still prevails. Had Holace not gone looking for the barrels to forge the end of his own legacy, spurred on by his own mortality, mummies wouldn’t be vaporising people now. The events that take place after that break the mummies out of their human vessels and plunge us into the tried and true oldie but goodie. Nothing is what it seems, and the movie uses comedy in a way that all good films should: to ask questions, asking big ones in a way that all audiences would find fun and gripping. The Hyperborean seems to have a slight nod and pay homage to old-school sci-fi and monster classics, weaving those iconic creatures with the contemporary environments and issues we face today.
Who doesn’t love laser shooting mummies?
The Hyperborean was the Opening Gala of Soho Horror Fest 2023 (International Premiere)
