The Lair (2022)(II) Very Far Removed from Marshall’s Glory Days (Review)

We all end up rooting for the underdog, don’t we? From humble beginnings to a series of trials, tribulations, knockbacks and naysayers, Neil Marshall has had ’em all. Many will harbour plenty good will for his one-two cult hits of Dog Soldiers and The Descent, both British gold standard uncompromising horrors of the early-to-mid noughties. Some will find plenty to like in his misunderstood Doomsday, a wild and jam-packed mishmash of Mad Max, 28 Days Later… and even Excalibur. He found a wider audience in mega-budget TV with two of Game of Thrones‘ most epic episodes, and even landed an ambitious reboot job on 2019’s Hellboy. Nominally his worst film, it was hampered by Lionsgate’s insatiable desire for its very own Deadpool, and ended up as a hot mess with a tone as unpleasant as its sickly colour palette. Marshall wasted no time in disowning the film, definitively damning it by stating: “There’s nothing of me in that movie.” The experience left him with a burning desire to get back to basics, and teaming up with diverse horror platform Shudder and new creative partner/wife Charlotte Kirk, he set to work on doing things his own way. With 2020’s witchfinder horror The Reckoning and now action horror The Lair, a new opportunity appeared for Marshall to remind people why they loved him in the first place: his scrappy independent spirit. Does The Lair present an exciting, fresh chapter for one of the UK’s leading horrormakers? Guttingly, absolutely not.

Co-writer and producer Kirk also leads the action as RAF pilot Capt. Kate Sinclair, who is downed by Taliban insurgents during a routine flight in the mountains of Afghanistan. An ensuing firefight leads her to take shelter in an underground bunker, which turns out to be a decrepit Soviet facility housing a gaggle of humanoid flesheaters known as Ravagers. Barely getting away with her life, a few stitches later and a good night’s rest sees her team up with a “Dirty half-Dozen” of American soldiers on the edge of the war to take the fight to these hard-to-kill monsters of the week.

Sounds fun! A dark, atmospheric setting, bantering grunts and practical effect-heavy villains is precisely Marshall’s wheelhouse, who clearly delights in this approach that owes debts to 80s cult cinema. Yet no matter how entertaining Marshall is finding his own film, it’s the product at the other end for paying audiences that the film lives and dies by. And die it does, quite spectacularly in fact, as Marshall mistakes reverence for the films of his teenage years with derivativity, populating his cast of characters with broad stereotype after broad stereotype. While this sort of material should really aim for cartoonish characters to give the action some pep, the multitude of feeble attempts to give personality to these paper-thin archetypes seriously hamper a game cast with some embarrassing material. Take Cornish actor Leon Ockenden’s wise-cracking hunk Sgt. Oswald Jones, an insane Welsh cliché that can’t go five seconds without mentioning rugby, rough nights-out in Cardiff or saying “What’s occurring?” He does his best to offer a wink and a smile to his dreadful dialogue, but there’s only so much chiselled jawline to hide behind after a while. The rest of the Brits in the supporting cast are relegated to some even more woeful American accents, with special mention going out to eyepatched wacko Major Roy Finch, played by Jamie Bamber doing the broadest, most extended Matthew McConaughey impression your ears will ever endure. Marshall and Kirk have written a character in him so hackneyed you’re never sure if he’s going to end his sentence with a hoo-rah or a yee-haw, and it’s that level of Looney Tunes-esque nonsense that cannot be matched by the otherwise po-faced tone.  

This speaks to a wider question of budget. While there are no exact figures out there about The Lair‘s financial backing, it’s fair to say it’s a cheap movie. To clarify: this doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Marshall has shown himself to be a fine director in a tight spot (literally, in the case of The Descent), and once had a preternatural talent for mounting crisp and claustrophobic action at the beginning of his career. Here, it’s hard to imagine him resting any harder on his laurels, settling for blandly lit and sluggishly cut set-pieces that would look fine if you happened to flick over to the SyFy channel on a Friday night, but are hugely disappointing when you consider Marshall is one of the biggest filmmakers collaborating with Shudder right now. The Ravagers are pure Doctor Who, an army of rubber-suited throwbacks that drool and hiss like Xenomorphs (Marshall is keen to capitalise on the comparison; the poster has the beastie entering frame at the same 45 degree angle as H.R. Giger’s iconic and eponymous alien) but lumber around like a Predator with a slipped disc, leaving them as less of a genuine threat and more of a pesky annoyance. Thank goodness, then, for their merciless treatment of the supporting cast, ripping faces and splitting skulls with some alarmingly-detailed practical gore VFX that stands as a proper saving grace for an otherwise stolid viewing experience. 

Viewers on Shudder will have to get by on that sole pleasure, but the blu-ray does offer a genial making-of featurette, composed of talking heads recounting their Hungarian shooting experience very fondly. Supporting actors seem completely on Marshall’s side, praising him for his empathy and openness and encouragement to experiment on set. Pity, then, that any footage where that happens has been surgically removed from the final cut that comes and goes as a cheap, not-very-cheerful diversion of 97 minutes. If anything interesting remains about The Lair, it seems to be an overly-confident bid for Marshall to follow in the footsteps of fellow Newcastle-born action-horror director Paul W.S. Anderson; both lovingly casting their wives as ass-kicking monster hunters, not giving a second thought to the critics. It’s an earnest hustle, and one has to wish them health and happiness, even if their audience isn’t getting any.

Welcome on Board, Simon – The Lair (2022)