Sick of his dead-end life, a young man called Nathan teams up with his friend Terry to burgle a local doctor’s house whilst the doctor, Richard Huggins, and his wife, Ellen, are away. Terry’s mum works as a cleaner there, and has told him that there’s a safe. They will break into the safe, steal the stacks of money that are sure to be inside, and escape to a new life. For help, they bring along Gaz, a more professional criminal who will crack the safe, and from necessity, they rope Nathan’s unwilling girlfriend, Mary, into the caper. There are just three problems.
The first is that the burglars got the make of safe wrong. Gaz can’t break into it, so they will have to wait for Richard and Ellen to return during the night and force them to give them the combination. The second, which they don’t’ yet know, is that Gaz is psychopathically unstable, and he’s happy to do very unpleasant things to get the money. The third is that the affable couple they’re burgling may be much more dangerous than they could have imagined.
So starts a game in which the balance of power swings from one character to the next. Aside from the Huggins’s, who always act as a single unit with a single purpose, it’s a mistake to think that any two people are necessarily on the same side, and not everyone is going to make it out alive.
The strength of The Owners lies with its acting, helped by its characterisation. Cult TV and film fans will be attracted by the pairing of Maisie Williams as Mary and Sylvester McCoy as Richard Huggins. Williams got huge applause for her role as Arya Stark in Game of Thrones and she’s proven that that was no accident, with great performances in films such as Carol Morley’s The Falling. Meanwhile, Sylvester McCoy shall forever be the seventh Doctor Who, so The Owners will immediately attract the interest of DW fans (like me, I admit without shame).
The actors play the two characters who eventually become the major adversaries, which gives them the greatest amount of screen time. Of the two, Williams is given more to do because of her character. Mary is the most rational of the burglars, and she is responsible for a major story shift about half an hour into the film, opening up the film’s middlegame in a split second. She is clear-sighted enough to distrust Richard almost immediately, despite his appearance as a basically friendly man who’s trying to do his best. The problem is that she’s too inexperienced, too volatile and too isolated to easily shift the power in her favour. Her open hostility towards the couple does not do her any favours, and neither is her treatment of Terry, a potential ally. Whilst she’s correct that Terry is a complete loser, she neither realises that Nathan is only slightly better nor that screaming at Terry will not get him on her side. To a certain extent, her suspicion of Richard does initially look like paranoia, and her behaviour doesn’t help her.
Generally, adherence to convention makes the film more predictable than it could be. More could have been made, for instance, of Mary’s paranoia. Is Richard Huggins the violent threat she perceives, or is he genuinely trying to sort everything out peacefully?
THE OWNERS
That’s not to say that Richard’s ‘friendly local doctor’ appearance is always convincing, as it clashes with his utter self-assurance. When he’s not directly in danger, he always acts as if he can control the situation, and it’s obvious that he doesn’t tolerate even slight challenges. In a disturbing moment, which McCoy plays extremely well, he calmly informs the pregnant Mary what smoking does to unborn children. By going into unnecessarily graphic detail, he comes very close to dropping any pretence. It’s this certainty that he is always in command, and that what he says goes, that makes Richard an unnerving presence throughout the film.
Both Andrew Ellis as Terry and Ian Kenny as Nathan are convincing as two naïve, unintelligent young men who are out of their depth from the start. Easily manipulated, their lack of self-awareness and willpower have serious consequences. In Nathan’s favour, he does try to strike back when Terry just gives up entirely. Oddly, though, Terry may be the more aware of the two. He knows that he is treated as little more than a joke, and he massively resents it. He also knows, even though Mary doesn’t, how much of a failure Nathan is.
Rita Tushingham as Ellen and Jake Curran as Gaz do what they can with their roles, but the script doesn’t serve them as well as it does the other cast members. Gaz is an unrepentant psychopath, and that’s about it. He functions more as a plot device than a character in himself, which is only underlined by his ultimate fate. Ellen, meanwhile, is an elderly woman suffering from a form of dementia, which forms almost her entire personality. It also raises the unpleasant implication that people with mental health problems are homicidally crazy, a tired old horror convention. This is a symptom of the film’s greatest weakness: its plot relies a great deal on genre conventions, and it does little to justify its use of the conventions or to play with them in any interesting way.
Whilst the set-up of a home invasion gone horrifically wrong is not new (for example, see 2016’s Don’t Breathe), this doesn’t mean that the film can’t have anything novel to offer. However, whilst it has its fair share of twists, the most effective one is effective because its timing is surprising, rather than because it happens at all. Generally, adherence to convention makes the film more predictable than it could be. More could have been made, for instance, of Mary’s paranoia. Is Richard Huggins the violent threat she perceives, or is he genuinely trying to sort everything out peacefully? Unfortunately, because of the genre, we already know what the answer is. Elsewhere, the film leaves more than enough clues for the attentive viewer to be unsurprised when the final twists come. At one point it even goes out of its way unnecessarily to highlight something important that gets resolved at the end of the climax. The success of the climax also depends on how much the viewer is prepared to accept for the sake of the story, partially because it again follows the convention of the home’s owners having more resources and much darker secrets than anyone in real life would be likely to have.
But even at this point, even if you can’t accept what’s happening on screen, the actors are giving it their all. The Owners is not going to be a horror classic, but it is the contribution of the actors above all that keeps it entertaining.
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