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Review

Offering further evidence that the most disturbing and unsettling “horror” films in contemporary cinema are works that fall just outside of any traditional definition of the genre, The Living and the Dead does not deal with any supernatural shocks, but rather the film confronts the greater horror of illness, psychological collapse and mortality. An international festival favorite from Rotterdam to Montreal’s Fantasia to Buenos Aires, this grim and haunting drama from young British filmmaker Simon Rumley marks the director as a definite talent to watch. With increasingly nightmarish precision, Rumley’s film chronicles the mental decay of James, as the schizophrenic young man is left to tend to his terminally ill mother, Nancy, in their crumbling English countryside estate. James’ father must travel to London and entrusts Nancy’s care to James and the matriarch’s nurse — unfortunately, James begins experimenting with his psychoactive medication and sinks into a hellish world of hallucination and paranoia, barring the nurse from the mansion and submitting his helpless mother to his madness. Rumley deftly utilizes the decaying rural manor as an effectively labyrinthine visual metaphor for James’ crumbling psychological state, and The Living and the Dead becomes a poignant and powerful portrait of insanity and humanity.

 -- Travis Crawford