Buy The Living and the Dead on DVD

The Living and the Dead

TLA Releasing, Danger After Dark / Year: 2006

DVD

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Synopsis

A hallucinatory British gothic fantasia of death and psychological decay, this haunting film from director Simon Rumley explores the tormented relationship between a dying woman and her schizophrenic son.

3 Reasons To buy this film

An astonishing 89% fresh on the Rottentomatoes.com tomatometer!
An international film festival favorite!
The type of psychological horror that will stick with you for a long time!

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

Product Format Information

DVD : $13.49

Availability: In stock and ready to ship
Close Caption: No
Region Code: 1
UPC: 807839003321
ISBN: 1934921017
Catalog #: DV2470812

Studio : TLA Releasing, Danger After Dark

Languages: English Dolby Digital 5.1 (Primary)
Aspect Ratio: Anamorphic 1.78
Extras: Trailers
Features:
Featurette: Making-of featurette
Photo gallery: Stills gallery

Customer Reviews

Realistic Horror

Amos Lassen wrote on 04/02/2011:

Get ready for a descent into hell with the new horror film “The Living and the Dead”. It is raw and real and very scary. It is an unusual film in that it is so bold. The cinematography is fantastic, the actors are excellent, the editing is mad and the music is amazing.
“Ex-Lord” Donald Brocklebank finds that he has to leave Longleigh House to go to London in order to discover how to pay for the medical treatments needed by his wife Nancy. His delusional, over-protected, adult son, James, believes that he is to be in charge of the manor house with his mother is terminally ill. He barricades the two of them into the house so she can undertake treatment and thereby protects her from any outside help including that of her nurse.
The film is an emotionally disturbing look at mental illness as it looks at the issue of ailing relatives and the reality of death. The downward spiral of delusion, madness and death, and horror is given to us in many layers but the film is exceedingly tragic in that it is simply the tale of a family that experiences an increasing series of emotional implosions that eventually destroys everything and which leaves the one survivor stripped of all and completely shattered and with no sanity.
The movie is somewhat of a retelling of “The Shining” but here the nuclear family is threatened by bankruptcy and death by terminal cancer and a child-like son who requires infusions of anti-psychotics. We see the personal need of the director to pull the audience into madness and he succeeds in attempting to do so.