Father of Flies

After the astonishing festival success of Irish changeling story You Are Not My Mother, the next family haunting that may or may not involve an imposter infiltrating the nucleus is now available to watch on digital platforms.

In a quaint detached home in upstate New York, the presence of their father’s new partner Coral unsettles young Michael and teenage Donna. The distant woman wears a plastic mask around the house – not quite of the Spectralite FaceWare variety, but with its curly cord and control keypad more reminiscent of a 90s novelty telephone – and barely interacts with her stepchildren. As the sole breadwinner, Richard is absent for most of the day, and occasional business trips take him away from the growing conflict inside his four walls for even longer periods of time. Disaster takes its course when one night, the children’s mother shows up in an unstable state and demands to see her family.

This trope-heavy production marks British director Ben Charles Edwards’s second feature after his 2015 debut Set the Thames on Fire. Due to it being largely set in one location with a compact cast, Father of Flies feels distinctly like a film trying to make the most of a low budget and pandemic restraints. Hence it comes as a surprise that the psychological horror was actually shot between 2018 and 2019, shortly before actor Nicholas Tucci (Richard) passed away from cancer. The film is dedicated to his memory.

Both Tucci and Swedish-Italian multi-talent Sandra Andreis, who plays the children’s mother, valiantly attempt to find their characters and their respective roles as parents in the limited screen time they are given. In reality, only Camilla Rutherford is given ample opportunity to fill out Coral as a fully-fledged figure and as such pulls the feature’s weight, together with child actor Keaton Tetlow, who stars as Michael. The teenage daughter, too, falls through the cracks and her mood swings taken out on her boyfriend come across as painfully unrefined and stilted.

Despite scratching the surface of multiple themes, the final product is lacklustre and pale – and not just due to the low saturation of the images. The short duration of 75 minutes unfortunately does not conceal the fact that the film’s protracted setup is not adequately redeemed by its final payoff.

In form as well as content, the British-American production bears remarkable resemblance to Austrian director Veronika Franz’s horror features Goodnight Mommy and The Lodge, and therefore is perhaps ideally suited for those impatiently awaiting Amazon Studios’s US remake of the former.

Selina Sondermann

Father of Flies is released digitally on demand on 11^th April 2022.

Watch the trailer for Father of Flies here: