Leave
A 911 call on a rainy night in September 2002, a police officer called to the Joshua Hill Cemetery in Syracuse, New York, where he finds a baby girl wrapped in a blanket adorned with symbols dubbed as Satanic in the press; adopted by a local family and given the name Hunter, she grows up aware of her strange origin story and wanting to know more.
A DNA test indicating Norwegian ancestry, the black metal band Gored Messiah were touring at that time and played nearby with more than a little attention due to their reputation, and with their former singer Cecilia Winterberg bearing more than a passing resemblance to Hunter she travels to Bergen to try to meet her and get the answers to her questions: is Cecilia her mother, and why was she left in a graveyard twenty years before?
Directed by former music video specialist Alex Herron, Leave was shot entirely on location in Norway but largely in English in deference to the protagonist’s linguistic difficulty, Alicia von Rittberg’s Hunter White not exactly Veronica Mars in her detective skills, travelling abroad without telling anyone and unaware that flying to Europe will cross the dateline, arriving the day after she expected to find her hotel has been cancelled yet stumbling upon leads and making leaps with an ease that defies logic.
Cecilia (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) conveniently playing a local bar that night, the trail first leads to former bass player Kristian (Morten Holst), confined to a mental asylum having been found guilty of the murder of his girlfriend Anna Norheim, burned to death when he set fire to a church, then to Anna’s family who accept Hunter but remain tight-lipped about the past; do they simply not wish to reopen old wounds, or do they have their own secrets to protect?
Rittberg apparently incapable of displaying emotion appropriate to any given scene, with no hint of the burning curiosity which supposedly drives Hunter, the burden of the tragedy revealed to her even as she finds a link to the past, the overwhelming shock of finding an extended family she never knew existed, she quickly alienates them by pushing for access and information they are reticent to share with a stranger when a more delicate approach might gain their trust.
Leave stumbling as any kind of believable human drama and so instead dependent on tenuous atmosphere and whatever twists writer Thomas Moldestad can provide, while there are a few they are insufficient to carry the film, the rushed opening act giving way to Hunter breaking into darkened houses searching for a diary she won’t even be able to read or wandering interminably through misty forests, as poorly prepared for what she has unleashed as when she first began her ill-conceived trip.
Leave will be available on Shudder from Friday 17th March
