Legs
Joy Wilkes is on a schedule, her ovulation calendar dictating when her dutiful and somewhat resigned husband Harry is to attend to her needs, yet pregnancy has apparently evaded her until symptoms finally begin to blossom and she arranges an appointment to be examined and have her hopes confirmed.
Sadly, the news is not what she wanted to hear; rather than a pregnancy, the diagnosis is that she has swallowed a spider in her sleep, seeking “a dark, lonely, quiet place” and finding an apparently cozy opportunity with her, but rather than being horrified Joy embraces the fragile life within and decides she wishes to keep the arachnid embryo.
Starring Downton Abbey’s Laura Carmichael as the broody Joy and Klokkenluider’s Amit Shah as Harry, painting the nursery pastel green while his wife has a more radical concept to reinvent the baby’s room, Legs is a short horror oddity directed by Celine Cotran from a script by Alannah Lewis, spinning webs out of the old wives’ tale of swallowed spiders.
Joy’s calm acceptance of the situation reflecting the measured and reassuring words of Doctor Crisswell (Primeval’s Karl Theobald), her behaviour is otherwise, driven to trap and consume flies to nourish her internal visitor, but while the premise is suitably ghoulish the direction is uncertain, Legs starting with sinister promise but failing to find a satisfactory destination even as it creates its own nest in which to care for it.
Legs will be available on the Arrow platform from Friday 10th May
