By the Throat
It is a big challenge but a step forward for Lizzy, acting as a live-in carer for reclusive Amy while her husband is away on business, though the duties are light, Amy rarely leaving her bedroom and Lizzy asked to simply leave meals at the door and to collect the tray later, Doctor Lewis occasionally stopping by to check on her progress, the only prohibition that she must not enter the room which belonged to Amy and Alex’s daughter, tragically killed in an accident.
Lizzy herself recovering from trauma, haunted by nightmares of the attack in the alleyway where she fortunately escaped physical injury but still struggles with the memories, Alex is pleasant and welcoming but Amy is a mystery, unseen but heard, the weeping at night behind the closed door, but finding her charge wandering in a daze and helping her back to bed, the two become closer, Amy beginning to engage with the world again.
Its world premiere at FrightFest at the Glasgow Film Festival, By the Throat is directed by David Luke Rees from a script-co-written with Madelaine Isaac, starring Patricia Allison and Jeany Spark as Lizzy and Amy with Rupert Young as Alex, constantly apologising for his wife when actually present, Janet Kumah as Sandra, Lizzy’s mother offering long-distance support, and Matthew Cottle as the creepy country doctor, simultaneously tight-lipped and condescending.
The core of the film the relationship between Lizzy and Amy, both survivors of different kinds of trauma, Amy perhaps seeing through the cracks of her fractured being and glimpsing a kindred damaged soul, as she rises like a phoenix from the ashes the challenge she presents evolves, knocking back red wine in the kitchen and commanding Lizzy’s attendance in a way which makes it difficult for the hired help to politely decline.
And then there are Lizzy’s nightmares which are bleeding into her waking life, figures at the end of her bed dressed in robes and masks of twigs, now glimpsed through the window in the garden, the strange construction of knotted sticks she finds under her bed which Amy confesses is a fertility symbol, Lizzy’s working class city dweller finding herself uncomfortable with but unable to refuse the awkward expectations of middle class country folk, a set up familiar in such stories.
Slow though undeniably well-performed by the leads, By the Throat loses its grip as the signposted ill intentions are predictably revealed and intervention arrives in the contrived form of Sandra showing up unprompted in the middle of the night as mama ex machina, concerned for Lizzy with her phone actually in her hand as she witnesses the ritual sacrifice garden party from the upper window yet failing to call the authorities, the ensuing bloody chaos an over-the-top disappointment which sidelines what strengths the film had built to that point.
Glasgow Film Festival continues until Sunday 9th March
