By The Throat had its world première Saturday 7 March at the Glasgow Film Festival for FrightFest
By The Throat opens with an immediate, literal explanation of its title, and with the primal scene of its central character’s trauma. For the terrified – if not quite helpless – Lizzy Roberts (Patricia Allison) is jumped and strangled by an assailant in a dark alley. This frenetically impressionistic sequence, though certainly reflecting a reality, is presented six months after the event as a nightmare that jolts Lizzy awake. For while she survived this attack, the PTSD has not loosened its grip on her. Regularly visited by panic attacks, Lizzy is still very much haunted by her recent assault, and no amount of medication or worried phone calls from her mother Sandra (Janet Kumah) can relieve her of her stress.
Despite very probably not being well enough for it, Lizzy takes a job house-sitting for a couple who have their own trauma. For Amy (Jeany Spark) and Alex Cummings (Rupert Young) recently lost their daughter in an accident, and like Lizzy, Amy is struggling to recover. So while Alex is away for the weekend on business, Lizzy must stay in their large house on the edge of a remote village, and bring meals to the door of Amy’s room. This house is doubly haunted – by the dead daughter whose forbidden bedroom the couple has preserved as a shrine to her memory, and by the mother who, like a ghost in her own home, is yet to emerge from her bed since the accident, and whom for the first day Lizzy does not even see, as only visiting Dr Lewis (Matthew Cottle) is allowed into her boudoir. Perhaps the place is triply haunted – for Lizzy keeps seeing, or at least dreaming about, figures in masks, although that may just be her own nightmarish terrors returning to her consciousness.
By The Throat is a film of careful symmetries, telling parallel stories of two women damaged by their recent harrowing experiences, and of two desperate mothers who will do anything for their daughters, There are also reversals here: for even as Amy gradually emerges from her chamber, Lizzy takes ill and to bed – and despite their differences in class, age and race, Amy clearly sees something of her lost child in the young woman, dressing Lizzy up in clothes and make-up like a little girl and even dancing with her as she expressly used to do with her own daughter. Yet with Amy’s violent mood swings, and the strange wooden figurine that Lizzy finds under her bed, something seems very sinister in this house – and when Alex returns from his trip, the atmosphere only becomes more oppressive and suffocating.
“Family is everything to me, it’s all I’ve ever wanted,” Amy will tell Lizzy. “We are good people – we’re just hurting right now.” Co-writing with Madelaine Isaac, director David Luke Rees (Look The Other Way and Run, 2022) presents a scenario where both parties are, in their way, victims, their raw wounds of loss and guilt leaving them particularly vulnerable to the abuse of others. If Lizzy is to come out the other side, she must be reborn and confront her trauma all over again – and if doing so creates more trauma in future, that is part and parcel of the cyclical, even ritualistic nature of her condition. Meanwhile the house that she is sitting is a microcosm of various tensions in Little England, as vestiges of supposedly ancient pagan practices still leave their mark on modern life, and as white Britain, for all its accommodatingly genteel surface, is only too happy to objectify and exploit its Black populace.
By The Throat is part gothic fairytale (the forbidden room, the woods), part folk horror (the twig fetishes and masked rites), but mostly a psychological study of a nation caught in the stranglehold of its own nostalgia, denial and lost innocence – and it is short and twisty enough to keep the viewer, along with Lizzy, gasping for breath.
strap: Lost in the woods: in David Luke Rees’ psychological thriller, a traumatised young woman is hired as a house sitter by a similarly broken couple
© Anton Bitel
