He Kills At Night had its world première at FrightFest, 8.45pm Saturday 23rd August in the First Blood strand
In keeping with its title, Thomas Pickering’s He Kills At Night opens, on 22nd November, as a classic slasher. Alone in a multi-level car park, a woman (Madeline Percival) changes her driving shoes for party heels, and heads from her car to the lift. After she hears someone whistling menacingly from the shadow, the lights go out – and when they come back on again, she is gone, with one shoe left behind, like Cinderella’s slipper. This liminal space is also a zone of genre, programmatic for what is to come, even if it also keeps us in the dark about its own context.
Cut to 24th December, and the radio is full of chatter about a possible serial killer, as three women have now gone missing – “when they’re alone at night,” as one caller says, “and at their most vulnerable.” A similar scenario appears to be unfolding before our eyes. For, out driving alone through the snowy countryside, young Fern (Isabella Percival), dressed for a Christmas party, stops to pee on the side of the road, and is roughly abducted at knifepoint by a man (Richard Galloway). Fern is smart, tough and resilient, but despite her every effort to get away, is not destined to be this film’s final girl. So the man commandeers another vehicle, along with its driver Marie (Levi Heaton). By now the man is injured and bloody, but not as much as Marie, whose swollen black eye is a telltale sign of her status as victim – and the man is quick to assert his dominance by giving her another one.
The only reason that poor, battered Marie remains alive is that the man cannot drive, and needs a ride. En route, they will cross paths with local Cleo (Eleanor May Blackburn), out searching for her 16-year-old sister (Serene Fensom) who vanished that morning. In conversing with Marie, the man is all too happy to claim the missing girl as another of his kills. For he is shameless, cruel and even boastful about what he does, and Marie’s pleas that she has her own beloved teen daughter fall on deaf ears. Clearly Marie will require all her wits, and some luck too, if she is to survive the night.
At one point, when the man wonders aloud how he might leave the country unnoticed without a passport, Marie suggests that if refugees can get in across the Channel every day, it must be possible to get out in the reverse direction, smuggled on a boat going the other way. Accordingly the screenplay by Pickering’s older brother James (who also wrote Pickering’s 2024 documentary I Could Never Go Vegan) associates its serial-killer thrills with a different, more commonplace issue (illegal immigration and people smuggling) that similarly challenges our notion of human worth. Here, the traffic goes both ways, and one person’s escape strategy is another’s abuse. The man is, of course, exploiting and dehumanising Marie to transport him where he needs to go.
He Kills At Night plays out as a tense, mostly two-handed road movie, presented in a naturalistic register to match the low budget. The cheery Christmas setting is constantly ironised by the dark spirit of ill will, and the potential monotony of the nocturnal driving is enlivened with the unremitting threat of violence, with the odd stop, and with occasional flashbacks to the other women’s disappearances in the previous months. All this suggests that Marie is headed towards the bleakest of destinations – but these backroads meander and twist along not always predictable trajectories and down some unexpected byroads, before hitting a shifting littoral space between land and sea where the film’s ambiguities will be resolved.
strap: In Thomas Pickering’s slasher/thriller/road movie, a man of violence shanghais a battered woman into being his chauffeur for the night
© Anton Bitel
