Binding Eva world première for the First Blood strand at FrightFest, 29th August 2026
Conscian Morgan’s debut feature Binding Eva comes with two prologues. The first comprises text that reads: “In these woods, an elder woman keeps to the old craft. She binds what will not let go. A trial for lost souls.” These are words worth remembering in a film that unfolds almost entirely in woods and tracks three characters lost there as someone or something plays confounding, disorienting tricks on them. Second there is a scene in a kitchen, where Felix (Ryan Ralph Gerrard), in the film’s first spoken line, tells his young son Isaac (Sebastian Winfield) on his birthday, “Make a wish, anything at all” – but when young Isaac reveals, “I wished for you to stay,” Felix immediately reneges. Much later in the film, little Eva (Darcey Wood) will tell Felix, “You can’t take back a broken promise” – and in these woods, guilt and regrets are always at the heels of wish fulfilment fantasy, as these characters’ forward momentum, even if it seems to take them in circles, allows for no way back.
We catch up with Felix in a shopping centre’s car park, lurching forward while looking back. He is a fugitive on the run, already shot in the shoulder by the two armed men who are after the contents, never seen but no doubt illicit, of his backpack. Desperate for a getaway, Felix ducks into the open backdoor of a car, taking its driver Katarina (Catherine Deevy) and her young daughter Eva hostage at knifepoint, and insisting that he be driven out of there fast. Felix wants to be taken to nearby Chepstow across the Welsh border, but as they speed along a backroad through the Forest of Dean, and Katarina, protective of her daughter, argues with their abductor, the car veers off the road and is put out of action, forcing the three to set off on foot.
Felix is a conflicted soul. On the one hand, he seems an aggressive, selfish, heartless thug, expressly valuing the contents of his backpack over any human life, and stating, more than once, a willingness to abandon this mother and daughter to whatever fate the elements have in store for them. He even, initially, leaves them both bound to a tree without water or food in the middle of nowhere. Yet the better, more human part of his nature keeps drawing him back to them, sharing what little water he has, and gradually forming with mute little Eva the fatherly bond that recurring flashbacks reveal him fraying with his own son. This walk in the woods is a transformative journey for Felix, who learns lessons in self-sacrifice and finally gets to keep the promises he has so often broken.
At the same time, the film that begins in banally real places on the map soon enters more irrational, folkloric domains, as those woods fold back in on themselves and become psychological spaces and testing grounds for the soul. A trickster figure (Paddy Glynn) is toying with this trio from the shadows, tempting them with what they want while also guiding them towards what none of them wishes to face. Here the lost-in-the-woods panic of Jeremy Lovering’s In Fear (2013) and Richard Waters’ Bring Out The Fear (2021) combines with the purgatorial dread of Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962), Dave Payne’s Reeker (2005) and Ryan Smith’s After (2012). The increasingly supernatural goings-on are conjured not through cheesy special effects, but through the much creepier use of editing, noises off and disembodied voices, as well as an A-frame cabin which, impossibly, keeps reappearing wherever they turn, and which, like the witch’s cottage in Hansel and Gretel, contains what they fear and desire.
“This can’t be happening, this isn’t real!” Felix will say, as the physics and geography of their location make less and less sense, and they can no longer see the wood for the trees. Co-written by Morgan, Will Clempner and Roffem Uzong, Binding Eva captures these three lives in suspense and in the balance – and while a way out for them is eventually found, the broken promises that they leave behind will always linger, among other remains.
strap: In Conscian Morgan’s naturalistic yet folkloric debut feature, three souls lost in the woods are stalked by something irrational
© Anton Bitel
