The Brook world première in the First Blood strand at FrightFest, 29th August 2026
Given its small population, the remote English village of Elmbrook, from which Paul Stainthorpe’s narrative feature debut The Brook takes its title, has a strikingly large number of missing persons, their faces displayed on a wall at local music venue The Tank. Part of it might be a natural drift to more urban spaces, much as Michelle (Jill Dellow) skipped town decades ago back when she was roughly the same age as her own teenage son Jacob (Connor Lawson) is today. Yet we know right from the film’s prologue that there is someone – or something – killing people in Elmbrook. The only reason that these disappearances go relatively unremarked is that those who vanish tend to be the village’s undesirables who are hardly missed.
“The past matters,” Miss Darling (Rhiannon Jones) tells her class – including new boy Jacob – at Elmbrook’s college, “we are also going to be looking back.” There is certainly unspoken history here, with neighbour Linda Walker (Meryl Griffiths) alluding to old secrets and unresolved issues with Michelle, who has only returned to settle the affairs of her recently deceased father Bill (John Lee Taggart). Meanwhile Jacob too is struggling to move on, as he grieves the recent loss not just of his grandfather Bill but also of his father. Jacob must work through his difficult feelings about the past in a place which is a wifi dead zone, has never quite caught up with the present and is described by Michelle as “like the land that time forgot”.
Jacob’s discovery of his grandfather’s old VHS camcorder will not only offer this adolescent an unusual glimpse into the past, but will pave the way for the future, as he and his new friends Erin (Helen Chong), Alex (Ainsley Fannen), Megan (Jamie-Leigh Price) and Jess (Beth Ellis) must contend with school bullies Callum (Dan Salmon) and Kieron (Kieron Jackson) while avoiding trouble with enthusiastic local policewoman Grace Shaw (Kylie Ann Ford) and getting to the bottom of this community’s strange rites (of passage).
The Brook is a small-town murder mystery, with Elmbrook falling somewhere between Agatha Christie’s genteel St Mary Mead, the curtain-twitchingly (judge)mental ‘model village’ Sandford from Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz (2007), and David Lynch’s more unhinged Twin Peaks (note that Michelle and Jacob share their surname with the actress Catherine Coulson, who played Twin Peaks‘ Log Lady). Do not be misled by the limited budget and finite setting: Stainthorpe’s screenplay, co-written with Chris Watt, is telling an expansive, ambitious story full of wild curveballs, shifting paradigms and delirious overdetermination. On the one hand, this is a coming-of-age story in which a young man learns to stand up for his peers and for himself, and to become reconciled with his past. On the other, this is a giallo-esque slasher whose killer wears a grotesque mask. And yet this also finds room for a community conspiracy, for a rumoured cryptid (the ‘Elmbrook puma’), and for a device – both literal and also metaphorical – which is accurately described by its former owner as “the stuff of science fiction”, and which leads to a time-confounding chase reminiscent (albeit on a much smaller scale) of Tony Scott’s Déjà Vu (2006). There is even just the slightest hint of a ghost story.
More than one character says of Elmbrook, “This town has eyes, it sees everything.” Here one person’s picturesque parish is another’s panopticon, as everyone knows everyone (and more importantly, everyone’s business), and those who fail to make “good choices” or a decent contribution to this Little Britain will quickly learn how unaccommodating, indeed unforgiving, the place can be in its determination to maintain a clean image. Throw into this mix a different way of watching, and even of seeing crucial details that may otherwise have been overlooked, and this sweet(-seeming) little village starts to resemble cinema itself, with its overlapping of timelines, with its shifts in perspective, with its flashbacks and flashforwards and with the odd violent cut.
strap: Paul Stainthorpe’s narrative feature debut tests character and switches genre in a small English village haunted by mystery, murder and (maybe) a monster
© Anton Bitel
