The Death of Us world première in the First Blood strand at FrightFest, 29th August 2026
The Death of Us begins with a distressed Ellisa (Angela Elise Munnoch), evidently a psychiatric patient, terrified by the approach of something that her nurse (Meghan Adara) cannot see. “There’s nothing there,” insists the nurse, only to look on in horror as Ellisa is bloodily torn apart in front of her very eyes. Here even an invisible abstraction can impact the real world.
Were it not for this opening sequence, which signals early that there is something supernatural going on, the viewer might easily suppose that, at least until the climactic sequence, actress Annabella Rich’s directorial debut is entirely naturalistic. For it follows the Harpers – artist-turned-mother Casey (Rich) and her husband the best-selling sci-fi author Danny (Rich’s co-writer Chris Mills) – as they struggle to move on from a home invasion that left their beloved two-year-old son Tommy and babysitter Jess (Francesca Louise White) dead, and Casey herself lucky to be alive after momentarily dying from her stab wounds.
Eight months later, Casey is out of the recovery ward, but both she and Danny still have a lot of emotional healing to do, as grief, guilt, resentment and recrimination remain haunting presences, even in their new home. Danny resorts to group counselling sessions where he finds that he shares a deep anger with widower Joe (Johnny Vivash), while Casey turns to occult specialist Reynolds (Nicholas Vince) to explain her paranoid sense of still being under attack by someone or something. Both are clearly working at their feelings of pain and loss, and each is finding their own path through and, hopefully, will eventually be able to meet each other somewhere in the middle.
That prologue, however, casts a long shadow over all this, pushing what seems an understandable and explicable situation towards something more straightforwardly irrational – and here, if the film’s supernatural elements are merely a metaphor for a psychological process, that metaphor’s vehicle and tenor are ultimately confounded, as past trauma returns (as unaddressed traumas do), assuming both a form and a disorientingly blunt force. At the centre of this is something truly unspeakable in its horror: the death of a child. Everything else radiates from that, as bereft mother Casey finds her way to satisfaction from the living, and even reconciliation with the dead, through a rite and a contract that can be read in more than one way.
The Death of Us may feature characters who somewhat clunkily tell their feelings rather than show them and who only become interesting once they have suffered, it may meander in its middle section and be marked along the way by a certain repetitiveness (which, again, is in the nature of trauma), but once it has reached its end, it turns out to be twistily surprising while remaining emotionally honest and retaining its essential ambiguity. It is also nice, because it is rare, to see a female protagonist whom others have taken for granted or even objectified actually becoming empowered by her reeling, untameable loss. No one, we suspect, will ever again be telling Casey how to grieve.
strap: Annabella Rich’s ‘cult’ feature debut turns a couple’s grief and trauma into a demonic rite of passage
© Anton Bitel
