LEAVE is a new horror thriller about a young woman who tries to find her roots after being abandoned as an infant in a US cemetery.
The debut film from Alex Herron, this Norwegian potboiler opens with a police officer receiving a 911 call about a baby crying in a creepy old graveyard. In a scene straight out of the annals of Scooby Doo, he arrives to find the wee nipper wrapped in a blanket covered in satanic symbols as a thick fog bellows around her.
Officer Raylan White (Clarence Smith) then takes Hunter (Alicia von Rittberg) home and raises her as his own daughter.
Hunter loves her stepfather, who is a loving and kind-hearted man. But she want answers about her origins and unbeknownst to her new family, she hops on a plane and heads for Norway in search of the truth.
She knows that a Norwegian death metal band were performing in her US hometown on the night she was discovered in unusual circumstances. This is her only lead.
By managing to get hold of Cecilia (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), the singer from the band, she finds out that their bass player Kristian (Morten Holst), now locked up in a high security mental institution, is her father. The reason for his incarceration, she learns, is for the murder of her birth mother Anna Norheim (Maria Alm Norell).
Hunters seeks out her late mother’s family who welcome her at arms distance into their rundown manor home. The answers she searches for are slow to come and at every turn a barrier is put in front of her to stop her delving any further. All the while, as she gets closer to getting the truth, a malevolent spirit is warning her to leave this foreboding place.
More mystery thriller than horror, Herron’s film, now on Shudder, has plenty of depth, but he holds back, to his own peril, in making any effort to give us any real sense of terror.
(3/5)
