FROM Black, exclusive to Shudder, stars Anne Camp (True Blood/ Pitch Perfect) as Cora, a recovering drug addict who’s young son disappeared five years earlier, at the height of her addiction.
Directed by Thomas Marchese, this is a dark tale, with a derivative storyline, about the power of a mother’s love and how it should never be underestimated.
Camp, the film’s saving grace, plays a young parent devoured by guilt after her child goes missing while she is lost in a drug-fuelled haze.
Cora is desperate for closure and will not accept that she will never see her son again. This sets her off down a dark path which could give her a shot at redemption, if she is willing to pay the high and terrifying price on offer for a chance to hold her child once more.
Marchese’s film opens with Cora, dazed and confused, covered in blood in a room filled with strange markings by her police officer sister Bray (Jennifer Lafleur). We are then for the next 100 minutes taken back through the events which lead up to this gruesome scene.
Cora’s sister is equally crushed and wracked with guilt for never being able to solve her missing nephew’s case but now believes her distraught sibling has been tipped over the edge.
A tale of occultist ritual, a mother’s mourning, and the lengths she is willing to go to put things right, it contains twisted scenes of supernatural gratification and demonic terror.
A similar storyline to Irish horror film A Dark Song, directed by Liam Galvin, From Black is not without its creepy hair-raising moments, even if it does mostly feel like a watered-down made for TV imagining of The Conjuring.
Hell, they say, hath no fury like a woman scorned. Throw motherhood into the mix and you then have a recipe for all sorts of pandemonium being raised.
(3/5)
