I knew absolutely nothing about The Torment before I started watching it. From the opening slightly wobbly camera shot to the first British daytime TV drama lines of dialogue I was convinced this film would live up to its title. At only 87 minutes long I knew I could take it. But by the end of those 83 minutes I had found that not only would I choose to take again and I would recommend others to take it too.
The plot was fairly simple but unravelled carefully throughout the film trying not to make itself too obvious. Hints of character backstory trickled out and did a good job of providing believable motive for the events that unfolded. One of the great things about The Torment is that it was very confident it wanted to be a horror film and did not deviate from that sense of purpose. The feeling of paranoia was palpable and the films constraint to one house gave an uncomfortable claustrophobic pressure.
The wobbly meandering shot that worried me so much at the beginning of The Torment was quickly unveiled as a very unusual and clever style choice to create a sense of tension and to play with the audiences expectations. The camera moved from third to first person perspectives naturally and was well identified by the sound and movement so you never felt too lost. The first person camera worked to create an uncomfortable closeness to other people whilst revealing the barrier of our own internal worlds, thankfully not through an internal monologue. When the camera was not locked to a characters perspective it would often follow characters about and then float over to other bits of the scene. Early on in the film this created the expectation that something was about to happen, scouring every inch of the shot, every reflected surfaces or dark space looking for what was there then the camera turn back to action. Once the more tangibly spooky things started to take place it really created a great sense of tension as you really I did not know when you were going to see something, and often you would misread shapes in the dark for much greater horrors. The camera would also linger for long periods of time on people reactions as other characters were talking to them. There was a lovely amount of distrust generated from this approach.
As with most horror the audio was crucial to the films success and rarely descended to horror movie clichés. It was subtle and intelligent and provided stability and clarity to the narrative regardless of what the camera was off doing. It really acted as the rock which grounded the film which only made it more effective when it acted to mislead and unnerve.
The only real downside to the film was some of the performances and dialogue. Unfortunately when shots are held for as long as they are in The Torment you have a great deal of time to pick up on all the little moments where you see acting taking place. The acting was not bad, but it was often visible. The dialogue did not always help either especially towards the beginning of the film when it was calmer and sentences were longer and offered occasionally contrived exposition. But for the most part it was all fine and at time very good.
The real shock of The Torment is that it is a very creative and unusual microbudget British horror that is actually frightening. It really deserves to be seen and celebrated as one of the very few British horror successes of recent years. I hope that Andrew Cull and Steve Isles make another horror very soon, perhaps with a little more money and rehearsal time.