13 FOR HALLOWEEN #3: The Conjuring 2

‘The Conjuring’ came out of nowhere three years ago – the first truly great film on James Wan’s CV, benefiting from a slow-burn atmosphere, a cluster of great performances and some chillingly effective scare scenes. That it was based on the casebooks of Ed and Lorraine Warren, paranormal investigators whose work has met (putting it as politely as possible) with no small degree of scepticism, was almost beside the point. ‘The Conjuring’ was a terrific, old-school haunted house movie; whatever its roots it actuality, the case that it was based on isn’t as well known as that of the Annabelle doll (referenced as a prologue) or the Amityville haunting.

Ed and Lorraine’s Amityville investigation provides the prologue to ‘The Conjuring 2’, which then goes on to document their involvement in the Enfield haunting. The Amityville business almost overbalances the film from the off, partly because it’s all so familiar (Jay Anson’s supposedly non-fiction potboiler, Stuart Rosenberg’s histrionic 1978 adaptation, a fuckton of awful sequels and a Platinum Dunes remake), partly because we all know now that the Amityville haunting was basically bollocks, and partly because of the inelegant way Wan stages the scene, Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) wandering around said property in a trance, discharging and reloading an invisible pump-action shotgun.

The scene builds to a decent climax, though, as Lorraine’s psychic connection with former Amityville resident and mass-murderer Ronald DeFeo leads her to a shadowy basement where she has a premonition of Ed (Patrick Wilson)’s death. Already haunted by the events of ‘The Conjuring’, Lorraine decides there and then that the paranormal investigation side of things is over and done with, finito, never going it back to it no more, uh-huh, no siree. And indeed, one opening credits sequence later, they’re happily doing the lecture circuit and doing TV interviews. Okay, maybe not happily: a fellow guest on the TV show loses no time in calling them out as shysters.

Then, on the opposite side of the Atlantic in a grimy suburb of London (the griminess doesn’t stop Wan throwing in a montage of every visual cliché one could possibly associate with England’s capital city, scored to – yep – ‘London Calling’ by The Clash), a single mother and her four children experience a series of inexplicable events, the ferocity of which becomes more pronounced. Naturally, Lorraine’s misgivings are eventually overcome and she and Ed join a number of other interested parties – ghosthunters, academics and sceptics – drawn to Enfield as a media circus whips itself into a frenzy. Ed and Lorraine reassure each other that they’re only there to observe and advise the church (if a reason was given as to the Catholic church in America’s interest in a semi-detached house in Enfield, UK, then I must have missed it), but it’s not long until they forge an emotional connection with the family and their involvement in the case puts them both at risk.

‘The Conjuring 2’ – while never quite hitting the heights of its predecessor (and certainly not delivering anything as brilliantly creepy as the hand-clap scene) – has a lot going for it. First and foremost, Wan’s steadfast refusal to rush things. He spends a good chunk of the first hour introducing the Hodgson family – matriarch Peggy (Frances O’Connor) and siblings Margaret (Lauren Esposito), Janet (Madison Wolfe), Johnny (Patrick McAuley) and Billy (Benjamin Haigh) – and incrementally developing the haunting. Things reach a point where the Hodgsons decamp and seek shelter with a family across the road – the Nottinghams – only for the weird shit to follow them, in the form of the film’s single best ghost: the Crooked Man. There’s also some business with a toy fire engine that’s far more unsettling than it has any right to be.

Wan also gifts a fair amount of screen time – at two and a quarter hours, ‘The Conjuring 2’ has screen time to spare – to Maurice Grosse (Simon McBurney), who is the first outsider to witness the supernatural goings on at chez Hodgson, and debunker Anita Gregory (Franka Potente), who comes close to disproving the whole thing when she catches Janet faking poltergeist activity. This scene, chiming as it does with the Warrens’ talk show detractor at the start of the film, achieves something the filmmakers don’t even hint at in the original: the idea of fakery and exploitation for media interest/brief fame. Naturally, Wan and his co-writers Chad and Carey Hayes and David Leslie Johnson lose no time in declaring in favour of genuine supernatural shenanigans and hurrah the Warrens, but ‘The Conjuring 2’ contains a small seed of doubt that could be propagated in interesting ways in future instalments. (With the original making $318 million on a $20 million budget, and the sequel on course to top that on a still moderate $40 million budget, I’d say more ‘Conjuring’ movies are par for the course.)

The UK setting is very well done, once you get past the ‘London Calling’ montage. The streets and houses look authentic; interior design and the utilitarian reality of working class lives prompted memories of my childhood in the Seventies. (Though I doubt a low income family in 1977 would own a colour TV and certainly not a model with a remote control.) The performances are across-the-board good, often shading to very good. Wilson and Farmiga are already wearing the Warren personas as if they were the actors’ signature roles; O’Connor nails Peggy’s weariness, forever urging herself on to do what’s best for her kids, but utterly exhausted by the effort. Esposito and Wolfe deserve careers based on their work here.

If there’s a fault with ‘The Conjuring 2’ it’s that niggling sense of “not quite”-ness. The Crooked Man is not quite as scary as the hand-clap; O’Connor’s performance is not quite as gripping as Lili Taylor’s; the tension is not quite as unremitting; the final act not quite as focussed. The running time, at nearly 25 minutes longer than the original, is only part of the problem (there are never really any longueurs, and I’d rather have a genre film that makes time for character beats and thoughtful pauses than one that doesn’t); the over-use of effects work has something to answer for, as does the over-egged finale which almost tips it a parody of ‘The Exorcist’. But fortunately, Wan never entirely loses control of the material and ‘The Conjuring 2’ remains a commendable sequel with enough by way of its protagonists’ chemistry and their burgeoning case files to whet the appetite for ‘The Conjuring 3’.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #1: Bone Tomahawk

As a subgenre, the western/horror hybrid is hardly overpopulated. Off the top of my head, I can think of ‘Grim Prairie Tales’, ‘Ravenous’, ‘Dead Man’, ‘Tremors’ and ‘From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman’s Daughter’ – and even then, two of them require a slight tweak of classification to allow for the contemporary western/horror hybrid.

Of this mixed bag of forebears, S. Craig Zahler’s ‘Bone Tomahawk’ owes its greatest debt of honour to Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Dead Man’. Both are utterly respectful to the conventions of the western – and keyed in to the fact that the best (American) westerns are exercises in classicism – while subversively and unapologetically steering the genre into increasingly challenging and contentious realms.

There is, of course, a case to be made for the kinship of ‘Bone Tomahawk’ to the “acid western” movement, and indeed it offers up imagery as bizarre and visceral as, say, ‘El Topo’ or ‘Straight to Hell’. However, there are long stretches of ‘Bone Tomahawk’ that play out in as thoughtful, measured and traditional a manner as anything by John Ford or Howard Hawks, whereas ‘El Topo’ and ‘Straight to Hell’ scream Jodorowsky and Cox respectively.

(In a weird alternative universe, ‘Jodorowsky and Cox’ is a surrealist private eye drama where the latter films all their cases in increasingly low-budget fashion. But I digress …)

It’s to Zahler’s credit that he embraces traditionalism and slow-burn storytelling for such a long chunk of the two-and-a-half hour running time. For all that ‘Bone Tomahawk’ changes horses in mid-stream a la’From Dusk Till Dawn’, the erstwhile genre touchstones a feint to set you up for the horror-infused sucker punch, it is bound up by Zahler’s self-evident regard for and understanding of westerns to such an effective degree that even when it delivers its most gruelling Deodato-like excesses, it remains at heart a western.

The narrative is uncomplicated and delineates into a prologue and three acts. The prologue has scumbag outlaws Purvis (David Arquette) and Buddy (genre legend Sid Haig) disturbed as they go about their business of waiting for passing travellers to rob and kill; spooked, they stumbled on a burial site kitted out with the kind of weird paraphernalia that makes the twig figures in ‘The Blair Witch Project’ look like Blue Nose Bears in comparison. Buddy is summarily killed by an unseen assailant while Purvis makes good his escape.

Act one introduces us to the small and spectacularly ill-named town of Bright Hope and sets up its residents, most prominently Sheriff Hunt (Kurt Russell), Deputy Kory (Richard Jenkins), fancy-pants ladies’ man John Brooder (Matthew Fox), working man Arthur O’Dwyer (Patrick Wilson) currently convalescing from a broken leg, and O’Dwyer’s wife Samantha (Lili Simmons), assistant to the town’s dipsomaniac surgeon. These individuals are thrown together when Purvis, assuming Buddy’s name, fetches up in Bright Hope and, showing a disinclination to answering Hunt’s questions, swiftly earns himself a bullet in the leg and a free room at the local jail. Samantha, her boss too incapacitated, is called to tend Purvis’s wound. She never makes it home, one of two people who disappear from town that night while a luckless farmhand is found dead, an arrow nearby.

Act two has Hunt, Kory, Brooder and the still crippled O’Dwyer set out in search of the so-called “Valley of the Starving Men”, acting on information received from a rather westernised Native American Indian resident in Bright Hope who identifies the arrow and warns Hunt and co. that the tribe responsible are cave-dwellers and savages. Over several nights, Hunt and his bargain basement posse contend with a couple of trail bums and their own internal tensions. In act three, they contend with … but that would be telling.

I’m in the odd position of being three-quarters of the way through the inaugural review of 2016’s 13 For Halloween slate, only just getting to the horror stuff, and finding myself compelled to back off so as not to spoil any of the gory delights awaiting those who have yet to discover this offbeat gem. Let’s just say that Zahler eventually casts his ill-matched protagonists into the orbit of an omnivorous tribe who are terrifying in their appearance, communication and casual brutality. And he does so without ever having to fully step outside of the imagery and conventions of the western.

And had Zahler’s facility with the horror film manifested in such fine style, ‘Bone Tomahawk’ could well have been a stone-cold masterpiece. Granted, it only falls short by the slimmest of distances, and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the horror elements; the issue is the adagio-like running time (two and a quarter hours) and the time it takes to get to the gruesome bits. Even the slowest of slow-burn horror movies don’t spend more than an hour getting their protagonists into the jaws of the unspeakable, then spend their remaining half hour or so putting them through the ringer. By the time ‘Bone Tomahawk’ cuts loose with the gore, the end credits would be rolling on ‘The Hitcher’ or ‘Wolf Creek’. It’s a minor complaint, though, and I feel I’m carping unnecessarily just by mentioning it. Particularly when so much else coheres – performances, production design, music, cinematography – to such stunning effect.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #7: Insidious Chapter 2

I’m at a loss how to begin this review.

Do I talk about the staggering self-importance of the word “chapter” in the film’s title, and how absurd it is that scripter Leigh Whannell aims for such a degree of literary aspiration when his screenplay is sloppy, unfocused and studded with truly dreadful dialogue?

Do I mention the spectacular anti-talent necessary to spend three times the amount that the original cost and emerge with a piece of work that looks cheaper and shoddier all round?

Do I bemoan the fact that the essential flaw in, ahem, “chapter one” – the unsuspenseful final twenty minutes set in The Further – is pretty much the raison d’etre here, and that a lot of noise and frenetic movement aren’t enough to paper over an even greater dearth of suspense this time round?

Do I basically rehash the final analysis of last night’s review and urge James Wan to give Whannell the heave-ho and start working with writers who can actually write – y’know, like he did on ‘The Conjuring’? 

Do I shake my head slowly and sadly at the laboured final scene that takes its begging bowl to studios and audiences alike and asks you to spare a penny for ‘Insidious Chapter 3’ (or ‘Volume 3’ or ‘Insidious: The Triptych’ or whatever pompous moniker it chooses for itself)?

Or do I describe one particular scene and let it stand as an example of how utterly terrible ‘Insidious Chapter 2’ is?

Yeah, let’s go with the latter. Here’s the set-up: Josh (Patrick Wilson) is acting very strangely following his incursion into The Further at the end of the first film; Renai (Rose Byrne) is having difficulty adapting to life at Lorraine (Barbara Hershey)’s house – where they’ve relocated while a police forensics team is busy at their home – and painfully unfunny comedy psychic investigators Specs (Leigh Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson) have been approached by Carl (Steve Coulter), an associate of their erstwhile employer Elise (Lin Shaye). Carl’s a medium who communicates with the spirit world by throwing dice. Information received at a séance directs Carl, Specs, Tucker and Lorraine to an abandoned hospital where Lorraine used to work and where – she only realises in twenty-year retrospect – she once saw a ghost. This quartet enter a dilapidated building which doesn’t seem to be locked up, fenced off or have any security arrangements in place – a building whose dank and decaying corridors are littered with expensive pieces of medical equipment that nobody seems to have thought of transporting to the new hospital – and, whaddaya know, they come across a file room that’s still full of patient records (confidentiality issues, anyone?) The first file they open is that of Lorraine’s former patient, a man – she recounts – who committed suicide by jumping from an upper window; a man – she further recollects – who was admitted after attempting to castrate himself. The file gives this troubled individual’s address and Whannell’s script immediately takes us to a big old house as dank and dilapidated as the hospital. It’s sat empty these twenty years … empty, that is, but for the couple of dozen corpses all sat upright in a basement room and covered with dust sheets. Carl and co. discover said bodies behind a false wall, the stink of putrefaction only assaulting them when they slide said false wall open, because, y’know, twenty years of rotting corpses wouldn’t stink out an entire house, would they? And, hey, they’d all still be in a sitting position and not just a pile of bones, amiright? And Carl’s contact in the spirit world could just have given him the address and not go through all the rigmarole of visiting an abandoned hospital whose administrators have no concept of information governance, non? And …

Oh fuck it. ‘Insidious Chapter 2’ has no respect for its audience. This review has just as little for its subject.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #6: Insidious

A couple of months ago I concluded an appreciative review of ‘The Conjuring’ thusly: “I’m curious to find out … exactly where James Wan became such an accomplished craftsman”. The answer, ladies and gentlemen, is ‘Insidious’ … kind of.

Made for a million and a half and looking like he spent ten times that much on it, ‘Insidious’ gelled with a moviegoing public fascinated by ‘Paranormal Activity’ and scared up over $90 million at the box office. It gave Wan the clout to make the bigger (but still, at $25 million, comparatively modestly) budgeted ‘The Conjuring’ and made an ‘Insidious’ sequel inevitable.

‘Insidious’ does a lot that marks it out from a slew of similar films, not least having a dictionary word for its title and not only understanding what that word means but keying in it to its aesthetic. It has a dependable cast, spends time establishing character and interaction, and allows them to behave intelligently. A major plus point here. How many horror movies have you seen where a beleaguered family stubbornly remain in their haunted residence, long after every logical and scientific rationale has been exhausted and the presence of supernatural forces proved beyond reasonable doubt? If for no other reason that the scene in which middle class couple Josh and Renai Lambert (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne) decide during the first act that it might be a good idea to up sticks and relocate, I’m inclined to give ‘Insidious’ a pass and overlook how damned sloppy it gets towards the end.

Here’s the set up: Josh and Renai move, with their three kids (pre-teens Dalton and Foster and newborn Cali) into an old but spacious house. A house whose interior seems unremittingly dark, whose corners and corridors are shadowy. A house with the kind of attic that you wouldn’t want to spend too long in even if it wasn’t haunted. Weird things begin happening almost immediately: objects move from one room to another, doors slam shut, Renai hears a strange voice on the baby monitor and later glimpses a figure in Cali’s room. Dalton (Ty Simpkins), playing in the attic one day despite being warned it’s off limits, falls from a ladder. Shortly afterwards, he slips into a comatose state. Doctors are unable to determine why. Three months later, he’s still unconscious, the Lamberts are receiving help from a home nurse, and the weird happenings are just about to kick things up a notch.

The long and short of it is that Renai braces Josh and they decide to move. The haunting follows them.

So far, so good. A horror film featuring adult characters behaving in a recognisably adult manner rather than dumbass teens doing stupid things. And the “it’s not the house that’s haunted” rug-pull is a doozy, even though the posters gave it away from the outset.

Then things get a bit iffy: Josh’s mother Lorraine (Barbara Hershey) suggests her old friend Lin (Elise Rainier), who just happens to be an expert in the field of paranormal phenomena, would be the ideal person to help them. Lorraine’s motivation is a dream in which she seems a demon standing by Dalton’s bed, who conversationally informs her he has come for the boy. Enter Lin, with her grindingly unfunny comic relief assistants Specs (Leigh Whannell, who also wrote the screenplay and if alarm bells are ringing at this point then you’re well ahead of me) and Tucker (Angus Sampson). Even at this point, the characters continue to exhibit realistic behaviours: Specs and Tucker at least try to undertake a scientific evaluation before the real spook show stuff cuts loose; and the tension between Josh and Renai is exacerbated as she buys into Lin’s portentous proselytizing while he recoils from it as so much bullshit.

Then things get really iffy: Lorraine reveals that when Josh was Dalton’s age he was able to astrally project and travelled, under the impression he was simply dreaming, to a realm called The Further and by doing so was followed back into the waking world by a demon. Lorraine shows them photographs which indicate a sinister presence behind the young Josh, inching closer to him in each shot. Lin intuits that the same thing has happened to Dalton and advises Josh that he will have to descend into The Further under hypnosis in order to rescue his son.

Leaving aside the implausibility that Lorraine would keep shtum about a past Josh has forgotten until three months after her grandson initially slipped into a coma that she knows isn’t a coma but an enforced stay in The Further, what happens next devalues the film almost to the point of parody.

Here’s the thing with the unknown: it frightens the most when it intrudes into the normal, the domestic, the everyday. Reverse the process and have the everyday (i.e. one unremarkable middle class guy) intrude on the unknown (i.e. The Further) and no matter how bizarro or Lynchian the imagery you conjure, it’s never as scary as, say, a silhouetted figure passing outside a bedroom window and then - bang! - suddenly appearing inside the room; or a face emerging from a painting right behind a character who’s completely unaware of it. At its best, ‘Insidious’ wrings significant scares from relatively simple set-ups and minimal requirement for special effects. Moreover, it works because Wan’s timing is impeccable: he virtually points out where and how the big scare moment will work, doesn’t deliver, seems about to move on to something else then – again, bang! - royally fucks you up with it.

Sadly, much of this good work goes south once Josh wanders into The Further, a place that can only be described as looking like Carnival of the Bizarre were trying out so new routines in Jack Ketchum’s basement and using a lot of dry ice to disguise any deficiencies. Oh, and The Further is ruled over by a demon who looks like he came last in a Darth Maul face-painting competition. It’s all incredibly silly and leads to a twist ending that you can see coming like an ocean liner on a duckpond. It’s the point at which Whannell’s script – not that it was particularly subtle to begin with – abandons all form of restraint and goes running around shrieking “Muh-hah-hah-haaaaa!!! I’m one of the demonic talents behind ‘Saw’. Are you scared yet? Are you, motherfucker? Are you? Muh-hah-hah-haaaaa!”, to which the only polite response can be a quiet observation that yes, actually, we were so why did you feel inclined to ruin it? That, and a vote of thanks that ‘The Conjuring’ was written by somebody who wasn’t Leigh Whannell.

When ‘Insidious’ works, it works incredibly well. But it remains a transitional film. It demonstrates all the strengths Wan would bring to ‘The Conjuring’, while suffering from the weaknesses that dogged ‘Saw’ and (so I’m told) ‘Dead Silence’. I’m aware that Wan and Whannell go back a long way and are big mates. Far be it from me to break up a bromance. But Wan sure as hell seems to deliver the goods in infinitely better style when he doesn’t have a Whannell script holding him back.

The Conjuring

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: it’s the 70s and a hard-working couple with several children move into a rambling old house in the middle of nowhere. They’ve sunk their life savings into the property and are looking forward to a new start. Their pet dog refuses to enter the house. Their youngest child finds an old music box and makes an imaginary friend who might not be so imaginary after all. Another child sleepwalks and sees things. Clocks stop at exactly the same time every night. A boarded-up stairwell is discovered, leading down a cobweb infested basement. Pictures jump off walls. Doors open and close of their own volition. The mother of the family suffers from bruising that doesn’t seem to have any apparent cause. As strange events proliferate, the family prevail upon the help of paranormal investigators who unearth a history of dark secrets and violent events connected to the house.

‘The Conjuring’ does nothing you haven’t seen in several dozen other movies, right down to the period setting which evokes ‘The Amityville Horror’. Its achievement, though, is generally doing these things better than those several dozen other movies. Avoiding their pitfalls. Skirting it, but never quite tipping over into melodrama. Not overly relying on CGI or whiz-bang effects (an exception, involving a bedsheet torn off a washing line in a gale, pays off with such a careworn image that it shouldn’t work … but somehow does). 

Engagingly old-school, ‘The Conjuring’ takes its time in establishing the characters. Let’s meet the family, truck driver Roger Perron (Ron Livingston), wife Carolyn (Lili Taylor) and their daughters Andrea (Shanley Cresswell), Nancy (Hayley McFarland), Christine (Joey King), Cindy (Mackenzie Foy) and April (Kyla Deaver). Okay, Carolyn’s a tad “gee whiz” naïve/optimistic and Andrea’s pretty much got the whole emo sulk routine off to a fine art, but on the whole these are decent people. A regular family. You wouldn’t balk at having them as neighbours. You care what happens to them. That might sound like an obvious thing to say, but you wouldn’t believe how many genre films I’ve sat through whose characters I’ve either not engaged with (‘The Haunting in Connecticut’) or actively disliked (‘Frozen’).

As the ferocity of the paranormal incidents increases, the Perrons engage the services of renowned ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), from whose case files the story is taken. And hence that twinge of familiarity: they were at Amityville, and they investigated the Smurl family haunting, on which ‘The Haunting in Connecticut’ was based. I guess ghosts and malevolent spirits just took to a certain kind of New England real estate and acted in remarkably similar ways whenever the Warrens were around.

The Warrens had their detractors throughout their career, and how closely the film chimes with the actual psychic investigation four decades ago isn’t something I’ve been able define based on some cursory internet research into the couple. Nor does it seem a worthwhile exercise. The film throws out its “based on true events” card from the outset and we all know how spurious that “based on” tag can be, what a multitude of sins it can hide. What’s up for debate here is how well ‘The Conjuring’ works as an example of its genre, as a work of entertainment. Did it give me the creeps? Yes, and then some. Did it make me jump? Twice, both scenes using the same visual motif.

I’ve seen nothing of director James Wan’s work beyond the inaugural entry in the ‘Saw’ franchise, and was underwhelmed to the point that I let the rest of the saga happily pass me by. I’m told that ‘Dead Silence’ was horrible in many ways (if memory serves, Tim Brayton of Antagony & Ecstasy coined the term “fucktrocious” in his review), and ‘Insidious’ reasonably effective if boilerplate. ‘Insidious’ has now been added to the rental list, and the rather pompously titled ‘Insidious Chapter Two’ is definitely on the big screen radar. I’m curious to find out – and it may well be an investigation as freighted by the unknown as any of Ed and Lorraine’s – exactly where James Wan became such an accomplished craftsman.

Little Children

Two strong central female roles are at the heart of ‘Little Children’, Todd Field's follow-up to the acclaimed ‘In the Bedroom’. Kate Winslet plays Sarah, a graduate stuck in an airless marriage to a never-home businessman with an addiction to internet porn. Jennifer Connelly, as Kathy, is Sarah’s opposite: a successful documentarist trying to persuade her layabout husband, Brad (Patrick Wilson), to sit the bar exam and become a lawyer.

Sarah meets Brad at the local playground, their days spent caring for their offspring and growing further apart from their partners. Before the eyes of a clique of neighbour mothers - who occupy their time with reading groups and gossip - they begin a tentative friendship. Then, secretly, a passionate affair.

Meanwhile, Brad’s friend Larry (Noah Emmerich) stirs up vigilante action against Ronnie (Jackie Earle Haley), newly returned to the neighbourhood after serving time for exposing himself to a minor. The sultry summer days blister into a heatwave; feelings run high; jealousies, violence and recriminations bubble under the surface.

Despite its subject matter, ‘Little Children’ begins in an almost humorous vein. A laconic voiceover emphasises the ironies and idiosyncrasies of humour nature. Fields populates his film with stock characters, but seems to do so deliberately. He has fun shuffling the clichés.

Gradually, the tone becomes darker. As the locals demonise Ronnie, their own flaws and failings are thrown into sharper relief. Sure, Ronnie is an unpleasant individual, but is the threat he poses as great as Larry paints it? After all, everyone’s guilty of something: Sarah and Brad are adulterers; Sarah’s husband is as sexually dysfunctional as Ronnie; Kathy sidelines family for career; Larry is a hypocrite and a bully. And yet all of them - even Ronnie - are capable of humanity. People are complex and complicated, Little Children seems to say; there's good and bad in all of us.

Fair enough. But this doesn't disguise the film’s faults. Fields relies too heavily on cyphers. Sarah’s husband is one-dimensional. The members of the reading group are straight out of central casting. The voiceover feels increasingly forced. The denouement is clumsy, character motivations going off the rails for the sake of lumbering melodrama.

Still, ‘Little Children’ boasts some terrific performances, moments of genuine erotic frisson, and, for the most part, a refreshing lack of judgementalism.