Sally Hawkins – The Magnificent 60s

Reincarnation gets a bad rep. You could say the same for belief in angels. And of all the weird things to repurpose is the word “grapefruit.”

It used to be easy to define entries to the horror genre as old school (legacy creatures like vampires and werewolves and legacy situations like the old dark house and its modern equivalent). But now in addition we’ve had decades of torture porn, sexuality equating to grisly murder, and more recently high concept and arthouse. The latter two occasionally intertwine, which generally means slow-burn rather than shock jump.

Given Hollywood’s dependency on superheroes and their ever-increasing budgets, no surprise enterprising directors have been turning to the low-budget attractions of horror, where reduced cost equates to limited financial exposure, and creatives are given their head often to devastating effect – witness The Black Phone (2021), Smile (2022) and M3gan (2022).

But we’ve also been introduced to a new generation of sadistic villains, some who wreak havoc through the best of intentions, others, such as Heretic (2024) charmingly demented.

There’s been nobody quite as psychotic as award-winning counsellor Laura (Sally Hawkins) who’s in the kidnapping and fostering business for nefarious purpose. There’s no point trying to work out what’s going on in her head, though we are provided with enough tantalizing clues, because the only person it makes any sense to is Laura.

The title, unfortunately, gives too much away and you can guess from the outset that Laura is in the revival game. Her daughter has drowned and she seeks a replacement. Into her lap fall orphan brother-and-sister Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong) struggling to get over the gruesome death of their father.

While ostensibly bonding with the pair through a night of partying, in reality she’s setting up Andy for humiliation (she pours her own urine on him while he sleeps so she can accuse him of wetting the bed), disorientation (playing upon his fears) and ultimately turning his sister against him (Piper believes her brother whacked her in the eye while asleep) and if none of that works then just plain doing away with him. Piper is only partially sighted so her idea of what’s going on is restricted.

But while Andy wrestles with all this and visitations from his dead father, in the background is mute kid Oliver (Jonah Wren Philips) and with his every appearance he steals the show, and that’s despite a convincing performance by double Oscar-nominee Sally Hawkings (The Shape of Water, 2017).

Shaven-headed, mute and locked in his room he resembles an angelic lost boy. But he’s starving and is apt at a moment’s notice to start chomping through wood or his own arm. He’s been fed some demonic nonsense and will not cross over the white painted circle surrounding the remote house. And when he can’t escape he turns turtle and has convulsions.

I’m not sure what rules surround kids in horror films and Jonah is way too young to be able to see the result but standing and crawling around drenched in blood with open scars and teeth missing I’m wondering just how he would be able to go to sleep at night (though, I guess he’s aware it’s prosthetic blood and obviously make-up completing the illusion). So the most demonic child since The Exorcist (1973) and it’s his image that will stick in your mind long after you’ve escaped the cinema.

There are plenty neat touches, the best being that Piper escapes a drowning by calling out “mom”, the title Laura has wanted to hear ever since her daughter passed away.

But slow-burn and certain arthouse aspects might put off the general horror fan.

Sally Hawkins and Jonah duke it out for most memorable turn and if you were going purely on the acting Sally would win, but movies are as much about the image as the word and on that score the boy wins hands down.

The Philippou twins, Danny and Michael, (Talk to Me, 2022) direct with the former responsible for the screenplay along with Bill Hinzman, his regular collaborator.

A sentimental ending and Oscar winner Mark Rylance (The Bridge of Spies, 2015) can’t save this latest tribute to that particularly British phenomenon – the loser. While no doubt this is in essence the true story of golfing wannabe Maurice Flitcroft who gained some kind of notoriety – and latterly some celebrity – as the world’s worst golfer after posting, on live television, by a long way the worst score in British Open history, it’s plagued with a woeful attempt at no-hoper charm that just doesn’t work.

Rylance (Maurice Flitcroft) is part of the problem. He could be a cousin to Jim Broadbent’s dour character in The Duke, but where Broadbent comes to life in the second half, Rylance does not, a one-note performance that fails to elicit any sympathy for the character. Where do I start with what is wrong with the picture?

Well, for a start, the idea that a crane driver is an awful job. My grandfather was a crane driver in the shipyards in Clydebank and it was a skilled and highly-prized job and earned him a little bit more than the other workers down below and instead of moaning about his job he drove on his children to become educated – my mother among three of the family to go to university in World War Two Glasgow. Clearly, also, “poor” Maurice earned enough to put down a deposit on a house, a big achievement in the 1960s.

And the idea that Maurice had never heard of golf until the mid-1970s seemed preposterous when hardly 80 miles away Tony Jacklin, the son of a steel worker, won the British Open at Royal Lytham St Annes in 1969. The whole of Britain was electrified. I remember with my brother peering through the window of a television shop to watch it live on television. Equally preposterous is the notion that golf was a middle-class hobby. I remember as a teenager just after Jacklin’s famous win caddying for my father at a public golf course, which required no payment of annual fees nor wearing of fancy golfing ensembles. Golf was far from a hobby restricted to the well-off.

The closest loser-hero to Flitcroft is British ski jumper Eddie the Eagle (also filmed) but Eddie was at least a recognized and official contender in his sport. He did not try to sneak in the back door without doing any of the endless training necessary for anyone who wants to compete at a high level. It’s just crazy to set Flitcroft up as some kind of official-tweaking hero, when he simply managed to gain entry to the Open by cheating. The closest comparison in golf in the winner-from-nowhere category was John Daly who won a major in the U.S. in 1991, only qualifying after one of the contenders dropped out, but he had been a professional golfer for four years by that time.

And I hate this grim mud-tainted view of the 1960s and 1970s. I grew up in that period and certainly don’t recognize the picture painted. Flitcroft’s children, luckily, didn’t inherit the delusional gene, his twins becoming world champion disco dancers and his other son becoming a successful businessman.

Flitcroft just wanted glory without any of the hard work and it’s hard to find any sympathy for such a delusional man. Anyone who pointed out to Flitcroft just how delusional he was received short shrift in the film. Woe betide any official who thought this character was going to bring derision to golf, at a time when the sport was going through a revival, thanks to Jacklin who would inspire a generation of even better golfers like Nick Faldo and Ian Woosnam.

It’s almost a cosmic joke that everyday golfers looked upon Flitcroft as their idol simply because he played the game as badly as they did and that he received some kind of celebrity as a result. Odd, too, that nobody’s ever thought to make a film about a true winner like Tony Jacklin.

Tag: Sally Hawkins

Bring Her Back (2025) ****

Phantom of the Open (2021) ** – Seen at the Cinema