Directed by: Matthew Holness
Written by: Matthew Holness
Starring: Sean Harris, Alun Armstrong
1 Hour, 25 Min.
Phillip, who carries a mysterious bag, arrives by train and goes straight to a boarded-up old house. Inside the filthy old house, he wanders around to find no one is home. He goes out back and pulls a giant spider(!) out of his bag and hides it in a barrel.
The next morning, he wakes up to find the spider in his bed and Morris, an older man, downstairs. The spider is his puppet. He’s a disgraced puppeteer. Apparently, there was quite a scandal. He says he’s there to destroy the puppet.
He sees on the news that there’s a local boy missing in the area. Not long after, he throws the bag containing Possum into the river, but he can’t be apart from it; he goes back and retrieves the thing, and wakes up again in bed with it the next morning. Philip’s clear got some mental issues.
There’s lots of aimless wandering around in dirty, abandoned places, including swampland, and there’s a definite mood of bleak isolation and loneliness here.
He hates the puppet, but can’t give it up. But is the puppet really the source of his problem?
It kinda feels like a short film that’s been stretched too thin. This film is nothing if not moody and bleak; it’s the most hopeless movie I’ve seen in a long time. You know it’s not going to end well from the beginning, and you’d be right.
