Matilda Gray (Lydia Wilson) is a talented cellist whose life is turned upside down when her mother, Janice (Joanna Scanlan), suddenly commits suicide. Whilst going through Janice's possessions, Matilda finds newspaper clippings reporting on the disappearance of a young girl from a small Welsh village 23 years earlier. With her best friend Hal Fine (Joel Fry) by her side, Matilda travels to Wales to try to find out why her mother was so interested in the case, and what she finds will cause her to call into question everything she thought she knew.
Requiem is not a very good show. The plot is utterly derivative, with writer Kris Mrksa stealing bountifully from everything ranging from Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898), to Jack Starrett's Race with the Devil (1975) to Robert Eggers's The VVitch: A New-England Folktale (2015). Matilda fails to engender even a modicum of empathy. She's deeply unlikable, and shows little self-awareness as she harasses a child and a clearly mentally-unstable woman. And then there's the tonal raison d'être - the "horror" of it all. Director Mahalia Belo is very much of the modern school of horror filmmaking; mix equal parts shallow focus camerawork, high contrast shadows, and unnatural noises, and finish with a garnish of implausible jump scares. Also Tara Fitzgerald, as antiques dealer and all-round weirdo Sylvia Walsh, appears to have forgotten how to act. The last twenty minutes of the last episode are pretty decent, and properly creepy, but by then it's far too late.
Review by Stephen CampbellBlockedParent2022-01-24T02:56:33Z
Clichéd and derivative nonsense
Matilda Gray (Lydia Wilson) is a talented cellist whose life is turned upside down when her mother, Janice (Joanna Scanlan), suddenly commits suicide. Whilst going through Janice's possessions, Matilda finds newspaper clippings reporting on the disappearance of a young girl from a small Welsh village 23 years earlier. With her best friend Hal Fine (Joel Fry) by her side, Matilda travels to Wales to try to find out why her mother was so interested in the case, and what she finds will cause her to call into question everything she thought she knew.
Requiem is not a very good show. The plot is utterly derivative, with writer Kris Mrksa stealing bountifully from everything ranging from Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898), to Jack Starrett's Race with the Devil (1975) to Robert Eggers's The VVitch: A New-England Folktale (2015). Matilda fails to engender even a modicum of empathy. She's deeply unlikable, and shows little self-awareness as she harasses a child and a clearly mentally-unstable woman. And then there's the tonal raison d'être - the "horror" of it all. Director Mahalia Belo is very much of the modern school of horror filmmaking; mix equal parts shallow focus camerawork, high contrast shadows, and unnatural noises, and finish with a garnish of implausible jump scares. Also Tara Fitzgerald, as antiques dealer and all-round weirdo Sylvia Walsh, appears to have forgotten how to act. The last twenty minutes of the last episode are pretty decent, and properly creepy, but by then it's far too late.