Film Review: The Living And The Dead
Roger Lloyd pack is a talented man with much more up his sleeve than most actors and a capacity to astonish in practically any role he takes on. You may, if you’re not familiar, also know him as the unfortunate ‘Trigger’ from vintage comedy series Only Fools And Horses.
In The Living And The Dead (2006) Lloyd pack plays Lord (Donald) Brocklebank, a man doing his best to cope with a truly nightmarish scenario that has been unfolding for some time with no hope of imminent closure anywhere in sight: a financial disaster means he has to travel frequently to make ends meet, his wife is terminally ill and bed-ridden, and their son, delusional and dangerously naive and suffering from Schizophrenia, demands constant attention—needing to be watched at all times, always threatening to do something awful. Burdened by all these gloriously depressing attributes, The Living And The Dead has been adopted by horror film fans as a cult classic, despite actually being more an art house style film at heart.
How dark is The Living? Well it’s very, very dark indeed. In every minute of the film is a horrible sense of foreboding that things could come crashing down at any moment and probably will in the end. It’s a punishing, unsettling waiting game, where the viewer wants it to be over, just so the Lord and his poor wife can be put out of their misery.
Stylistically speaking, it’s a peculiar film which can’t be easily categorized: it begins slowly—mundane to the point of instilling boredom in places—and then changes abruptly in places, marking the down-ward spiral of Donald’s mentally deranged son as he embarks on a campaign of misery. Leaping from old-fashioned to acid-house manic, The Living And The Dead is a secret UK gem that should find a place in every true film lovers heart.