The Unseen

Writer/​director Gary Siny­or is best known for mak­ing com­e­dy fea­tures (Leon the Pig Farmer, Unit­ed We Fall), occa­sion­al­ly with a bit of high-con­cept fan­ta­sy thrown in (Soli­taire for 2, In Your Dreams). But The Unseen is his first for­ay into goth­ic, as its sto­ry veers ambigu­ous­ly between the super­nat­ur­al and men­tal breakdown.

Audio­book read­er Gem­ma Shields (Jas­mine Hyde) and Will (Richard Flood) are liv­ing a life of domes­tic bour­geois con­tent­ment with their tod­dler son Joel – until one night Joel drowns on Gemma’s watch. Haunt­ed by grief, guilt and blame, the cou­ple goes into emo­tion­al free fall: Gem­ma starts expe­ri­enc­ing pan­ic attacks, with symp­toms that include tem­po­rary blind­ness; while Will, insist­ing that he can hear lit­tle Joel talk­ing in his bed­room, turns to reli­gion for com­fort. Des­per­ate to repair their frag­ment­ing rela­tion­ship, they go on a week­end retreat to a lav­ish new Lake Dis­trict guest­house owned by Paul (Simon Cot­ton), a sym­pa­thet­ic stranger who had helped Gem­ma when she had her first pan­icky loss of vision.

“He’s a bird­watch­er – a fuck­ing bird­watch­er,” says Will of Paul, as he encour­ages Gem­ma to join him in some ​‘snoop­ing’ about the place while their host is away. ​“No won­der his wife ran off.” Once the action has moved to the Cum­bri­an coun­try­side, the film’s focus also shifts to the over-solic­i­tous Paul whose pro­fes­sion­al con­nec­tions to phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals and micro­phones begin to dove­tail in unex­pect­ed ways into the Shields’ trag­ic story.

Like Nico­las Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (right down, sly­ly, to its title), The Unseen begins with a moment of parental dis­trac­tion fol­lowed by deep mourn­ing, and then takes its char­ac­ters’ trau­ma out of the home envi­ron­ment, while insin­u­at­ing, at least in their minds, the pres­ence of a ghost. Grad­u­al­ly, a ratio­nal expla­na­tion emerges for most of the strange goings-on, but blind­ness – both lit­er­al and metaphor­i­cal, and fig­ured in the film by blur­ry POV shots that obfus­cate events – keeps turn­ing the screw on genre. For the film is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly an inti­mate psy­chodra­ma, and one of those thrillers (think Wait Until Dark, Blink and Julia’s Eyes) that place sight-impaired hero­ines in per­il, and, maybe just maybe, also a gen­uine ghost story.

What The Unseen lacks though is Roeg’s econ­o­my. As these char­ac­ters trav­el North West, then home, then North West again, the film mean­ders on its own round trip, with just a bit too much repet­i­tive dia­logue about Gemma’s lost sight and Will’s preter­nat­ur­al hear­ing. And while it makes sense, in cir­cum­stances so recrim­i­na­to­ry, that the cou­ple should be prick­ly, so lit­tle chem­istry exists between them, with Will in par­tic­u­lar prov­ing brash, accusato­ry and increas­ing­ly deranged, that their deep love for one anoth­er is some­thing which has, time and time again, to be stat­ed explic­it­ly by the script in case (as is like­ly) the view­er should oth­er­wise miss it.

The per­for­mances are all good though, and the ster­ile moder­ni­ty of both the Shields’ and Paul’s respec­tive domi­ciles suits these pecu­liar­ly alien­at­ed peo­ple who, unseen, haunt each other’s homes.