Writer: Rustam Branaman
Director: Rustam Branaman
When the devil breeds…a new evil is born
The Culling is a confused little movie that should be better than it is.
The film starts with a woman running away from something in the dark. Then we have some intriguing shots of a creepy house and a room filled with broken dolls. It’s all looking promising.
But after that teaser it quickly goes downhill. We join a group of five young people on the way to SXSW (an irrelevant detail presumably intended to make things seem ‘relevant’). As they drive along chatting and we get the usual character establishing dialogue – establishing in the minds of this viewer at least that the guys were all jerks.
Arriving at a closed diner at night where they meet a cute-yet-creepy girl (Lucy, played superbly by a young Harley Graham) and her doll Jade. Lucy is lost and needs a lift home. Inciting Incident bang on schedule at 10 minutes in.
So now the story is getting going… except that it isn’t. Things revert to seemingly normal for a while. And that’s the way it goes, we keep thinking things are about to kick off but they don’t. The characters just spend more time getting drunk and stoned and being annoying. I guess Branaman was trying to build an air of increasing tension, but the stop-start is simply frustrating. There’s way too much filler in this section and in an 81 minute film 35 minutes is far too long for Act 1.
Once things do get moving they actually go quite well for a while. There are some genuinely creepy scenes and the characters – although unlikeable – react believably. The problem is that this last section is then too rushed. Despite an infodump near the end we never really know what was going on, we just get hints of what could have been an interesting story. This wasn’t just ambiguity, this was a large bunch of loose ends. The film’s tagline probably explains more than its script does!
So Branaman – with a background in producing and acting – shows skill at atmospheric direction, but unfortunately his story-telling skills as a script writer simply aren’t up to scratch.