Nocebo (2022)

The new film from the team behind 2019's VIVARIUM - writer Garret Shanley and director Lorcan Finnegan - gets a cinema release from Vertigo.

Christine (Eva Green) is a successful designer of children's clothes. At a fashion show she receives a phone call giving her news of a devastating disaster. Almost immediately she is confronted by a diseased dog, its body covered with boils and dripping with ticks (and yes it's a really great, scary image to start the film off with). The hound seems to be a hallucination but nevertheless, after seemingly being bitten by one of the ticks Christine collapses.

Several months later Christine is a wreck, still tortured by the guilt of the news she heard over the phone. She's trying to rebuild her life with her husband Felix (Mark Strong) and daughter Roberta (Billie Gadsdon) but has become dependent on a bagful of medication and she needs a breathing apparatus to sleep.

Then one day Diana (Chao Fonacier) arrives, claiming that Christine has employed her to take care of both Christine and the family. Christine's regular blackouts mean she can't remember if she has asked Diana to work for them or not and soon Diana is the live-in help. But she's not actually there to help. At all.

At the Mayhem Film Festival in 2019 screenwriter Garret Shanley said VIVARIUM was influences by the old ITV series Sapphire and Steel. In this case, NOCEBO feels very much like the team's attempt at a (very good) episode of Hammer House of Horror. We have a successful middle class family for whom horror arrives and it's not until close to the end that we realise what and why everything is happening. It's not exactly an original idea (in fact it was popular in both pulp paperback fiction and in a few films of the 1960s and 1970s) but we haven't seen it done for a while and for a modern audience it provides an excellent updating of a particular genre trope. NOCEBO also manages to be scary, repellant and horrifying when it needs to be, making it one of this year's horrors that definitely worth catching. Here's the trailer:

NOCEBO is out in UK cinemas from Friday 9th December 2022