The Last Will and
Testament of Rosalind Leigh
(Canada, 82 min.)
Written and directed by Rodrigo Gudiño
Starring: Aaron Poole, Vanessa Redgrave, Julian Richings,
Charlotte Sullivan
Being home alone can feel creepy. Sleep seems troublesome on
a dark and stormy night, especially when the lights are out and strange noises
are coming from every angle. Now imagine trying to feel comfortable staying in
a house after leaving it years before. It’s a childhood home, which was
recently vacated by its sole occupant, the mother, who departed in a strange
and unusual death.
Rosalind haunts Leon the minute he walks in her door.
Rosalind’s house is truly an eerie place. It’s stuffed with all sorts of
antiques, which she bought from Leon’s dealership without his knowledge, and
dressed in an immaculately detailed feat of set decoration. Trinkets, statues,
and creepy embroideries create a ghostly atmosphere in Rosalind’s home. Leon has
clearly entered a haunted house, but the force behind the unnerving presence is
neither good nor evil.
Writer/director Rodrigo Gudiño keeps the rift that created
the distance between Leon and his mother a secret for the first act of the
film. It’s only after Leon trudges through the dirty basement and then comes
upstairs to find a bizarre videotape in the TV, which documents an odd
religious ritual involving his mother and her fellow worshippers, does the
mystery become palpable. Leon, paranoid and slightly off-kilter over what he
has just watched, is creeped out exponentially when he discovers a new angel
statue in the living room. It was in the basement last he checked.
The angel turns out to be a gift from his mother, which she
would use to test Leon’s fate. The Last
Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh
thus uses the tension between belief and non-belief as the current for fear as
Leon questions himself throughout the bumpy night. The scares of Rosalind Leigh come through faith and
folklore. It’s all what one believes—or doesn’t believe—that is cause for
terror.
The film is invested in both an ambiguous religious overtone—one
never gets a full sense of what Rosalind practices and/or preaches—and a thread
of spooky superstition. Take, for example, one of Rosalind’s homemade wall
hangings that Leon observes in the kitchen. It advises houseguests that if one
drops a knife, a man will visit. If a spoon, a woman; if a fork, what comes
will be neither man nor woman. (Always take caution not to unload the
dishwasher too quickly.) Leon drops a fork. He later receives a rap on the door
from a mysterious caller. The visitor, whom Gudiño keeps outside the frame, has
a voice of an implacable tone. It could be male or female; one doesn’t know.
One must rely solely on the senses and weigh one’s belief in Rosalind’s folklore
to see if this stranger poses a legitimate scare.
The Last Will and
Testament of Rosalind Leigh lets a viewer play much of the tension in his
or her own mind. The film is essentially a one-man show for Poole, who carries
the film well, with cast members such as Redgrave and Charlotte Sullivan
appearing only as disembodied voices. All the other figures, played by Julian
Richings aka the resident creepy guy of Canadian cinema, are mediated by video
images and window frames. The impressive sound design and carefully framed action
create some discomforting moments in the absence of actors as viewers imagine
the sources of these sounds. Poole rarely shares the screen in Rosalind Leigh and the film enjoys an
atmosphere of isolation and suffocation.
Towards the latter half of the film, however, The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind
Leigh invites a ghoulish CGI figure to visit upon Leon. A haunted house
picture becomes a monster movie and Rosalind
Leigh loses faith in well-executed minimalism to convey horror. The demon
that visits Leon looks like a rough draft of Gollum from the VFX lab. Much of what
the ghoul does is eerie, as he visits Leon like a kiss from Satan, but he looks
more aptly fit for Looney Tunes than for a horror film. The ghoul embodies a
play between believing and non-believing, though, so die-hard horror fans might
be able to keep the faith right until the end of Rosalind Leigh.
The appearance of the ghoul, on the other hand, muddles the
message of the film. Is The Last Will and
Testament of Rosalind Leigh a compelling provocation on faith, or is it a
mere haunting fuelled by a deranged and departed old woman? The film is
nevertheless an impressive exercise in low-budget filmmaking, as Gudiño
provides a consistently compelling creep-show using only the essentials.
Whatever one believes to be good horror, though, The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh is sure to provide a
thrill.
Rating: ★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Rating: ★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh screened at
The Mayfair July 3-4.
