Quoting the classics can be a dangerous game for a film – one liable to highlight your shortcomings. When two Gypsies-cum-demons chant Leaning on the Everlasting Arms, Robert Mitchum’s ditty from Night of the Hunter, not to mention bearing love-hate tattoos on their knuckles, it indicates that this low-budget British home-invasion horror is missing the same fairytale concision. Which is a shame, as this messy but entrancing, faintly surrealist feature by Shani Grewal has entirely different qualities of its own.
Blinded in a car accident that killed her husband, Harper (Suzanna Hamilton) has lived alone for several years; until recently that is, as stepson Taran (Viraj Juneja) returns home to find that his mother and sister Megan (Francesca Baker) have kidnapped the drunk driver responsible and shackled him in an upstairs bedroom. This is Sebastian (Michael Maloney), who in their eyes dodged jail with a fake insanity plea; they intend to stage a retrial on their own terms. But, spouting in multiple tongues including one belonging to a sinister entity, Sebastian may genuinely have a few cables unplugged.
The arrival of Sebastian’s daughter Lilith (Miranda Nolan) on the front porch kicks off a transgressive free-for-all similar to the cloistered early films of Ben Wheatley. Mostly shot in a low-sun dazzlement redolent of some threshold being traversed, boundaries are trampled in this Anglo-Indian household: of civility, between step-siblings and – with late paterfamilias Pal (Madhav Sharma) seen wandering in a parallel hellscape – between worlds. Grewal and cinematographer Jamie Knights display a flair for bleary, dissociative ambience; at one point, a confrontational tea party morphs into a chirpy curry cook-out.
At the same time, Ride the Snake is maddeningly imprecise when it comes to plot details, with an obscure and confusing early setup resulting in brittle acting from cast members trying to stand it up. Especially problematic is not finding a visual register that firmly grounds Sebastian’s possibly diabolic nature, leaving Maloney at first overacting until he builds into an erratic turn reminiscent of Don Logan-era Ben Kingsley. The real threshold in play here in this experimental delirium is between the ludicrous and the sublime – and Grewal is mostly camped on the right side.
