Tribeca Review: The Cottage
Written and directed by: Paul Andrew Williams
Cast: Andy Serkis, Reece Shearsmith, Jennifer Ellison, Steven O’Donnell
out of 5 stars
What starts out as a fairly middling dark comedy about gangsters and kidnapping morphs into an expertly witty, often hilarious gorefest. Andy Serkis (who played Gollum in “The Lord of the Rings,” and the big ape in Peter Jackson’s “King Kong”) plays David, a hard-bitten lowlife, who recruits his timid and peevish brother, Peter (Shearsmith) in a scheme to kidnap Tracy (Jennifer Ellison), the stepdaughter of a London strip-club owner for ransom. With Tracy bound and gagged, the brothers repair to a cottage out in the English countryside, but what they don’t realize is that not only Tracy a fiercely unmanageable trash-talker capable of head-butting Peter’s nose out of whack (Peter gets a punishing beating throughout “The Cottage”), but the strip-club owner’s already on to them, and has sent a pair of henchman on their trail.
With this somewhat stale scenario in play, writer/director Paul Andrew Williams takes us through several wild and amusing turns, as David and Peter discover the jig is up, Tracy escapes taking Peter hostage, and David attempts to re-assert control of the situation. Before long, the players end up in a creepy farmhouse where this comedy of errors turns into a delirious mash-up of “Psycho” and “Night of the Living Dead.” Snippets of information, enticingly revealed, about a long-ago farm accident, a disfigured farmer, a doomed family, and a farmhouse chock-full of morbid bric-a-brac all become backdrop to a madcap serial-killer-on-the-loose storyline as David, Peter, Tracy, and Tracy’s buffoonish stepbrother Andrew (a hilarious Steven O’Donnell) try to fend off a murderer so grotesque, he’ll reside somewhere between your nightmares and most amusing memories (think Paul Bunyon crossed with The Elephant Man!).
This is the kind of comic-horror rollercoaster ride that doesn’t come around so often, full of unapologetically gory dispatchings, deliciously wry comic turns, terrific acting, especially from Serkis (this guy’s Grade A material, folks, the equal of the best character actors today), with William’s script and direction punched-up with clever ideas and setups right to the very final second. Don’t miss it. I predict “The Cottage” is going to be a cult item in the Brit horror canon in the coming years.
