Livid

18 ¦ Blu-ray & DVD

After their debut with the gore-fest Inside, French directing duo Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury return with another tale of horror.

Although the film's title suggests an angry emotion, it's likely to leave audiences feeling more nonplussed and bemused more than anything else.

The first day of any new job can be quite a nervous experience, but not so for Lucie (Chloé Coullard); this may be due to the fact that she's only shadowing a mobile nurse on her rounds for ten days, for work experience, visiting a number of frail and fragile elderly folk who are housebound.

One of the homes she visits belongs to Mrs Jessel (Marie-Claude Pietragalla); Jessel is old enough to be possibly a hundred, but she's far from being good for her age. She's been bedbound in a coma for a large number of years now, with a nurse coming around to change her blood transfusion bag. She's apparently worth a fortune, with a treasure of some kind supposedly hidden in her large home somewhere.

It's this notion of hidden wealth that gets Lucie thinking; her father recently announced that his new girlfriend was going to move into their modest family home, and Lucie would to prefer to live anywhere other than there.

She mentions to her fisherman boyfriend William (Félix Moati) about the elderly woman's wealthy stash and together they decide that if they found the money, it could be the start of a better life for both of them.

So, along with William's brother Ben (Jérémy Kapone), the trio break into the spooky woman's house, on Halloween no less.

After rooting around a while, their dreams of finding treasure of any kind, soon dissipates. It's replaced with the disturbing reality that leaving this spooky house isn't going to be anywhere near as easy as they found breaking in to be.

boom dvd reviews - Livid
Why oh why must I always get the jam all over me when I eat my doughnuts?!

If this all sounds like your standard youths entering a spooky house scenario, you'd be half right. In an attempt to be original, the directing pair, who also wrote the script, have woven in a preposterous storyline that involves ballet. It's certainly original, but is so outrageously ludicrous that it just doesn't work.

What's more, the film isn't in the same league as their previous work where gore is concerned; how it got its 18 certificate is unclear, as the only thing disturbing about it is how poor and pointless the story is.

You can almost see what they were aiming for, visually at least. The art direction is certainly impressive, and it clearly works hard to create a foreboding mood. But the plodding plot and bizarre characters (one of whom happens to be not only a dance teacher but also a dab hand at clockwork implanting in humans. No really) make it a disappointing feature.

Adding to the curiousness of it all is an almost blink-and-you'll-miss- her appearance by Béatrice Dalle, who was no doubt doing it as a favour for her Inside directors; she really shouldn't have.

An interesting follow-up to their debut then, but sadly nothing here to be afraid of.

three out of five