Cordelia review – reality-bending drama of creepy neighbours
There’s a really interesting pairing of two really interesting screen presences – Antonia Campbell-Hughes and Johnny Flynn – in this flawed but potent psychological chiller. It’s a claustrophobic chamber drama about emotional breakdown co-written for the screen by Campbell-Hughes with the film’s director Adrian Shergold. In some ways, it’s a riff on Polanski’s Repulsion, with the story of a lonely young woman beginning to get unmoored from unreality.
Campbell-Hughes plays Cordelia, a troubled, damaged soul who is only just recovering after some unnamed trauma; she is an actor rehearsing a play and comes to stay in a creepy London mansion flat occupied by her twin sister Caroline (also played by Campbell-Hughes) and Caroline’s boyfriend Matt (Joel Fry); they leave her alone there. Cordelia strikes up a friendship with Frank (Flynn) the charming, but strange and unreliable young man they can hear practising his cello in the upstairs flat – a relationship which quickly becomes very disturbing.
Shergold and Campbell-Hughes orchestrate some very disquieting dream sequences, and scenes in which ostensible reality bleeds into a hallucinatory dream state. And they have some excellent moments down in the London Underground, whose potential for horror is often mishandled by filmmakers but works well here, especially at the very beginning. And there’s a genuinely unsettling moment where Cordelia leaves London for an interlude at her stepmother’s house in East Anglia, a journey which proceeds as weightlessly as a dream – and perhaps it is a dream.
Cordelia contains cameos from Alun Armstrong and also Michael Gambon, as the scatterbrained elderly neighbour who starts a highly unwelcome conversation about whether or not having mice in your flat means you won’t have rats. Perhaps this film doesn’t entirely work all the way through, but it is a shard of malevolence that jabs into your skin.
• Released on 23 October in cinemas.