POSSUM
Carry Bag Man
released 21 January 2018 | 15 | Blu-ray/dVd
Director Matthew Holness Cast sean Harris, alun armstrong, simon Bubb, andy Blithe
With Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, writer and star Matthew Holness perfected the ironic horror pastiche. His feature debut is rather more grim, but equally in thrall to the past. Gone is the comedy – instead, this is a public-informationfilm-bleak tale of missing children and a puppet with far too many legs.
Philip (a relentlessly grave Sean Harris) wanders a Norfolk town, tightly clutching a leather bag. Inside is Possum, a monstrous puppet that “came into the world” when he was a child and has haunted him since. Returning to his cruel uncle Maurice (Alun Armstrong), he intends to destroy Possum once and for all, but another child has already gone missing…
Despite being nominally set in the present day, Possum feels more like a lost transmission from 1975. There’s an austere beauty to the film as Philip wanders a barelypopulated landscape of derelict army bases, railway lines and ominous patches of lonely water. Combined with the buzzing, scything score, it’s an oppressive sensory experience. The story is admittedly slight and feels overstretched in places, but it has bags of atmosphere – and that puppet really is bloody horrifying.
Extras Nada on the DVD. The Blu-ray has commentary by Holness, plus his 2011 short “A Gun For George” (17 minutes), a ’70s crime show parody. Will Salmon
George Romero’s 1978 vampire film Martin was a big influence on Holness, who “wrote with the guy from Martin in mind”.