THIS LAVENDER LEAVES AN AWFULLY BAD SMELL
Everyone in this horror movie behaves just as you would expect, writes Calum Marsh
Every horror movie takes place in a universe identical to ours in all respects but one: There’s no such thing as a horror movie.
How else to account for the way characters in horror movies behave? If you were an anguished young woman suffering the effects of an undisclosed trauma, as Abbie Cornish is in Lavender, and you started seeing ghostly children running all over the place, and heard ominous whispers in and around the house, and began to find yourself beleaguered by hackneyed bumps in the night, surely it would occur to you that these phenomena seemed familiar.
They’re certainly familiar to us — from other horror movies. Anyone who’d seen a hauntedhouse picture before would know how to handle themselves when the spooky stuff really gets going.
So here is Cornish, rather catatonic, lazing around a smalltown farmhouse as though it were a Swiss chalet, all the while harangued by the spectres of dead girls, who pop up and sing old-fashioned nursery rhymes at half-tempo, as one does. She’s been advised to enjoy this rural sojourn by a psychiatrist (Justin Long) one suspects of nefarious motives from the first moment he appears, and who indeed starts lurking around the farm once Cornish has settled in.
Whether he proves to be the architect of all this paranormal hoopla, an agent of phantasmal baddies, or something more incredible is a mystery I am obliged to leave for you to enjoy. I will only say that how the psychiatrist turns out to be involved in this story would surprise only someone unacquainted with the medium of motion pictures.
This may be an advantage of the alternate universe theory. If Lavender’s hero had ever seen a movie before, the twists and revelations of her life would seem outrageously cliched.