In short: The Unfolding (2016)

While the world has stumbled into an international political crisis that seems bound to end in a nuclear war unless people start acting in their own best interests (tough chance), Tom (Lachlan Nieboer) is taking his girlfriend Rose (Lisa Kerr) on a little trip to the country. They’re not just going to walk the moors of Dartmoor, though. Tom is very interested in the paranormal and has managed to let them stay in a supposedly very haunted house.

When they arrive at the place, the owners are just in the process of fleeing it. It’s not quite clear how much of the flight is caused by the political situation and how much by the haunting, but given the things that are going to happen to Rose and Tom inside the house, nuclear war might not be the worst alternative.

As a fair warning, Eugene McGing’s clearly very low budget The Unfolding is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. It’s another POV horror piece, so the visuals tend to be grainy, or shaky, and generally never feel terribly sharp, the sound mix is often less than ideal – it’s very much seat-of-your-pants filmmaking. However, The Unfolding is also a film of big ideas, the script showing the influence of a cerebral British style of horror, with the spirits of Nigel Kneale and Third Doctor/early Fourth Doctor era Doctor Who hanging over the film. If a viewer is willing to be a bit patient, she may very well find that McGing is doing some rather interesting things with what at first seems like a very standard POV ghost story set-up, using the haunting, among other things as a mirror for humanity’s drive to self-destruction.

And make no mistake, the nuclear threat hanging over the proceedings isn’t only an homage to 70s British SF/horror. The way the inner threat and the outer threat of the haunting relate to one another (it’s our old friend, “as above, so below” again), and the clever and disquieting way the film handles this relation is remarkably intelligent and effective.

Even though The Unfolding’s best qualities lie in its ideas, and you really can’t expect any big set-pieces on its budget, most of the supernatural manifestations are effective too, McGing doing much with letting his – always at least good, often better – actors react to things the audience can’t quite see, and suggesting more through sound and shadow.


For my taste, The Unfolding is really worth coping with its rough edges, as it demonstrates that intelligence can go a long way.