A worm is an insidious creature. It burrows beneath the surface of the land, consuming and writhing in the dark, enriching the soil by recycling buried decaying organic matter. It’s an essential process carried out in the darkness beneath our feet. Ned Caderni’s film ‘Worm’ is a modern folk horror that confronts what lies festering beneath our lives and perhaps positions insidious and ever present technology as the manmade inheritor of this grim duty, consuming what is buried, recycling what is rotting beneath the surface of our lives.
Bella (Freddie Acaster) and George (Joshua Dowden) are a young couple who decide to celebrate their one year anniversary by taking a holiday together to George’s quaint family home in the Welsh countryside. Their fragile peace is disrupted when Bella receives an email seemingly from her dead ex-boyfriend, arriving like an updated gothic letter from the other side, with a mysterious and menacing video attachment. Soon the pair find themselves stalked by an unseen presence that threatens to tear their burgeoning relationship apart.
Worm subtly invokes the conventions of folk horror but eschews vulgar jump scares and grisly imagery in favour of quiet menace. Doors open and voids beckon. Shot composition familiar to the found footage genre forces us into a singular voyeuristic perspective, whilst jarring dream sequences see the camera become handheld as we assume the perspective of a more active invasive presence, stalking through the house by flashlight. In dreams and visions we see a ghostly figure, in almost anachronistically medieval clothes, leap from a cliff and stagger from the house in otherworldly movements. These horror sequences are inventively unsettling whilst still grounding the narrative with genre form.
Bella and George must undertake the ritual journey from the security of the modern city to the mystery of the natural world, moving from the ego-dominated urban space to the id-haunted rural. But whereas folk horror would typically bring our modern heroes into conflict with the primal landscapes and folk traditions of the countryside, Bella and George bring their ghosts with them. In the quaint country home, the WiFi router dominates the little wooden corner unit, round and cold like Hal-9000’s emotionless eye. Screens lurk in the corner of every room, silently watching. Even before the supernatural emails arrive the technology allows Bella’s workplace to dominate what should be her holiday, driving a wedge between the pair as George uses childish games to try and return their dynamic to a lost state of genuine connection. But the screens are the conduit for the pixelated digital ghosts of their pasts and what’s online cannot so easily be put behind us. Perhaps cyberspace is the new primal landscape.
In this context, the rugged wilds of Wales take on a liberating function, the sweeping vistas and abundant light offering relief from the confines of their relationship. Inside the home, Caderni’s camera is claustrophobically staged in what feels like limited available space; our characters framed in doorways or reflected in mirrors, furniture foregrounded to make the character’s inclusion in the blocking feel almost incidental to the cold gaze of the camera. Caderni constructs Bergman-esque shots that allow monologue and reaction to play out simultaneously without breaking the verisimilitude of the interaction, showcasing the beautifully naturalistic performances of Acaster and Dowden.Â
A kaleidoscopic vision sequence near the film’s conclusion suggests a synthesis of these spaces, blending digital noise with Brackhage-esque impressions of the natural world. A reckoning occurs bringing Bella to her final place of revelation, and though the ensuing action may bring us closer to the artifice of conventional narrative than the film has strayed before, it is a well-earned melodramatic intervention, resolving the action of the film but not the tension which lingers past the credits.
Worm is a beautifully made and provocatively timely intervention into the folk horror genre. By eschewing the folkloric obsessions of the genre and centring the ever-presence of technology and our own self-constructed digital images of our past lives, Worm explores a much more frightening and modern form of ghost story than recent attempts to capitalise on the genre’s heritage.
Worm is touring the London cinema scene and will soon be available to watch in a cinema near you. Keep up to date here.