By Simon Thompson
Director and screenwriter David A Roberts’s Older Gods is a dimly-lit, congested, and featureless viewing experience which somehow managed to make a one hour and twenty-two minute movie feel like five hours. Watching this movie was so dull, that I felt I was trapped in some sort of Hunter X Hunter exam- style time trial with my laptop to see how long I could last without getting up to put the kettle on.
The plot of Older Gods revolves around Chris Rivers (Rory Wilson), an American citizen visiting Britain to investigate a strange cult that he believes to be responsible for the death of his friend William ( Ieuan Coombs). As Chris gets deeper and deeper into the mystery surrounding the cult, he must fight a constant battle of holding on to both his life and his sanity at the same time.
I would say that Older Gods suffers from three major problems above all else. The first is that I found the cinematography to be far too dark for any of the visual effects or reveals to be genuinely scary, and since film is a visual medium being able to actually see what I’m supposed to be looking at shouldn’t be treated as a neat little bonus. The second issue is that the acting feels more akin to an episode of Heartbeat or Doctor Foster than it does to a tense and creepy horror movie, with all the side-characters either acting like twee agony aunts in a Nationwide advert, helpful PC Plod style coppers, or Zelda Majora’s Mask style harbingers of doom.
The third and final issue is more of a stylistic one than anything else, this is because David A Roberts’s artistic intent with Older Gods is to make a piece of Lovecraftian horror. This is a great big bloody stumbling block for one specific reason, which is that what makes HP Lovecraft’s writing great is that it’s based around pure description and the principle that what you can’t see or even begin to possibly imagine is far more terrifying than something that is actually in front of you.
This is why Lovecraft or works made in a Lovecraftian vein have a chequered history when it comes to either trying to adapt or ape that style in a visual medium, with the best examples of Lovecraft’s style in my opinion on the big screen either being loose adaptations ( Reanimator and The Colour Out Of Space), or spiritual successors (The Thing, In The Mouth of Madness, and The Lighthouse), rather than a direct attempt to fully imitate his unique vision outside of the short-story format, which is what I sense that Roberts was trying to do.
To conclude, Older Gods is a trite and by-the-numbers rural horror that anybody who has read more than two scary stories in their life has encountered before. As it trundles along at the pace of a tired snail, the only thing about it that will inspire any fright in you is that it’s not ended yet.
Bloody Flicks 