By Simon Thompson
Writer/director Hayden Hewitt’s Cara is an unflinching and visceral piece of horror, which, despite containing some solid acting and plenty of striking imagery, falls just short at the final hurdle. This is a shame because Hewitt is a filmmaker with a strong imagination and a sense of originality, but his visual flourishes can’t overcome the flaws that this movie has.
The plot of Cara follows the eponymous protagonist (Elle O’ Hara) a mentally ill young woman who has turned to working on a live bdsm OnlyFans- style site to make ends meet. Cara suffers from what could roughly be described as dreaming episodes that are linked to various horrific personal traumas, and due to the alienating nature of her job finds her grip on reality slipping further and further away.
Believing that there is a plan in place for her to be sent back to the psychiatric facility where she was abused, Cara hatches a brutal revenge plan involving both the viewers of her content and the sole architect of her original personal torment.
The acting in Cara is a cut above the usual low budget horror standard. Elle O’ Hara does a commendable job in the title role, which is no easy task, because despite everything that Cara has gone through she isn’t a particularly easy character to like- by Hewitt’s design- so the fact that I wasn’t completely alienated by Cara as a character is a testament to O’ Hara’s skills as an actor. Veteran British character actor James Dreyfus, as Cara’s social worker Gregg, gives the best performance out of the supporting cast by a mile, portraying him as a man reduced to being a box ticking bureaucrat, a symptom of a broken system incapable of helping those who need it.
Visually, Hewitt juxtaposes the mundane everyday locations that the film takes place in with the previously mentioned surreal nightmares that Cara suffers from in the same vein as directors such as David Lynch, Hitchcock, and Herk Harvey. Through the use of blue filters, and a more expansive colour palette the dream sequences are both luridly terrifying yet are also a joy to look at due to their surreal inventiveness.
Where the movie really suffers however is the third act. Although Hewitt’s script constantly kept me guessing, by the time the movie reached its third act I was feeling disappointed for two reasons. The first was that I felt the narrative had become way too predictable and slightly contrived, and the second is that I found the ending to be far too abrupt when it came to dealing with the protagonist’s fate.
Cara arrives on digital from 17 February 2025 from Reel 2 Reel Films.
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