By David Dent
When we first meet Alice (Lucy Lovegrove), a midwife by profession, she’s being let down lightly, being described as good at her job and committed to her patients, despite what she’s been through. “You just need time”, she’s told.
Alice is about as low as you can go. At some point after losing a baby in childbirth, her partner Jason also departs, presumably because of Alice’s inability to move on from the loss. But the hallmark of Hunter’s debut feature is that nothing is explained; all is filtered through Alice’s distracted mind, as she sits among unneeded baby clothes, which, boxed up, later hatch moths. Alice now lives in isolation somewhere in Australia; no geographic pointers are given as to how isolated she is.
Jason’s sister, who’s pregnant, comes to check on Alice (a photograph shows that the pair were with child at the same time). She wants to help, clumsily offering to take away some of Jason’s things; it is assumed that his departure was unplanned.
Lost in her cycle of grief, Alice still wants to work, applying for a midwife job she is clearly in no position to take; she falls apart when the heavily pregnant interviewer asks whether Alice is a mother. She also goes on a date, which predictably does not end well. “I want a family,” she tells him on their first night.
While scrolling through the job links online, she reads an item about the ‘Mystery of the Midwife Witch’, a 19th Century American midwife and folk healer named Ada Landrake who moves to Australia, successfully prospects for gold and is subsequently hanged as a witch when babies start dying. Alice has felt a presence in the house with her and begins to imagine that she is being haunted by the witch; a way to try and find justification for the cruelty visited on her.
The Latcher is a dreamy – actually make that woozy – look at grief and its effect on those who suffer. Early scenes of Alice’s disassociation in her sparse, untidy home and her later obsession with its occupying force, reminded me of Polanski’s Repulsion; the movie remains a little formless, although affecting, and filtered to within an inch of its life. But Lovegrove is distractedly convincing and there are some effective touches; the horror is there but at arms length, or barely glimpsed, which works in its favour.
Bloody Flicks 