FrightFest started in style with David Keating’s Cherry Tree: a stirring orgy of surrealist terror that’s stacked with rigid exposition and continuity errors but successfully blends genre tropes and unique visual styles to tantalising effect. Melding Argento, Cronenberg and Clive Barker with the perverse noir of the 90s Redemption flicks and the exploitation terror of Jess Franco and Lucio Fulci.
The Carrie style set up introduces fifteen-year-old Faith (Naomi Battrick), a student distressed by her father’s illness and signs of imminent demise. Faith’s school-life is also mottled by bullies but she is not the stereotypical genre outcast. Faith has friends, kudos, the attention of boys and doesn’t crumble in conflict. Her testy mannerisms ground the story with a level of realism that sits well with the weirder attributes. Events, thankfully, take a turn for the outlandish when Faith is propositioned by her alluring hockey teacher Sissy (Anna Walton) who offers to save her father’s life but at a terrifying cost.
The story sifts into twisted terrain, embracing darker attributes and evoking the work of Neil Jordan and Ken Russell in its combination of abstract horror within a cold setting. Editing bleeds dreamy sequences well as the plot slips into a swelling nightmare world for the latter half but Cherry Tree remains patchy and illogical throughout due to hack editing and a flimsy structure. The story provides interesting twists on recurring genre themes while stunning visuals create a lurid mood but it frequently stammers with shifty dialogue and slack execution.
Contrived set-pieces feel crow-barred in to give the illusion of foundation but Cherry Tree is better mouldering opaque and illogical in the subconscious like an old, forgotten memory. Combining macabre repulsion with adolescent angst is common in the genre but unusual within this melding of Euro-horror modes as animal sacrifices and crevice dwelling centipedes make the skin crawl. Meanwhile its conclusion hurls devil witch mutations into an otherworldly setting with astounding imagery bringing Hellraiser to mind.
In its need to please too many, Cherry Tree sometimes feels lost and unsure. Its visual inimitability may alienate audiences partial to more plastic genre efforts while stocky exposition and a patchwork narrative may prove too slapdash for hardened genre/ film fans with higher expectations.
For those who revel in the weirder visual strengths, like their claret rich and their horror oblique and ethereal, Cherry Tree will remain a fascinatingly fumbled slice of pseudo goth terror, rich in style but light on vital sagacity.
