The Secret of Marrowbone review: Skilful chiller from the team behind The Orphanage

Dir Sergio G Sanchez, 110 mins, starring: Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Heaton, Mia Goth, George MacKay, Kyle Soller, Robert Nairne

(Lionsgate/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock)

The exquisitely crafted new Gothic horror movie The Secret Of Marrowbone comes from the team behind The Orphanage, The Impossible and A Monster Calls. It’s a mongrel creation: Spanish-made, with mainly British characters and set in early 1960s America. If you’re looking for period accuracy, cultural consistency or a realistic sense of time and place, you won’t find it here. Not that it matters. Its stylisation and strange sense of dislocation only add to its appeal.

Writer-director Sergio G Sanchez is clearly aiming for a dreamlike atmosphere. The film unfolds almost entirely in a beautiful but rickety house deep in the woods. It’s here that the Marrowbone family has retreated. There are four children, the oldest of them Jack (George MacKay). Their mother (Nicola Harrison) grew up in the house. The father is nowhere to be seen. All that Sanchez lets us know about the family members is that they are determined to forget the past. They want to “begin again”.

In that first summer, their lives are idyllic. The kids run amok in the woods, undisturbed by anyone other than the sympathetic Allie (Anya Taylor-Joy), who lives in a farmhouse nearby and appears to work as the local librarian. Like the parent and daughter in Debra Granik’s recent and far harsher Leave No Trace, the family doesn’t bother with schooling and tries to have as little interaction with the outside world as possible. The mother, though, is ailing. We discover eventually just why the family is going to such lengths to suppress any mention of “that business” about the father.

Several elements here are jarring. The film is set deep in a forest and yet the seashore seems to be very close by. Characters dress in subdued outfits that make you think of the British post-war austerity era and yet listen to Beach Boys music. The filmmakers don’t tell us anything about why the mother married such a monstrous man or what prompted his misdeeds. All we do know is that there is some kind of bogeyman or ghost in the house; that a room upstairs is bricked up and that Jack has a mysterious mark on his forehead.

Sanchez includes conventional shock tactics – threatening silences, clammy hands that reach out of the dark, rumblings and screamings, cracked mirrors, sinister characters emerging from the woods, and some very bloody standoffs. He deliberately leaves it opaque as to whether we are watching a supernatural story or whether the source of evil is someone still living. Jack is not only the film’s protagonist but also its narrator – and he’s a highly strung and very unreliable one.

Whatever frustrations you may feel about some of the filmmakers’ trickery and contrivances, it’s hard not to admire their skill. They pay attention to landscape. As in A Monster Calls, trees appear to come to life. The house itself is anthropomorphised and seems to change from homely to threatening in accordance with Jack’s rapidly shifting moods. Mackay plays the lead with the same mix of ingenuous vulnerability and creepiness he brought to his role as the tormented young fisherman in his breakthrough film, For Those In Peril.

Story-wise, Marrowbone may not add up but this is a lyrical and chilly affair in similar vein to other recent Spanish-made horror pictures in which atmosphere is always foregrounded at the expense of plot.