Mark Reviews Movies: UNWELCOME

Unwelcome, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 8, 2023

It might take a while, but Unwelcome becomes the right kind of twisted—a creepy, bloody, and unsettling take on a fairy tale about trauma, power, and malevolently helpful creatures. Co-writer/director Jon Wright's horror tale builds a decent amount of suspense, with its story about finding out that there are terrible people no matter where one goes, and does so with a warped sense of humor that's as unexpected as the shifting concerns of its plot. The lengthy payoff, though, is what really sells it.

Wright and Mark Stay's screenplay seems as if it could be going in an assortment of directions at any given time, and it doesn't really matter that each of those directions is predictable in one way or another. The trick is in keeping us on our toes.

We meet Maya (Hannah John-Kamen) and Jamie (Douglas Booth), a couple who have been dating for a while and live together in estate housing in London. The two want to have a baby, and after a pregnancy test offers some happy news, Jamie heads outside the apartment building and across the way to buy some non-alcoholic bubbly to celebrate.

He's harassed by a trio of hoodlums hanging around the shop, and in a miscalculation of his adrenaline-fueled mind, Jamie speaks up for himself and insults the three guys. Soon enough, Maya hears her boyfriend return home, only to hear three more voices appear and ruckus of violence erupt. The goons beat Jamie and start to attack Maya, but they're stopped by her wielding a knife and the sound of police sirens approaching.

Immediately, the film establishes its threat, not as a supernatural one, but as a grounded, human one. That goes a long way to keeping us invested in the slowly escalating tension of this scenario, especially because some supernatural presence and/or threat seems waiting just off-stage to unleash some kind of terror at any moment.

They're redcaps—"little people," as the locals of a small Irish town call them. Maya and Jamie find themselves in this place after his aunt dies, leaving her nephew a peaceful cottage just at the right moment (There's an otherworldly quality to the exterior of the house, clearly shot on a soundstage so that the lighting can reflect the mood).

After the assault in their home, Jamie and Maya are ready for some peace and comfort, especially with a baby on the way and some trauma through which to work. The two can receive as many portents of doom and malicious creatures from their neighbor (played by Niamh Cusack) as she's willing to offer. Warnings of keeping the not-quite-leprechaun-like monsters happy with nightly blood offerings of liver, though, aren't enough to scare the two away from a new, hopefully happy life.

The rest of the plot isn't much, but it is enough. There's a hole in the roof of the couple's new home, so they need to hire some contractors to fix it. While they wait for that, Maya and Jamie meet their new neighbors around town, where they're treated to free groceries at the shop and, after an awkward silence that suggests some rural hostility toward the city folks, a toast at the local pub. Sure, one guy at the bar gets a bit too drunk and makes Maya uncomfortable with his alternately aggressive and insulting demeanor, but he's kicked out of the joint. His walk home through the woods goes even worse, because, as you might recall, there are little goblin-like creatures that don't appreciate intruders.

The big matter here revolves around the couple's increasingly antagonistic relationship with the contractors, which is a storyline that's so simple and unassuming in how ordinary it is that it's a clever bit of sleight-of-hand. We meet head contractor Whelan (Colm Meaney, whose ability to seem either warm or menacing in equal measure is used to great effect here), who runs the company with his three adult children: Aisling (Jamie-Lee O'Donnell), Killian (Chris Walley), and Eoin (Kristian Nairn). The first two siblings are irritating nightmares of spoiled attitude, petty thievery, and privacy invasion, and Eoin is either "slow," as his father "kindly" refers to him, or so routinely beaten by his dad, who creepily insists that everyone calls him "Daddy," that he's in a state of arrested development.

The rest of what happens can't be described without giving away the various subversions of who and/or what are actual threats to our protagonists, how they're revealed, and in what manner the central conflict escalates. In general, though, Wright balances the grim view of humanity on display and a dark sense of levity, especially when those little creatures finally come into play in a significant role in the third act.

That climax unfolds as a home invasion of sorts, filled with gory violence against human and redcap bodies. The fact that the creation of these creatures is more to do with practical effects, prosthetics, puppetry than digital effects gives them a tangibility and a sense of personality that elevates the impact of the carnage, as well as the demented humor.

It all works—as nasty comedy, as eerie horror, as psychological fable about feeling powerless and finding the power to take control of one's circumstances—to one degree or another. Mostly, Unwelcome is entertaining as a series of subversions of familiar ideas, themes, and story threads, twisted into a strange, over-the-top modern-day fairy tale.

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