Pigeon Shrine FrightFest Film Review

Dramas don’t come darker than this—the astonishing central performance and a stunning final third will fry your mind.

Abused and abandoned by her drunken dad and selfish mother, young Charlotte is forced to seek refuge with vile polaroid pervert Roy. Unaware of his predatory nature, Charlotte becomes a commodity on the stock market of human misery.

Georgia Conlan‘s confrontational debut features more triggers than an Only Fools and Horses convention. Deeply sinister, it can only be stomached after the epiphany of its machiavellian narrative. However, this reverse engineering makes for such a squirmy watch that the uncomfortable may bail long before its jaw-dropping revelation.

It’s a commendably audacious, even brave, plan of attack, but this level of audience manipulation is naturally problematic. A significant portion of the film feels tacky and voyeuristic. It’s a risky business to generate tension using such an incendiary premise. On one level, it trivialises intense emotional damage; on another, it provides almost unbearable jeopardy.

For the most part, Charlotte loses this delicate balancing act—or so it appears. It is almost impossible to explain why that doesn’t matter without resorting to spoilers, so I won’t. Only one other franchise I can recall has tried anything like it before, but Charlotte trumps it in practical achievement.

It is a testament to the movie’s sheer edginess, and twisty gall that even writing a review mirrors the contextual pitfalls of the horrors on show. Perhaps the most helpful thing would be to allow this Søren Kierkegaard quote to do the heavy lifting for me: “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”

Despite its ruthless execution, Charlotte‘s deceptive façade has budgetary cracks. Some of the acting is challenging, as is the stereotypical clumsiness. The sets are sterile and restrictive, and many character decisions are improbable. Yet, the stellar screenplay gathers these threadbare strands and weaves them into a tight narrative twine, secretly binding our perceptions.

Unnailed endings are the bane of genre fans’ lives, but it’s a head-fuckingingly jaw-dropping ambush in this case. Delivered with minimum spoon-feeding and maximum mischief it could make for rabid word-of-mouth buzz for the film if anyone has the balls to release it into the wild.

Easily one of the most controversial movies of the year Charlotte is the epitome of zero fucks given indie filmmaking where the intended story is king at any cost and sensibilities are for stripping and pounding in the testicles with a rustic tenderiser.

So obviously a labour of love, one wonders how the filmmakers feel to have given birth to such a devilish monstrosity as Charlotte.