Chris Colfer loses his hands, and the prosthetics he gets back are wired into his subconscious. That is the engine of The Restoration at Grayson Manor, and a new trailer for it has arrived ahead of the film’s October 9 theatrical opening.
Glenn McQuaid directs from a script he wrote with the novelist Clay McLeod Chapman. Colfer plays Boyd Grayson, who brings men back to the family estate largely to remind his mother that she will never have grandchildren. Alice Krige plays the mother, Jacqueline. Daniel Adegboyega, Declan Reynolds and Gabriela Garcia Vargas fill out the house.
Casting Colfer is the boldest decision anyone made on this film. Six seasons of Glee built him as the sweetest-voiced person on American television, and a movie that gives him two violent prosthetic limbs and a mother who calls his subconscious “as filthy as a pig wallowing in its own feces” is spending that goodwill on purpose.
Glenn McQuaid Has Done This Before
McQuaid was born in Dublin in 1973, made his feature debut with I Sell the Dead in 2008, and directed “Tuesday the 17th” for the first V/H/S. He also co-created the audio horror anthology Tales From Beyond the Pale with Larry Fessenden. Grayson Manor shot at Stradbally Hall in County Laois, with Dublin’s Fantastic Films and Austria’s Horse&Fruits producing, and funding from Screen Ireland, the Austrian Film Institute, Coimisiún na Meán and RTÉ. It has already been round the festivals, including Sitges, Fantastic Fest, BIFFF, Trieste Science+Fiction and the Dublin International Film Festival.
Chapman is better known for his books. Whisper Down the Lane and Ghost Eaters are his, and he wrote the screenplay for The Boy in 2015.
Alice Krige Has Been Haunting Houses Since 1981
Krige’s genre record is the deepest thing on the cast list. She was Eva Galli in Ghost Story in 1981, Mary Brady in Sleepwalkers in 1992, the Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact, Christabella in Silent Hill and the witch in Gretel & Hansel, and she turned up in Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 2022. Putting her in a decaying manor as a controlling mother is not a subtle move, and it does not need to be.
Where You Know Chris Colfer From
Colfer won a Golden Globe in 2011 for playing Kurt Hummel on Glee, and spent much of the decade after it writing The Land of Stories, a bestselling children’s fantasy series. Chroma’s Ahbra Perry called the film “audacious, perverse, and emotionally ferocious” in announcing the release, and described it as “Chris Colfer’s powerful return to acting in such a daring, transformative role.”
Killer Hands Have a Long Record
Hands with their own agenda is one of horror’s oldest ideas. The Hands of Orlac got there in 1924, Mad Love remade it in 1935, The Beast with Five Fingers gave Peter Lorre a crawling hand in 1946, Sam Raimi had Bruce Campbell fight his own in Evil Dead II, and Idle Hands played it for laughs in 1999. What McQuaid adds is a reason for the hands to misbehave that is not supernatural at all. They are doing exactly what they were built to do, which is read their owner’s mind.
Chroma opens it in US theaters on October 9 and brings it to on demand December 1. Wildcard releases it in Ireland and the UK on November 6, and the trailer above is their Ireland and UK cut. The premise is thin ice for a ninety-minute feature, and whether it holds depends on McQuaid keeping two registers in the air at once, the operatic and the ridiculous. Krige has done exactly that for forty-five years.
