Somewhere inside They Wait in Shadows is a small, mean, well acted film about two women who cannot agree on what happened to them. A haunting keeps wandering in front of it.
The setup is lean. Ingrid and Jenny, estranged for years, return to the isolated house they grew up in after their mother’s death. Ingrid is recently divorced and carrying guilt attached to something from their childhood. Jenny is caught in another unstable relationship, this time with Ray. The family’s old Ouija board is still in the house, and before long the things the sisters spent their adult lives refusing to name start showing up with bodies. Sam Mason-Bell wrote it, directed it, shot it, and edited it, which gives the film one unmistakable author and almost nobody positioned to tell him no.
Hunt and Adara Do the Heavy Lifting
Jessica Hunt and Meghan Adara are convincing as sisters, which sounds like a low bar until you count how many better funded horror films clear it. They play estrangement as something with a shape rather than a plot condition. There is a specific register two adult siblings fall into when they are being polite at each other instead of talking, a tone worse than shouting, and Hunt and Adara find it again and again. Hunt gives Ingrid a wound that has been managed rather than healed, the kind you can carry through a workday. Adara plays Jenny as someone who decided a long time ago that motion is safer than sitting still with her own memory. Put them in a room to argue about the past and the film comes alive.
The sisters are the movie. Everything else is weather.
Monsters You Can Touch
The monsters are practical, built with full body makeup, prosthetics, puppetry, and animatronic work, and they behave the way handmade creatures always do. They take up space. A rendered thing floats in the frame no matter how much money you throw at it, while something assembled by human beings has weight, a slightly wrong texture, and the faint suggestion that someone inside it is having a very long day. That last part is not a criticism. There is real friction here between creature designs that make no attempt at realism and a family history that is depressingly plausible, and the film gets a strange charge out of putting the two in the same house.
The film also stops to admire them. Practical work asks the camera to hold still and commit, and commitment costs time, and time is where the film loses its argument. The slow stretches are not doing enough character work to justify their length. There is a difference between a scene accumulating pressure and a scene waiting for something offscreen to be ready, and too much of the middle is the second kind. Every time the film comes back to Ingrid and Jenny, the heat they generated has gone out of the room. They have to start the movie over.
What the Sisters Cannot Agree On
What holds the thing together is its subject. This is a story about childhood abuse and about what two siblings do with a history neither of them narrated the same way. I would not call it a study of any clinical condition, since the film is not offering a diagnosis and neither am I, but it is genuinely interested in guilt as something you inherit and then pay off in installments. The monsters are attached to that guilt rather than floating loose from it. The childhood material is treated as damage that produced two specific adults with two specific coping strategies, not as a spooky origin story with a bow on it. That puts They Wait in Shadows ahead of the large and growing pile of horror films that convert a family wound into a creature and then lose interest in the family. Mason-Bell does not lose interest. He just cannot always find the images to carry what he means.
An Ending That Answers the Wrong Question
The ending does not land. Without going near specifics, the resolution attends to the supernatural side of the story with far more energy than it attends to the sisters, and the sisters were the reason to be here. The disagreement the film spent its whole length building never gets a scene equal to its weight. What arrives instead is closure of the tidier variety, answering a question the movie was not actually asking. A film this committed to two women contradicting each other about the past should finish on that contradiction, not politely around it.
Who This Is For
Two and a half stars, and the half is doing honest work. If you follow Trash Arts, if you seek out British underground horror on principle, or if handmade creature effects are enough of a draw that you will forgive a slack middle, there is something here worth your evening, and Hunt and Adara are worth it on their own. If you need a film to keep moving, or you want an ending that pays back what the performances put in, this one will test you long before the credits. It arrives on UK digital today through Miracle Media, following the US digital release in May through Cleopatra Entertainment.
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
