After traffic kept me out of the first screening of Day 2, Rogue River, and my intended discovery screen film, A Horrible Way to Die, sold out, I was left in Screen 1, watching Emmerdale collide with The Stepfather in Susan Jacobson’s The Holding.
The film opens in frantic fashion with mother of two Cassie Naylor (Kierston Wareing) frantically burying the corpse of her husband Dean. Flash-forward eight months and Cassie is struggling to pay the bills for her cattle holding and fend off the unwelcome advances of her country bumpkin neighbours. Welcome to the stage Aden (Vincent Regan), a charmer claiming to be an old friend of Deans who soon finds himself slotting into the Naylor family, whether they like it or not.
The film looks great, not so much due to the Jacobson’s talent but rather than spectacular natural scenery of its Peak District setting and among the solid cast, Regan stands out with a perfectly menacing performance as a sweet-talker with a glint in his eye all too capable of melting into a glare. As soon as handsome stranger Aden walks onto the farm you pretty much know where the rest of the film is going. As Roger Ebert has said of his type ‘He's one of those guys with a bland smile and a voice so nice and sweet that right away you know he's twisted.’ In the movies, if ever a single mum finds a perfect man with shimmering abs, he’s usually a serial killer (The Stepfather), a vampire (Fright Night) or Jerry Maguire (Jerry Maguire). If horror movies tell us anything, it’s that as soon as that divorce is finalised, mum’s sense of judgement tends to go out of the window.
In a predictable film that unfortunately brings not much new to the table, a strange subplot involving the youngest daughter Amy (Maisie Lloyd) being obsessed with the bible is painfully neglected. In the Q & A after the film, the writer revealed that the initial script was much more supernatural, with Aden taking a more ambiguous existence, and Amy’s religious ramblings were a part of this initial draft. They kept her stuff in the final version as they ‘liked it’. Unfortunately, liking it doesn’t really justify keeping it in and despite it being the most interesting part of the film, it builds to nothing and feels (as it clearly was) like something from a different, far better film.
Whilst The Holding looks good with impressive acting and a few early twists and turns, it quickly turns into a story already done to death. Jacobson does throw in an out of place explosion in the final ‘sisters doing it for themselves’ third but it can’t save The Holding from being not bad, not good, just a film as formulaic as they come.
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