Black Pond (Tom Kingsley & Will Sharpe, 2011)

A distinctly eerie low-budget black comedy, Black Pond comes across more as a TV piece in the style of Nighty Night than an actual cinematic feature, even if it got to our screens via the Raindance film festival. The unsettling air is contributed to by the rehabilitative casting of convicted child porn downloader Chris Langham as the family father, who is befriended by a gentle man with obvious psychological issues. We already know from the outset that the family end up burying the visitor in the woods after he dies at their house, and a number of false notes, particularly Simon Amstell's wedged-in cameo as an obnoxious twerp of a psychiatrist, also detract from the film's dramatic consistency. But the dialogue is also nicely acerbic, particularly between the estranged husband and wife, with the batting between her bitching and his stream of bland inanities, and some images are genuinely fresh and disturbing. It's an interesting debut from the directors, albeit somewhat uncertain whether it's seeking to be a faux-documentary, a comedy of embarrassment or a serious drama.

6/10