The Seasoning House Review

• 13th Aug 2013

The Seasoning House was a critical success at last year’s Frightfest and its release is timely in coming out just before Frightfest 2013 in which a new bevy of horror, supernatural and violent revenge thrillers will entertain this year’s fest. The Seasoning House falls into the latter as an arthouse revenge thriller. It begins with a girl crawling in and out of spaces in a run down shack of a house. Set in an unnamed country in the Balkans (probably Bosnia), we soon learn that this house is a makeshift brothel that had opened during the war in the 1990s in which young girls who’s families had been murdered during ethnic cleansing had been taken by a man called Viktor and put into ‘service’ in the brothel to provide for the paramilitary fighters (the film is at pains not to specify which side they belong to). Needless to say that the girls are kept prisoner and not willing accomplices in the transaction and have to be sedated with heroin and tied to the bed while they are abused, beaten and sometimes killed by their johns. We are then introduced to the girl we saw in the opening shots, a petite deaf and dumb girl who goes by the name of Angel (Rosie Day) who arrives at the brothel where she witnesses her best friend being stabbed in the neck in order that the girls show their ‘loyalty’. Viktor (Kevin Howarth) takes to the girl and keeps her behind to give her the job in assisting doping the girls up and tying them to the beds, feeding and cleaning them acting as a slave to Viktor. She stays here for a few years and soon learns to use the ventilation shafts and wall cavities to move around in unbeknownst to Viktor. This is where Adam Etherington’s cinematography is at its best as it tracks Angels through the narrow nooks and crannies of the building. What she witnesses at the ‘brothel’ is abuse of the worst kind. Even after the war the place is used and frequented by former paramilitary groups who systematically abuse and sometimes kill the girls. One day Angel, at the edge of not being able to take anymore decides to take decisive action on the day that Goran (Sean Pertwee), the man who had murdered her mother in front of her eyes arrives with his cronies. Angel can now use her unique geography of the house to her best advantage to exact her revenge.

The film is the directorial debut for Paul Hyett, a special-effects maestro who, like Tom Savini has now moved into direction (Hyett also wrote the script) and has done so very effectively despite the limited budget; Hyett had provided the effects for such modern horror classics as The Descent (2005) and The Woman in Black (2012) and clearly studied the way these films were directed. Yet, like most inexperienced directors the film is not short of its faults or at least demonstrating a lack of experience. The films first half is fairly slow and artful with a moody slow sleeper score by Paul E. Francis before it becomes a gore fest with Angel exacting her revenge in the second half of the film. The first half may demonstrate more originality or style while the second half delivers on excitement for those who like their action and atonement for the villains to be painful and bloody even if that violence is a little hackneyed in places.

The films message seems really to be about the de-sensitization of war, particularly amongst men, none truer in the West in recent years than the horrors of the wars in the Balkans throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. The Balkan region has also come under attack and investigation since the war for harbouring war criminals as well as people trafficking with sometimes the specific purpose of being forced into prostitution. While Hyett’s attempts at realizing the Balkans is brave, he never the less doesn’t pull it off in the production design department: all the houses, locations and countryside appear too much like a Wiltshire village rather than central Bosnia; only Howarth convinces as a Slavic para while the rest of the crew, Pertwee included seem more like English football thugs (as opposed to Croatian or Serb football thugs of which both countries have trouble with). Never the less this is an effective and well done first directorial effort from Hyett.

Chris Hick