Mum & Dad

This grisly, cod-Freudian satire is the first film to be released under Film London’s Microwave scheme, which dished out £100,000 to a handful of burgeoning Brit filmmakers. Lena (Olga Fedori) is the young Polish immigrant working as a cleaner at Heathrow who is captured, imprisoned and tortured by a family of psychopaths.

The small ensemble give game performances and, more importantly, are all in on the joke, as soap opera squabbles (which feel like they’ve been sapped straight from early Mike Leigh) segue merrily into scenes of mutilation and murder. Perry Benson – last seen in Shane Meadows’s ‘Somers Town’ – is given, ahem, a meaty lead role as the homicidal dad, but he’s too likable to convey any real menace.  And while the mechanics of Lena’s ordeal have a revolting plausibility to them, you feel that director Steven Sheil has not yet mastered a way of developing tension through camerawork and editing, and as such, this commendable first effort works better as sick comedy than scary horror.