(I’m going to end up spoiling this one to a degree, so if you’re interested in watching it, maybe do that before reading this.)
Sometimes, you look up a movie and it’s pretty clear what you’re going to get from the thumbnail, the title, and the brief description. And Let Us Prey isn’t exactly subtle in this regard - there’s that title (ugh), a thumbnail of a bloodied figure covered in barbed wire, and the brief description “Held in a remote police station, a mysterious stranger takes over the minds and souls of everyone inside.” So yeah, we have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen: Late at night in some tiny police precinct, someone with no name or identification gets hauled in and thrown in a cell, and over the course of the night he basically possesses and/or torments everyone else there because he’s actually the devil or some shit like that.
This is by no means a fresh or original story idea, but here’s the thing: Let Us Prey is actually not what you’d expect from the description and relentlessly generic title. But, as much as I appreciate the film trying to defy expectations, I’m not sure the means by which it chose to do so actually works all that well. It’s not so much scary as a grim slog to an ending that isn’t terrible, but one that feels sort of like a foregone conclusion.
The film opens with portent - shots of crashing waves, flocks of crows against storm clouds, the sun fitfully breaking through. At first it’s nicely atmospheric, setting up a feeling of impending dread. But then it keeps going…and going…and then there’s an unnecessarily lingering close-up on a single crow, and it might be a special effect, but it’s like “okay, we get it, something’s coming and crows have something to do with it.” A lone figure appears in silhouette. Whatever’s coming, it’s here.
Elsewhere, on the other side of the title card, it’s dark early morning in some unidentified part of Scotland, and Police Constable Rachel Heggie is awake, doing push-ups, getting ready for her first day at her first assigned precinct. She heads out the door, walking to the station,, just in time to catch a young hoodlum coming the other way in a car that’s going too fast. Too fast to see the figure right in front of him, and he runs right over a man standing in the middle of the road. A man who vanishes immediately. Rachel sees the whole thing and takes him into custody.
The station is not very promising. It’s dingy and small. Sergeant MacReady, the ranking officer, is sort of a puzzle. He disapproves of profanity, but not of roughing up the kid Rachel’s brought in when he gets a bit lippy. He’s contemptuous of Rachel’s attention to procedure, but expects her to toe his line. The kid - who calls himself “Caesar” - is a bit of a regular at the station house, and gets thrown into lockup alongside Mr. Beswick, a mild-mannered schoolteacher. Elsewhere, we’re introduced to PCs Jack Warnock and Jennifer Mundie, who are spending their shift having sex in the front seat of their patrol car. Rachel radios them to look out for someone matching the victim’s description and they make fun of her over an open channel.
So we aren’t off to a good start. There’s the new cop stuck at her first probationary assignment, with what appear to be a bunch of corrupt fuck-ups stuck at a backwater station where they can’t do too much damage.
And then in walks the mysterious man, the one Caesar hit earlier, with barely a scratch on him, no name, no identification, the fingerprints of a man who died years ago, and a book. Full of names.
See, what we discover pretty quickly is that everyone in this police station - MacReady, Warnock, Mundie, Caesar, the doctor, and Rachel - have secrets that they’re hiding. And in most cases, those secrets are fucking horrifying. When vehicular manslaughter and killing a suspect in custody are the least objectionable ones, you know you’re in for some shit. The mysterious figure isn’t the devil here, pretty much everyone else is. So almost everyone is incredibly unsympathetic to start with, and as the film goes on it goes quickly from “unsympathetic” to “monstrous,” detailed in brutal, blood-soaked flashbacks that linger just long enough to get the point across, Apart from being kind of unbelievable in its scope, it also means that the movie stops being about how a police station full of people deal with this supernatural entity and instead starts being about us waiting for these absolutely awful people to get picked off one by one. We know that pretty much everyone (with one exception) is one degree or another of being a terrible person, so there’s no stakes or tension to their demise. It’s just a matter of waiting until they get theirs, which they do, often in supremely gory fashion, and as often as not by each other’s hand. There’s an inevitability to it, but not an inevitability that evokes dread, just a feeling of “okay, he’s probably next.” And the turn is revealed pretty early on, so it’s not like there’s a lot of horror to be found in the discovery that these otherwise average people have done awful, awful things. They’re unlikeable to start, so the only real surprise is the sheer depravity to which some of them have descended.
And I’m all in favor of subverting cliches, of taking the obvious and doing something difference with it. So there’s something interesting, at least in theory, about a movie that takes the “bunch of people trapped with a mysterious evil figure” conceit and turns it on its head, where the mysterious figure is actually more of an avenging angel and everyone else is awful and paying for their sins. But there’s no subtlety to it, no mystery. The moody opening doesn’t know when to stop, and for every shot of convenience stores or gas stations half-lit in the encroaching dark that, if they occurred in a film that played things quietly and low-key would create something haunting and uneasy, there’s relentlessly stagey dialogue, interiors that are obviously sets, and constant cutaways to flashbacks, often of horrible violence, not gratuitously lingered upon but also depicted in absolutely brutal fashion, without blinking or looking away. It doesn’t give us a chance to see the protagonists as sympathetic or relatable people before yanking that away. So we’re denied any horrifying revelations (beyond exactly how fucked-up some of these people are), and once we know the deal, the rest plays out pretty much like you’d expect. The end result means it’s not especially scary, and none of the people are developed to any degree beyond the terrible things they’ve done. We’re just waiting to find out the extent of their crimes and then waiting for them to die. In that sense it’s a lot more like a typical slasher films, where indiscreet teenagers are punished for things like drinking and premarital sex, with the lone sympathetic character surviving, complete with the sense that they’ve survived…but at what cost? You think it’s going to be one set of cliches, but it’s another.
In the end, a police station full of extremely bad people -cops and civilians alike - are shown doing bloody, horrible things to other people, and then doing bloody, horrible things to themselves and each other, and the one who’d normally be the bad guy is nothing of the sort, and maybe it’s an empowerment narrative for the protagonist, but it’s all so thoroughly nasty and unpleasant that it’s hard to care much about it. It’s grim, it’s pointless, it’s pointlessly grim and grimly pointless. Hell is empty, Shakespeare wrote, and all of the devils are here.
IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
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