Mark Kermode, Observer film critic 

The Ones Below review – Polanski-esque chiller

David Farr’s tale of a young couple and their peculiar neighbours downstairs oozes anxiety and paranoia
  
  

clemence poesy the ones below
Something wicked this way comes: Clémence Poésy in The Ones Below. Photograph: PR Image

This home-grown psychological chiller starts with an ultrasound image of an unborn baby’s face and a la-la-la theme which evokes Krzysztof Komeda’s lullaby from Rosemary’s Baby. The spirit of Polanski looms large as young middle-class couple Kate (Clémence Poésy) and Justin (Stephen Campbell Moore) find their expectant anxieties mirrored by the new couple in the downstairs flat, with whose barely repressed “otherness” they become inextricably, guiltily intertwined. Playwright and theatre director David Farr (who co-wrote Joe Wright’s Hanna and scripted TV’s The Night Manager) makes a solid fist of his big-screen debut as writer/director, generating some small-scale chills which are undiminished by the occasionally creaky dialogue. Cinematographer Ed Rutherford, who did such brilliant work for Joanna Hogg on Archipelago and Exhibition, uses woozy camera moves to capture the exhaustion and paranoia of parenthood, while the production design effectively counterposes order and chaos – inside and out, upstairs and down.

 

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