Here is a cheerfully ingenious lo-fi movie experiment from first-time feature director Joseph Archer and writer-performer Cathy Wippel; it’s a found-footage horror with hints of Blair Witch and Peeping Tom, set in the Victorian London of Jack the Ripper. The footage that’s been found, incidentally, is composed of unearthed reels of monochrome film from the 1880s, which we see entirely in a kinetoscope-style circular screen, flickering and glitching and buzzing with eerie accidental jump cuts from one weird scene to the next.
It was supposedly shot by an enterprising pioneer called Tamworth (we hear his voice from behind the camera, but never see his face), who, it becomes clear, is a sensational and until now unacknowledged genius of early cinema – in that he manages to record lip-sync sound on to wax cylinders so we can actually hear what everyone is saying. With a cheeky touch of implied black comedy, the film is suggesting that Tamworth was somehow able to carry his camera and recording equipment to these places of Victorian horror and underclass shame as easily as an iPhone.
And what he was filming was a fly-on-the-wall record of an attempt by an ad hoc women’s spiritualist investigation team to discover the truth about the Ripper murders. These women hang out with his potential victims in pubs, brothels and opium dens, believing that these crimes are not attributable to a single cloaked and top-hatted individual slipping creepily in and out of the fog, as per traditional portrayals, but the work of ghosts, uncanny and evil forces conjured into being by fear, misogyny, poverty, press misinformation and political rage. The music-hall song Two Lovely Black Eyes leads to a ghastly finale.
It is an amusing, unnerving film, and yet I felt it could also be something you would see performed by a young cast on stage at the Edinburgh fringe. It is a film that’s in the business of taking risks and having ideas, but the performances are perhaps rather one-note and the pace a little unvarying as well. Well, it’s an intriguingly jittery, paranoid sliver of anxiety from the Victorian age.
• Snapshot screened at the Edinburgh film festival.
