[*Stale Popcorn EXCLUSIVE Movie Review*] INSATIABLE
Watching Jessie Kirby’s Insatiable, for the purposes of review, was the greatest test I’ve had as a ‘film critic’. For the purposes of full disclosure I am good friends with Sean Coughlan (who you guys will know around these parts as NotorietyH), who worked on this movie and has a “story by” credit. I have also been a vocal champion of this little underdog flick, pimping its poster and trailer on this very site. I’m also in the process of trying to arrange interviews with the director and the films star.
What if I watched it and, you know, it was… well… shit? Would that affect my friendship with Sean? Would it ruin my chances of getting to have a chat with Kirby? Most important of all, would it destroy my fiendish plan to get one step closer to getting to flirt interview my new “(not so) secret” crush, Nora-Jane Noone (who I’ve spent years slating, before then realising I was completely in the wrong about her — yeah, she’s going to love me!!!)
So, the conundrum came down on me. Do I go ‘easy’ on Insatiable? Do I pretend that the complimentary screener I was sent didn’t work (funnily enough it didn’t initially!) in order to opt out of this awkward position? Or do I maintain a strong sense of integrity and just tell it how it is, and hope that Kirby and co respect my honesty? I’m going to go with the latter.
With that in mind, I promise you that, here on in, I am going to be absolutely honest (which I’m certain is what Miss Kirby and Mr Coughlan would want anyway!) about Insatiable. Regardless of what extrenous connections I may have to the film via Mr Coughlan. When I finished watching it, I sat down and watched it again, back to back, just to make sure that my opinions felt concrete to me.
Taking its seed from a story strand seen in the second series of BBC’s The League of Gentleman, Insatiable presents us with an Ireland of the near future. The economy has crashed and food is rapidly running out. The official plot synopsis tells us that meat sources are gone due to BSE and a new strain of Chronic Wasting Disease. Bird flu has killed off most of the fowl. The fish in the sea are full of radiation. All over the world vegetable crops are failing. In one small village, Mr. Harvey (Jon Kenny), a supermarket owner, believes he alone can stave off the locals hunger. Ellie (Nora-Jane Noone) works for Harvey in order to keep food on the table for her dying mother, and comes to meet Rachel (Laura Donnelly), Harvey’s niece, as a result. When Harvey suddenly starts selling meat again Ellie becomes suspicious that it is not the stored pig meat that he claims it to be. When Rachel and Ellie uncover that the recently deceased from the village are the main ingredients of the new meat, and that Harvey and his cohort Sergeant Kenny (Damian Kearney) are turning to murder to keep the supermarket fully stocked, they must fight to stop the local merchant from continuing his horrific plan.
My rambling introduction to this review was somewhat unnecessary, because it is with a mixture of delight and great relief that I can report that Insatiable is good. Very good, in fact. As the poster and trailer reel indicated there’s a really interesting vibe about the film that evokes favourable comparison to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man and the cult gem that is Dead and Buried. So much so that I feel more than comfortable in saying that if you enjoyed either of those films, then you will have a great time with Insatiable.
The film isn’t perfect. From the outset it feels kind of unsettled within itself, and chops from scene to scene like a serious of sketches as opposed to one coherent narrative. Fear not, this doesn’t last. Kirby rather bravely brings us in as the crisis is in full swing, so she has set herself the task of not just establishing a full roster of characters but also the very detail relating to the crisis that we, the audience, need to know. After about twenty minutes or so, the film settles down into a very tense, dread-filled ride. By the one hour mark it has you, very effectively, in the palm of its hand.
The music, for the most part, is very well done but is a little overwrought in some scenes, coming to distract you from the scene as opposed to adding effect to it. There’s also a few clunky production effects - most notably in the scene where the character of Bobby (Michael Sheehan) accidentally kills a customer. That scene is forgiven any fault though on the grounds that it ends on a deliously dark one-liner by Mr Harvey where, as Bobby awkwardly tries to attend to the lady’s wound that he has just caused, he bellows “Stop fondling the woman, lad!”
Here’s the thing about Insatiable though; what flaws it has don’t detract from the film, they really kind of add to its overall charm. The sparse, low-budget production design, for example, in which the cast and crew have had to work with what they could afford, is actually totally in keeping with the vibe that the film is creating - this is a village in crisis, with no food, no money, barely any stability, and people dropping like flies. The sparseness of the interior locations, and their rough-and-ready appearance, depicts this really rather well.
Insatiable excels though in an area where budget and funding cannot have an effect - its script and its performance. Donkey Punch (a film that exists as a sort of template to suggest that if that movie can find its way to the big screen, then Insatiable should have no problem!) might have been likeable despite its thoroughly grotty premise, but it lacked strong performances across the board. Insatiable, on the other hand, doesn’t have a weak performance in it.
Michael Sheehan may only have a small role as Bobby, but he sort of gives off the same rough, charismatic presence that Australia’s Sam Worthington does, and did well enough to attract the attention of James Cameron for Avtar and secure a role in Terminator 4. Ciara O’Callaghan is also worth highlighting too, as Jenna, Bobby’s doomed girlfriend. Special mention must go to our own ‘NotorietyH’ of course, whose role as “Angry Customer At The Front Of The Shop Queue” suggests that he has a bright future in Civil Service Training Videos on manual handling and safety in the work place. Ha Ha.
These are but the background characters though. Carrying the film are the central performances by Jon Kenny, Nora-Jane Noone and Laura Donnelly. Kenny is big, pantomime-esque fun in this film. He’s incredibly effective and continually bounces his character between being very darkly comic and just downright creepy. With Tobin Bell having sold his soul to the devil with those Saw sequels, Kenny could easily head on over to Hollywood and get himself a slew of creepy, character parts in big, mainstream horror thrillers no problem.
Like pretty much all the cast, bar Noone, I was utterly unfamilar with Laura Donnelly prior to seeing Insatiable. She is absolutely fantastic in this. A real stand-out. The IMDB suggests she has a few episodes of The Bill, Casualty and the like on her CV (what struggling actress doesn’t here in the UK?) but if this is her feature acting debut, then this is the sort of ‘calling-card’ performance that most unknown actresses could only wish they were capable of.
Matching her every step of the way is Nora-Jane Noone. Now, I’ve been less than complimentary about Miss Noone in the past, basing her talent off of The Descent (a film I rate quite highly, but not for its script or performances) and Doomsday. Having now seen her in The Magdalene Sisters and this, my opinion is completely reversed AND I think I’ve spotted why I was wrong in the first place; it’s becoming apparent that Noone can’t work as some sort of dispensable ‘turn-up-and-smile-at-the-camera’ type in empty, disposable tosh like Doomsday. She needs a character well-written enough for her to get her teeth into and shine as a result. Give her nothing, and its like she’s desperately searching for a diamond in a mound of dog shit (a la Doomsday and Ella Enchanted) and coming up empty. Give her something solid and she’ll stand up as one of the most interesting actresses working out of the United Kingdom presently, as is very much the case here.
Saying there’s an unsavoury moment in a cannabilism-themed thriller, is a bit like saying that it’s a bit wet in the ocean, I know. But, for the most part, the film never takes on that grotty, seedy, attention-seeking vibe that most low-budget films of this type usually do. So, the scene in which one character is locked underneath the floorboards whilst a corrupt police officer urinates on her from above, stands out unfortunately. It seems completely out of line with the steady sense of suggested dread and terror that has been expertly built up until that point.
Insatiable has an ending that, initially, you feel as if it doesn’t so much end as it does just stop, which was a little frustrating I will admit. I thought it built brilliantly towards a confrontation that never came. As I said, I watched it twice in quick succession and the ending worked better on second viewing though. I think I was expecting a slasher-movie style face-off between Mr Harvey and the two girls. When I didn’t get it I was disappointed, but second time round, I started to realise that such an ending would have been a bit of a betrayal to the assured tone that Kirby had worked hard to build. Let the ending sink in though and it becomes sort of etheral and intelligent.
There’s a sense of integrity on show whereby no one overplays their hand, there’s no gore-for-the-sake-of-it, no gratuitous nudity (there’s nudity - just not gratuitous!) - just very much a sense that Kirby has a strong story to tell and she’s going to tell it her way!
And to give proper mention to the film’s director, Jessie Kirby, here is the guiding hand that takes a rough-around-the-edges, flawed little horror thriller and makes it sing and come alive. This is no bullshit, there’s a level of confidence being exuded here that you wouldn’t think possible from someone who is making their directorial debut. Look at the love scene between Ellie and Rachel, which cross-cuts very well between the act itself and an argument that takes place in its aftermath. Yes, we’ve seen it before in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight, but what you have to take into account is that - when complimented on his take on such a scene - Soderbergh stated that he’d always wanted to do his own take on Roeg’s famous cross-cut love-making scene but he never felt he had the confidence or the skill to do it right, until he all but forced himself to try it a good few movies into his career. Kirby has tried her hand at it and pulled it off with her first movie.
On top of this, there’s a level of low-budget inventiveness on show here that you could compare, rather boldly, with Sam Raimi’s debut in The Evil Dead. He never let a micro-budget get in the way of his ideas. Kirby has the same tenancity. She was obviously aware from the outset that she couldn’t do blood-thirsty locals laying siege to our heroines in the supermarket or people being torn apart whilst their neighbours feast upon them. Instead she’s looked around at the tools she has available to her, a strong talented cast and a great economically written script, and she’s concentrated on using them to her advantage.
As a result she’s delivered an extremely watchable, well-made, low-budget gem that, for all its relative flaws, it has ‘cult favourite’ written all over it. And, if you’re one of the attention-defecit types who always just scan to the last couple of paragraphs of my overly-wordy reviews, for my ‘wrap-up’ and ‘rating’, then let me just bring you in on this: Lesbians, tits, blood and cannibalism… What more can you want?
I hope Insatiable secures the most solid distribution deal available to it and it gets out there to play on the big screens. It would be an absolute shame for this really well delivered debut to find its home in the world of ’straight-to-DVD’, especially when I am so certain that there is an audience that will lap this up and be utterly appreciative for having done so.
This is a solid ‘three and a half popcorn’ film, but I have got to recognise the achievement by Kirby, her cast and her crew, who have done so much effectively and efficiently with so little:
Popcorn Ratings Explained
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