It Feeds

(Chad Archibald, Canada, 2025)

This insight stuck with me from teenage university-library-shelf-scouring years: in a French Dossier du cinéma volume published in the early 1970s, Claude-Jean Philippe’s entry on Seven Chances (1925) refers to a stunning transition that takes Buster Keaton from one spot to another in his car – but the vehicle remains perfectly still in the frame, while the background changes in a dissolve. The critic’s comment (as I recall it): “Absolute speed is translated by absolute stasis” – a magical effect, and an exhilarating feeling of propulsion.

The same trick comes around in contemporary horror cinema, and It Feeds does it as well as any comparable exemplar. Therapist-clairvoyant Cynthia (Ashley Greene) tunnels deep into the minds of those patients on whom – beyond the bounds of standard medical practice, of course! – she lays her two fingers; the journey plunges her not only into traumatic memories but also, in limit cases, horrific, disgusting, deathly figures who feed on the living (and give their food-sources a very nasty burn in the process). And, each time, it’s the same kick: Cynthia stands stock still, while the background changes. Whoosh! (Speaking of sound, the score by Steph Copeland is a little obvious in the way it relentlessly underlines/illustrates every last jolt and threatening shadow.)

By the time, late in the piece, that Cynthia enters the head of her ailing teenage daughter Jordan (Ellie O’Brien) via this method – and then, once walking around in a suitably crypt-like atmosphere, further puts the probing finger onto the abject, life-sucking Thing itself – we are shot through time and space in a pleasingly vertiginous spiral. This is especially the case as It Feeds plays on a double register: there are buried, painful, personal memories (usually relating to family issues), and then there are these otherwise-unexplained ghouls/bad spirits forcing their way into the human realm.

It’s easy to tick off the ledger of horror genre influences and sources parading by: the body-hopping concept as in David Robert Mitchell’s excellent It Follows (2014, soon for a 2026 They Follow sequel, which I guess may prompt They Feed); a book of scary pencil sketches as in The Babadook (2014); characters zapping in and out of dreamworlds and visions as in the A Nightmare on Elm Street series; the terror of being buried alive as in The Vanishing (1988). The panoply of references doesn’t matter much per se. What counts is the evident directorial skill of Chad Archibald (who, and this was news to me, has already made a lot of stuff) and cinematographer Jeff Maher; they (literally) keep everything in brisk motion, and serve up many gripping, inventive touches.

The acting – including a memorable single scene from Julian Richings – also registers at a notch or two above standard current horror fare. So-called psychological depth is not really what you should be looking for in It Feeds, but the jazzy mutual interference between the mother/daughter tension and the hauntings by spirits-of-the-dead (whether real or imagined) juices the ongoing intrigue in an admirable fashion (Archibald is also responsible for the script). It doesn’t fall into the opportunist bait-and-switch tactics that lessened the overall impact of The Babadook, for instance.

It’s always intriguing to gauge the effects of changing fashions (and pressures) in relation to gender representation on genre movies like this. All the central characters in It Feeds are women – including a slightly clunky comic-relief role for Agatha (Juno Rinaldi), Cynthia’s friend and nervous accomplice, who is ditzy until the plot absolutely demands she be straight-faced for about two minutes before reverting to jokey lines once more.

Conversely, all the monsters and (potentially or actually) violent, certainly toxic members of nuclear family units are men, and white – to which is added a melancholic suicide case, and an initially unhelpful black cop (Mark Taylor) who ultimately relents and gives a hand (or, rather, withholds it) while Cynthia is taking her Ultimate Trip into Multiple Psyches. An eloquent panorama of modern masculinity, indeed!

© Adrian Martin 20 April 2025