‘Cara’ VOD Review
Stars: Elle O’Hara, Michaela Longden, Sarah Jane Duncan, Jacob Roberts, Johnny Vivash, Julie Hannan, David Howell | Written and Directed by Hayden Hewitt
Credits rolling over, a montage of images that include dildos and men’s faces leering from computer monitors give way to a nightmarish hallucination sequence. Cara, a new psychological horror film from writer/director Hayden Hewitt (Lips, Elbows), starts as it intends to continue, unrelentingly dark and grim.
Cara (Elle O’Hara; When Darkness Falls, Tommy’s Honour) has recently been released from the grossly misnamed “Sunnyside”, a mental institution where she spent the past several years. Now, she shares an apartment with Ashley (Michaela Longden; Book of Monsters, The Baby in the Basket) who, like her, works as a cam girl. Not a great life, but better than being institutionalized, something she swears she won’t let happen to her again.
Unfortunately, Cara’s mental state seems to already be deteriorating, as evidenced by the post-credits hallucination, and her imagining her therapist Gemma (Sarah Jane Duncan; Where Demons Hide, Vengeance) repeatedly calling her a whore during one of their sessions. She’s also becoming convinced that there’s a conspiracy to re-institutionalize her.
Hewitt populates Cara’s world with a collection of sleazy characters such as her abusive client Paul (Jacob Roberts; Hollyoaks, The Plot Against America) and John (Johnny Vivash; Lulu and the Electric Dreamboat, Freeze) who is seemingly on her side, but also happens to be a paedophile. Even Cara herself is hard to like, at one point throwing a lit cigarette into a baby carriage after getting mad at the infant’s mother.
The first half of the film is a dark drama steeped in misery, broken people and ruined lives. Not just Cara and her immediate circle but the overworked and burnt-out social workers to her parents Bernadette (Julie Hannan; Matriarch, Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist) and Michael (David Howell; The Crime Police, Powerless). The viewer is thrown into a crowd of unlikeable and hopefully unrelatable, characters. If you happen to like films such as Scum or Kids then this will be right up your alley, if not then it’ll be rough going.
Writer/director Hewitt frequently uses tinted shots to show us what is going on in Cara’s mind in comparison to what is actually happening. And that is the focus for much of the film, the contrast between what really is and what Cara’s increasingly paranoid mind tells her is happening. And as it convinces her more and more that’s she going to be re-institutionalized she lashes out more and more, leading to the film’s bloody climax.
And while those final minutes are fairly brutal, the film as a whole relies more on unrelieved grimness and nastiness for effect than on what most might consider horror. With so many dark dramas straddling the line with horror, I almost feel like we need a new term for these films, that are primarily disturbing without relying on scares and/or gore for most of their impact.
And while Cara is disturbing, achieving that feeling comes at a price. By the time the film comes to its bloody payoff, I really didn’t care about the characters’ fates. If they’d been more shaded or nuanced I might have had reason to feel anything when they meet their end. Even Cara, who we know has mental issues is so unlikeable I didn’t feel sympathy for her. The cast all give good performances and are convincing in their roles, but the script doesn’t give them a way to humanize their characters.
Overall Cara manages to paint a disturbingly bleak portrait of life with a severe mental illness in modern-day Britain, but doesn’t quite manage to pull off the ending the director was reaching for. If you like your films grim and depressing, you’ll want to give this a chance.
**½ 2.5/5
Cara is available on digital platforms now, via Reel 2 Reel Films.
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