Collection Only
2024 · 12m · United Kingdom
Directed by Alun Rhys Morgan
Genres: comedy, dark comedy, horror
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, tense
Two estranged friends travel to a small Welsh town to collect a free armchair from a creepy old house, where tea with a welcoming old woman takes a sinister turn.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A premise this deranged—two mates trek to rural Wales for *free furniture* and stumble into body-horror tea-time—shouldn't work, but Morgan leans into the absurdist collision between mundane British politeness and genuine dread with the kind of tonal recklessness that makes consensus critics nervous. That's exactly why it lands.
The film's restraint in its horror mechanics and its debt to a lineage of British gothic unease (think early Ben Wheatley) reveal a director thinking formally about how comedy and dread can share the same frame without collapsing into parody.
The whole thing hinges on a single tonal choice—the decision to play the old woman's hospitality with genuine warmth rather than obvious creepiness—and that one commitment to sincerity over signposting transforms what could've been a gimmick into something genuinely unsettling on a shoestring.
Festivals
- Méliès d'Argent competition 2024, Méliès d'Argent