The Leerie
2022 · 14m · United Kingdom
Directed by Joseph Daly
Genres: drama, historical, horror
Tones: dark, melancholic, surreal
In 1899, a Scottish lamplighter facing redundancy is haunted by nightmarish visions of an electric future.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's competent period-horror-meets-industrial-anxiety, but the premise—obsolescence as cosmic dread—arrives fully formed and never twists the knife; the nightmarish visions feel obligatory rather than genuinely disorienting.
Daly situates the lamplighter's twilight within a precise historical moment and formal visual language—the interplay between gaslight and electric futures, between documentary precision and surrealist rupture, marks a filmmaker conscious of both social-realist and expressionist lineage.
The decision to let the lamplighter's face remain largely stoic while the world hallucinates around him—the surrealist visions doing all the emotional labor—is a smart constraint that makes a modest budget feel like focused intention rather than limitation.