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Found footage may be a fairly stale gimmick in horror these days, but the low-budget British indie “Snapshot” finds a way to freshen up the idea — and if that largely amounts to layering another technical gimmick over
it, the results are nonetheless striking. Emulating the look of 19th-century pinhole photography, with the entire film presented in a circular 1:1 aspect ratio, this resourceful debut feature from director Joseph Archer and screenwriter-star Cathy Wippell turns the visual restrictions of that device to its advantage: This imagining of the well-trodden Jack the Ripper tale hinges heavily on what can’t be seen, as it follows a group of young Victorian women pursuing their own supernatural theory behind the killings terrorizing London, and the pioneering male filmmaker who takes it upon himself to document their efforts.
Viewers must swallow a certain degree of contrivance to go along with “Snapshot.” For one thing, it demands we accept that Tamworth (voiced by “All My Friends Hate Me” star Tom Stourton), the heard-but-not-seen inventor behind the camera, could have assumed a near fly-on-the-wall kind of presence in various unseemly locations through east London’s underbelly to have captured these revealingly candid reels. (Complete with leagues-ahead-its-time sound-recording technology, to boot.)
Introductory text informs us that this footage was discovered languishing in the (fictitious) “British Film Archive,” and Archer, also the film’s editor, deftly maintains a jumpy structural sense of reels rather crudely sequenced, with telling gaps between them. As DP, his visual approximation of early-cinema techniques, often wittily distressed, sometimes betrays his contemporary ones; the actors, likewise, slip in and out of period register. Still, if its illusion isn’t entirely complete, “Snapshot” is nonetheless an effectively eerie novelty, sure to attract attention in arthouse horror circles following its competition premiere in Edinburgh. Its next stop will be London’s genre-specific FrightFest later this month, but international festival programmers should take an interest too.
The morbidly lilting music-hall staple “Two Lovely Black Eyes” (“Only for telling a man he was wrong,” runs the follow-up lyric) recurs throughout “Snapshot,” becoming the defining musical theme in a story of female exploitation and exasperation in a society not yet rocked by the women’s suffrage movement. Tamworth, evidently a young man, appears sympathetic to the cause, spending much time in female company to chronicle the reality of their lives outside the sphere of patriarchal influence; still, as the film continues, the palpable shadow of the male gaze on proceedings becomes unnervingly hard to shake.
His key subjects include Minnie (Wippell, writing herself the juiciest role here), an intrepid, rebellious type who’s also something of a class tourist: Though raised in a well-to-do London family, she prefers to hang out with the sex workers and miscreants of the city’s working-class East End, where her close friend Fanny (Hazel Rogers) practices the oldest profession in the care of maternal madam Evelyn (Nadia Lamin). Of late, women like Fanny have been turning up dead in the area’s backstreets with alarming frequency; a climate of terror is setting in as the Ripper’s body count rises, but there’s still a living to be made.
In any case, Minnie and Fanny — along with other women in their circle — have become convinced that the killer is actually a phantom entity, and are determined to hunt the ghost down by patrolling his spooked environs and making spiritual contact with his dead victims — with Tamworth, of course, reliably on hand to make a permanent record of this plainly doomed project. As “Snapshot” becomes a queasily sustained exercise in waiting for the penny to drop, Archer and Wippell keep the story lean and the overt scares sparse, instead cultivating a more subtly pervading mood of disquiet and dread that aims to honor the everyday experience of women in this particular milieu.
“Snapshot” does risk feeling more like a very clever exercise than a fully realized narrative: Even with a tight 86-minute running time, the drama begins to spin its wheels a bit in the second half, while the characters have limited room to grow in this confined formal setup. But the payoff is mordantly effective, and the film’s fine sense of gallows humor gives it some welcome tonal breadth. It promises bigger, even more ambitious things from Archer, Wippell and their production outfit Silicon Gothic, and stakes out a commitment to horror filmmaking that doesn’t merely chase Hollywood trends, instead using both the resources and the cultural baggage on their doorstep.
