The Living and the Dead

Close to bankruptcy and facing the disintegration of his home and family, Lord Donald Brocklebank lives with a terminally ill wife Nancy and schizophrenic son, James.

In a last ditch effort to raise funds, Donald must go away and so he arranges for a family nurse to come and care for his wife.

However, James would like nothing more than to prove to his father that he is a responsible adult but suffering hallucinations from his drug cocktails, James tragically locks Nurse Mary out of the house. As the stress of looking after an ailing patient increases, James' own mental condition worsens and his ability to care for his mother diminishes along with his ability to tell fantasy from reality with tragic and harrowing consequences.

Simon Rumley's "The Living and the Dead" begins as a rigorous study of a crumbling family in one of those crumbling English country houses. Lord Brocklebank (Roger Lloyd-Pack) has a sickly wife (Kate Fahy) and a twitchy adult son named James (Leo Bill) who seems to be schizophrenic, epileptic, autistic and devoted to wearing a suit that fit him snugly at age 15. Bill's performance as a damaged young man who desperately wants to please his parents is not delicate and may not be politically acceptable to all viewers, but it's an uncanny and powerful one. When Brocklebank goes away on business and mom's nurse fails to show, James blows a gasket and the movie does too. Rumley's realism and restraint abruptly vanishes, plunging James and the viewer into a jittery, nightmarish maelstrom of sound and image meant to capture his permanently altered state. "The Living and the Dead" is not an easy movie to sit through, and its darkness may be a little mannered, but it's an elegant construction with real emotions buried deep inside.

Oart neo-gothic horror, part empathetic schizoid freak-out, The Living and the Dead suggests an unlikely cross between Spider and Requiem for a Dream, albeit one whose whole is less than the sum of its parts. The only child of the aristocratic Brocklebank family, James (Leo Bill) suffers from an inferiority complex as a result of his mental retardation, having come to loathe himself for his inability to be "normal." When his father (Roger Lloyd-Pack) is forced to leave home on business matters, James takes the opportunity to prove himself a responsible adult; locking the family nurse out of their manse, he assumes care of his sickly mother (Kate Fahy), whose needs he is wholly unable to provide for. The series of unfortunate events that unfold therein echo the suspense-baiting tactics of the shrill A Beautiful Mind's baby-in-the-bathtub scene, only director Rumley understands the twisted, ugly nature of mental disorder far better than Ron Howard. As external spectators to this dilemma, we're left to recoil at the abusive decay and unforgiving brutality of James's personal oblivion, while Rumley's practically alien compositions defy any singular perspective or sense of reality. Though this effectively evokes James's barely-there awareness from one moment to the next—particularly through the use of time-lapse sequences that suggest his childlike mental tangents—the mise-en-scène remains too stylistically disjointed to take us into the deepest recesses of his depravity. As is evident here, Rumley—who wrote the film in response to his mother's short-lived battle with cancer—is a great humanist. The Living and the Dead, then, is most effective as a promise of greater things to come.



Roger Lloyd-Pack ... Donald Brocklebank
Leo Bill ... James Brocklebank
Kate Fahy ... Nancy Brocklebank
Sarah Ball ... Nurse Mary
Neil Conrich ... Policeman