Stewart Thorndike’s Lyle is a small film in every sense of the word. The running time is a neat ​60 minutes, the budget is micro, and the sole location is a single three-story apartment building in Brooklyn. This queer homage to Rosemary’s Baby is a slow burning psychological horror, which ultimately isn’t that scary, but it features an outstanding central performance from Gaby Hoffman (Girls and Transparent) as a slowly unravelling grieving parent.
The film opens with a pregnant Leah (Hoffman) and her partner June (Ingrid Jungermann) moving into a new apartment with their toddler Lyle (Eleanor Hopkins) in tow. Things swiftly become creepy: their eccentric landlady Karen (Rebecca Street) seems delusional and clingy, Lyle seems to be communicating with an unseen ‘person’, and Leah can’t get a straight answer from June regarding how she found the apartment listing in the first place.
The early scenes in Lyle are perfectly pitched and full of an impending sense of dread. Who is Lyle ‘talking’ to? Why is June never home and why is she so obsessed with having a boy? And what’s with the beautiful but strange model living upstairs?
A pivotal scene featuring one character’s tragic death is a of the highlights of the film. Through a split-screen Skype conversation with her friend Threes (Michael Che), we witness Leah’s terror as the onscreen glitches in the Skype connection (images freezing, audio dropping in and out etc.) build the tension and keep the audience on the edge of their seats.
Subsequently, as Leah struggles with her grief, she begins to suspect the people around her and investigates the macabre history of her new home. It is at this point that Lyle loses some of its mystery and begins to become more of a facsimile of Roman Polanski’s aforementioned classic horror film. That being said the climactic final scene is quite chilling.
Thorndike’s film is technically assured for the most part. Grant Greenberg’s cinematography is suitably disconcerting; several static shots slowly shift out of focus and the placement of forms at the edges of wide framed shots creates a sense of unease within the viewer. Jason Falkner’s score is mysterious and melodic. The opening title music has echoes of John Carpenter’s famous Halloween theme. There are a few noticeable continuity errors throughout the film, a rubbish bin in the background of one scene changes location from shot-to-shot and a close-ups of a toy horse also seem to break the crossing the line rule, but these moments are few and far between.
Apparently Lyle was originally planned to be a web series and one feels that perhaps this would have been a better medium in which to explore this dark and mysterious tale. As a brief feature film it doesn’t entirely succeed in unnerving the audience or offer much new in terms of genre. However, there are just enough disturbing moments to keep horror fans satisfied and Hoffman’s performance is devastatingly mesmerizing.
Rating: 3 ½ stars out of 5
Lyle
Director: Stewart Thorndike
USA, 2014, 65 mins
Melbourne Queer Film Festival
mqff.com.au
19-30 March
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