Urban Ghost Story

The Fridge (Peter Mullan, U.K., 1995). Two homeless people struggle to free a child trapped in a refrigerator in this turn-of-the-screw drama by the star of My Name Is Joe and director of the New Directors/New Films hit Orphans. (20 mins, Color, 16mm)A horror film set inside a run-down Glasgow housing project, Urban Ghost Story has been best defined as a Ken Loach version of The Exorcist. Sharing with Loach an eye for the nuances of working-class isolation and conflict, director Jolliffe follows the haunting of a young girl who is recently recovered from an accident that killed her friend, and who believes the dead have followed her into this world. Rattling windows, banging walls, moving furniture, these apparitions appear less frightening, however, once a phalanx of obnoxious social workers, condescending reporters, and conniving experts descend upon the girl and her hardened, struggling mother. Steadfastly ignoring the girl's pleas in favor of their own "educated" responses, the experts merely increase her sense of isolation, leading to a final, inevitable confrontation with a horror based in grimy reality-a horror thus made far more undefinable, tragic, and disturbing.-Jason Sanders

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