This French-set slasher comes up short despite much promise.
Le Manoir has so much going for it as a horror film. The French entry playing at this year’s Fantasia Fest has a great setup and a premise which is the perfect canvas from which to paint a genuinely creepy slasher. It takes place on a holiday, has plenty of outrageous young people populating it, and seems to be made by people who know and love the genre as a whole. Why then, does Le Manoir do so much wrong when it all could have gone so so right?
Not wasting any time, Le Manoir (or, The Mansion) takes place on New Year’s Eve as a group of twenty-something friends arrive at an isolated mansion in the French countryside to celebrate the end of the year. Although each are struggling with their own individual problems, they all proceed to engage in plenty of dancing and drinking in celebration of the holiday. However, the fun soon ends as the guests start to die one by one.
Most films of Le Manoir’s nature can be analyzed by pinpointing what works effectively and what knocks the film down repeatedly. First, the former. The movie begins with a stellar opening, featuring a maid frantically gathering her belongings as she prepares to leave the grand house before the evil lurking within it captures her. While it of course proves too late for her, the sequence sets up the promise of an intriguing throwback of the classic kind of horror film with genuine thrills which sadly never comes to be. This is all a shame as the film’s music is pure catnip to any horror fan and ranges from an eerie lullaby to what can only be described as manically Hammer-esque. Adding to this is a dark, yet striking production and set design, which would feel at home in a horror effort from any genre and is just the kind a film of this genre deserves. All of the typical misfits are present and accounted for here including weird girl Charlotte (Lila Lacombe) and sensitive guy Bruno (Ludovik Day), both of whom incidentally are the only two who manage to do anything with their roles.
However, none of it is enough to save the movie. Unlike most horror films with similar themes, Le Manior’s problems aren’t necessarily attributed to character and script, but rather come from the oddest of places. The biggest of the film’s flaws is the sound. Scene after scene features moments where it is all but impossible to literally hear the characters speak, making one eternally grateful for the advent of subtitles. It isn’t that it’s necessarily hard to hear the characters, but rather that there is NO SOUND. At other times, when the sound is actually there, it’s shoddy, fails to line up with the appropriate subtitle, and makes a casualty of everything save for the music. As if this weren’t enough, there are a number of touches which would feel more at home in a comedy, including an overdone amount of snot which stays plastered on Bruno’s nose and a boar which begins talking to Charlotte in Spanish, especially weird since this is a French film. When the use of the English language comes into play, a person would literally have to restrain themselves from yelling, “Are you screwing with us?!”
Le Manoir doesn’t reveal itself as a comedy until well into the proceedings. But the film never makes it fully clear as to whether or not this is an accidental comedy, mainly because its laughs never really hit their target. At one point after discovering the deaths of both a dog and a party guest, the group gathers outside where they find a mysterious figure by their van. When the figure reveals himself to be a friend of the group, who unleashes a number of mad beats, the terrified individuals forget about the carnage and the killer and literally start dancing to the music. The film does have a somewhat decent build up of suspense regarding who or what is doing the killing. Yet this doesn’t excuse any of the film’s shortcomings, all of which eventually makes the audience wonder: Could any of this actually be intentional? If only Le Manoir was worth caring about the answer.
