The best thing you’ll see all week: Cherry Tree Lane

Posted by on January 29, 2013 in Movies

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For a guy with three boring names, each more boring than the last, writer/director Paul Andrew Williams is utterly fascinating. If you’ve seen London to Brighton and The Cottage, you know what I mean. If you haven’t seen them, you should. Both of them. In any order. You pick. But see both of them. Because you can’t really get a sense for this British director’s talent without seeing both movies. And then, for good measure, see a weird arthouse horror movie he co-wrote called The Children.

All caught up? Good. Because now it’s time to see Cherry Tree Lane, Paul Andrew Williams’ grim horror thriller that you previously had to import from the UK to watch on a region-free DVD player. It was worth it. But lucky for you, it’s available today in the US where fine DVDs are sold and rented.

As you’re watching Cherry Tree Lane, you might think it’s a mean-spirited thriller preying uncomfortably on issues of race and class and how small the houses are in modern day London. You’d be partly right. But the point of Cherry Tree Lane — and I’m going to take pains not to spoil it beyond acknowledging it — is the last scene. Or, rather, the moment the last scene ends. The way the last scene ends. The musical cue on which the last scene ends, wanting only a thick red curtain dropped by a stagehand in the wings. All the building tension and pressure, from the very opening scene of water boiling on a stove to that last moment in the same kitchen, is entirely about how you as a viewer feel at that instant. I bet you didn’t know you had it in you? But Paul Andrew Williams did.

  • amanda_chen

    I enjoyed it, but it felt like a short that had been padded out to twice its natural length. Maybe Williams is going to work on a horror anthology next.

  • tomchick

    I didn’t get the impression that it was padded so much that it was in real time, which means we’re seeing everything as it happens, within one of the character’s perspectives.

    And Williams next movie is, as near as I can tell, a romantic comedy. Hmm. Not what I was expecting.

  • charmtrap

    I’m heartily sick of the home invasion/torture genre. You’d think this was happening every 30 seconds the number of movies there are about it.

  • Schmitzkater

    I watched it on a whim, but the steady, somewhat slow build-up really gripped me from beginning to end. While I guess real might be the wrong word for it, I was absolutely impressed by how down to earth the part of the villains played out and engrossed by the almost grotesque comedy that it sometimes helped create.

    Not being too familiar with Home Invasion movies, are there any other standout titles that would lend themselves to an introduction to the genre?

  • tomchick

    The original Desperate Hours with Humphrey Bogart (not to be confused with Michael Cimino’s star-studded remake) holds up. The remake of Mother’s Day (not to be confused with the gross 70s rapesploitation Troma movie) is pretty good. Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs is a classic for a reason. I recently saw and wrote about an interesting one called In Their Skin.

    But most home invasion movies are just cheap appeals to the primal fear that criminals are going to get in your house (as per charmtrap’s comment). Pound for pound, it’s a pretty crappy subgenre.