Shadows

  Alma (Mia Threapleton) and Alex (Lola Peticrew) live with their mother (Saskia Reeves) in a derelict hotel in the middle of the woods. An unspecified cataclysm has come to pass, making daylight dangerous for the girls due to some unspecified presence. Only the mother goes out to hunt, and even then, always at night time.

 They've staked out a pretty good life for themselves; Mother is a bit of a survivalist, so she's a good provider, and the hotel provides enough comfort and space for the two teens to explore and play.

 But all's not well at the Starlight Hotel; The younger one, Alex, chafes under Mother's strict discipline, getting Alma repeatedly into trouble. And Mother, always overprotective, becomes increasingly erratic and threatening as her control over the girls seems to wane.

 Italian/Irish co-production Shadows is a fairly straightforward... let's call it post-apocalyptic psychological thriller; There's something almost old-fashioned about it, a confident, unhurried pace that lets us spend time with the girls as events escalate towards an inevitable confrontation with their Mother. There's a couple of twists - one of them fairly easy to guess, the other one completely unnecessary, both of them unoriginal - but it's a satisfactory ending nonetheless.

 It's a slight movie that slightly overstays its welcome and doesn't really do a lot to imprint itself on memory, but it's very, very accomplished. The script (by Damiano Brué, Fabio Mollo and Vanessa Picciarelli) has a good feel for dialogue, rendering the teens likeable and lending tension to their fraught relationship with Mother. There's not a huge amount of psychological depth to these characters or their relationships, so it's a good thing that the three leads are more than up to the task of breathing life into them, with the siblings in particular sharing a great, lived-in chemistry; They easily carry the film.

 Director Carlo Lavagna carefully maps out their life in the hotel, and along with cinematographer James Mather imbues the exterior, both daytime and nighttime, with a sense of menace. They do experiment a couple of times with shots that try to capture the girls' subjective experience, with mixed results.

 Meanwhile the reedy soundtrack by Michele Braga, featuring lots of '70s-style atonal winds, further reinforces the film's classic feel.