Review
Cherry Tree Lane
Director: Paul Andrew Williams>
Release Date: unknown
As a clearly unhappily married couple sit down to dinner their lives are turned upside down when a trio of intruders burst their way into the house. They want to find their son Sebastian. He has wronged them in some way and now he has to pay. Cherry Tree Lane is part home invasion thriller, part rape-revenge exploitation flick and it’s completely disturbing if a little baggy.
It’s 78 minutes long, but feels like 2 hours. The initial set-up goes on too long, introducing a couple who clearly can’t stand one another and then clumsily cutting to the home invasion. Although perhaps this is the point: life can be suddenly and brutally interrupted. What follows next is a claustrophobic, unnerving waiting game. Director Paul Andrew Williams’ clever use of the close-up creates tension and fear and by staging most of the violence off screen we are never sure exactly what is happening.
The ringleader Rian (Jumayn Hunter) is vile and unpredictable whereas the couple (Rachael Blake and Tom Hunter) are completely predictable as middle class suburbanites: stiff-upper lipped, hostile and ineffectual. In one scene the husband is left alone and ends up flailing on the floor in a failed escape attempt. There are also hints at the background of the three boys, perhaps one can’t read, which the woman picks up on, but again it’s forgotten just as quickly.
The film would be completely unwatchable were the tension not punctured with some blackly comic moments, when one boy looks through the DVD collection confused by their arty taste and then another can’t work the remote control.
Cherry Tree Lane is to be endured rather than enjoyed. It certainly is a button pusher, caught somewhere between Michael Haneke’s Funny Games and a video nasty, so then what is it trying to say? If it is just an exercise in endurance, to terrorise or titillate, if it is without moral, without context or without answers, then what is the point?
Marjorie Gallagher
