While young men play a cricket match, one team member plays with his girlfriend in an apple orchard directly across the street. After he’s called back to the field, Pauline (Tracy Hyde, Melody), bides her time wandering ’round the grounds.
A path takes her to a gnome-statued garden at a railhouse occupied by a pubic-bearded hunchback (Brazil’s Bill Wallis, almost too creepy) and a towering idiot (Clive Mantle, Alien 3), making for an even grimmer version of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. And if you want me to tell you about the rabbits, George, they’re as short-lived as the perilous Pauline.
At just under 50 minutes, The Orchard End Murder is a nasty little piece of work. The British picture heralds great promise for documentarian Christian Marnham in his fiction-film debut, particularly as a practitioner of crime and suspense, but to date, he’s made one lone feature: the 1988 rape-revenger Lethal Woman.
Too bad, because rare is the thriller whose suspense lever can be plotted like a diagonal line, rising in proportion with each passing minute toward a slow-burn end more satisfying than films twice its length. Designed to unsettle, hard to shake, The Orchard End Murder proves potent to the core. How ’bout them apples? —Rod Lott