Red Mist

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Rating 1


Directed by Paddy Breathnach

Written by Spence Wright

Starring Arielle Kebbel (Catherine), Andrew Lee Potts (Kenneth), Sarah Carter (Kim), Alex Wyndham (Jake), Martin Compston (Sean), Katie McGrath (Harriet), Michael Jibson (Steve), Christina Chong (Yoshimi), MyAnna Buring (Shelby), Stephen Dillane (Dr Harris), Michael J Reynolds (Dr Stegman) and Colin Stinton (Detective Cartert)


Catherine is a promising medical intern. She hangs out with a group of other interns of varying degrees of unpleasantly smug arrogance. Kenneth is a mortuary attendant with a severe stutter. A seriously damaged individual because of things he witnessed as a child, he routinely cuts his body and secretly films the interns with his cell phone. When he films Sean stealing drugs from the dispensary, he is forced to ingest a dangerous cocktail of drugs and alcohol, after which he slips into a deep coma. Catherine is distraught at what they have done and secretly injects Kenneth with an experimental drug, not realising that he now has out-of-body experiences, allowing him to control others and exact a terrible revenge on her friends.

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Paddy Breathnach is the Irish director responsible for the 2007 horror film ‘Shrooms’. ‘Red Mist’ was made with funding from Northern Ireland Screen and, although set in America, it was filmed in Northern Ireland. With the exception of Arielle Kebbel, the actors here are variously from Britain, Ireland and Canada, and there are some distinctly unconvincing American accents on display, to go along with the wholly unconvincing setting. We are not shown too much, for obvious reasons, but what we do see looks like Northern Ireland – and Northern Ireland looks nothing like America.

The film plays like a kind of cut-price mixture of ‘Flatliners’ and ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’, with a nod towards every horror film that has ever used telekinesis as a plot device. It’s daft and cheap and decidedly threadbare. The various killings become increasingly unpleasant, but since much of it is shot in near darkness it is difficult a lot of the time to make out what is going on. On the plus side, there are some decent actors here. Andrew Lee Potts will be familiar to viewers of either ‘Strange’ or ‘Primeval’. This is the third film I have watched to feature Arielle Kebbel and I am starting to notice that she has a genuinely likeable screen presence.

In America and elsewhere the title of the film was changed to ‘Freakdog’.

Review posted 15 July 2009



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