The Canal

Making the most of its modest attributes and a wrenching central performance by TV regular and Hellboy veteran Rupert Evans, this Irish chiller lurches from unspoken eeriness to outright horror as it plots a familiar paranormal trajectory. Evans plays a film archivist who moves into a beautiful period house by a scenic canal with his wife and young son. Learning his new residence was the scene of a ghastly early-20th-century murder, he discovers actual newsreel of the event just as he learns his wife is having a torrid affair. When her body turns up in the canal, he's convinced malevolent spirits lurking within the walls of his home must be responsible. Ivan Kavanagh directs the unsettling combination of straightforward old-school terror and vintage found-footage with a no-frills professionalism heavy on ambiguity, dark atmosphere and creeping unease. Steve Oram (Sightseers) adds welcome light touches as a deadpan policeman.