The Piper

The tale of the Pied Piper has fascinated audiences for some 740 years, but will there ever be a good film about it? People keep trying and failing. This latest effort comes from Erlinger Thoroddsen and is most notable for its cast, featuring one of the last performances by the ill-fated Julian Sands and also starring Charlotte Hope, best known as Miranda from Game Of Thrones. It has big ambitions, building its story around the longstanding occult notion of using music to encode forbidden ideas, but misses the fact that whilst one of the joys of music is its sense of consequence, any successful symphony must present its audience with challenges and keep them guessing before reaching its conclusion.

There is no guesswork to be done here, in a film which takes the most obvious route right from its opening scenes, never missing a note. It opens with Katharine (Louise Gold) trying to convince a conductor, over the phone, that her latest work must never be played. The conductor, Mr Gustafson, is played by Sands, and as he’s appeared in this kind of role before we can be confident that his character will not be easily deterred. Katharine, or course, proceeds to try and burn her manuscript in the grounds of her country estate, setting her voluminous clothes on fire in the process and burning to death, whilst it survives.

Picking up where she left off, heedless of warnings, is Melanie (Hope), a talented musician whose precociousness means that she has trouble fitting it. She wants to impress her conductor, the aforementioned Mr Gustafson, by recovering and restoring Katharine’s manuscript. Thoroddsen needs us to feel some sympathy for her, so rather than making this all about ambition he gives her a young daughter, Zoe (Aoibhe O’Flanagan) who is losing her hearing. Success in this project could give Melanie the money she needs to get specialist treatment for Zoe – though, in truth, the kid seems pretty comfortable as she is, and the two are already fluent in sign language.

O’Flanagan’s performance is the most natural in the film, and she’s fully at ease in her role. By contrast, both Sands and Hope are heavily mannered, which doesn’t make the heavy-handed dialogue go down any more easily. Mr Gustafson seems permanently irritated and doesn’t get much of an arc. Melanie realises that something is going wrong when she begins to have the nosebleeds so popular in horror films of this type. It takes her a while to connect this with the visions of a certain German town that she experiences when pieces of the music are played, but she does, in due course, realise that she’s in trouble and try to do something about it.

There’s more to the ideas here than in some previous versions, so it’s a shame that Thoroddsen doesn’t really know how to develop them. The musical work within the film is its greatest asset so one wonders if certain scenes ended up being edited to suit it, rather than the other way around. There’s a spectacularly OTT final sequence which looks as if it has been lifted from a futuristic late Eighties pop video or computer game, the presence of snow evoking thoughts of well-used VHS tapes. It’s just a backdrop for some rather insubstantial action, however, and we don’t really see enough happening between the characters to make it feel like it matters, with the director opting for quantity rather than quality where violent incidents are concerned.

Perhaps we should be grateful for all this. A successful onscreen Piper could be a deeply unsettling experience. Rest assured, this one won’t be leading you anywhere.