One of the great challenges faced by anyone trying to adapt one of the great classic Gothic novels is how close to stick to the source material – stray too far away from it and you please no-one; stick too close and you run the risk of either being dull (many of them are the very definition of uncinematic) or allowing the melodrama to just look foolish. In adapting J. Sheridan LeFanu’s The Wyvern Mystery, David Pirie – author of Heritage of Horror, the first large scale look at the British horror film – makes it look almost ridiculously easy.
There’s little here that we haven’t seen a good few many time too often in the past – a young woman in a creepy old mansion is terrified by a terrible family secret looked up in the attic – but Pirie’s script, Simon Magg’s moody (sometimes almost impenetrable) photography, director Alex Pillai’s understanding that you can’t let these thing flag for a second in case we cotton on to the fact that none of it actually makes any sense, and a first rate cast firing on all cylinders make the familiar material seem exciting and inventive.
A pre-big-time Naomi Watts takes the central role (her breakthrough role in David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. was still a year away) and more than holds her own against such luminaries as Derek Jacobi and fellow rising stars like Jack Davenport. She plays the pivotal role of Alice extremely well, charting her development from naïve young innocent to feisty and resourceful woman determined to protect her family from the monstrous presence confined to the house’s upper reaches.
Credit to Aisling O’Sullivan as the terrifying if bizarrely accented Vrau – her final confrontation with Alice may suffer from being something of a belated info dump but the crackling performances from O’Sullivan and Watts gives the scene a real charge of menace and impending violence. It’s in these wonderfully filmed scenes that The Wyvern Mystery finally becomes the full blooded horror it’s been promising us with since very early on.
And this is what separates The Wyvern Mystery from many television Gothic adaptations – at times, it’s genuinely scary. The sudden appearances of the disfigured, half-blind, totally crazed Vrau are brilliantly handled, but it scares in other, less-obvious ways too. Those favoured tropes of the Gothic novel – disease, loss of a child, sexual repression erupting into bloodshed – are all present and correct and Pirie skilfully weaves them into the complex plot without ever allowing it all to look too over-the-top.
The Wyvern Mystery hasn’t met with the best of critical receptions in the years since it was first shown on the BBC as a two-parter, but there’s so much here to enjoy – the production design, the chilly ambience, the very fine performances – that it’s hard to understand why so few critics warmed to it. Ignore the naysayers – if you’re of a mind for full-on Gothic romance with a dash of horror and plenty of eerie goings-on in an old dark house, you won’t go very far wrong with this effortlessly classy production.
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