Lyle Review: A grieving pregnant woman struggles to maintain both her sanity and child in this chilling horror which screens at this week’s Final Girls Berlin Film Festival.
Lyle review, Kat Hughes.
Lyle Review
Pregnant Leah (Transparent’s Gaby Hoffman), her wife June (Ingrid Jungermann) and their toddler-age daughter, Lyle, move into a new apartment building. Not long after their arrival, tragedy strikes and Lyle dies in a tragic accident. No matter how hard she tries to, grieving Leah refuses to believe that the event was accidental, and points the finger at her baby-obsessed Landlady, Karen (Rebecca Street). As Leah’s mental state slowly starts to spiral out of control, her quest for truth leads her to some very dark revelations.
In book terms, given its run time, Lyle would be a novella. Too long to be classed as a short, and too short to be logged as a fully-fledged feature, Lyle sits somewhere in the middle, but grips the viewer from the opening scene. Coming in at a very lean 65 minutes, Lyle is a movie that doesn’t waste its time getting to the important stuff. Within the first fifteen minutes we’ve already gotten to know our cast of characters pretty well and have lost poor little Lyle. The zippy run time means that Lyle feels like it’s over in the blink of an eye, and in some places the feature could use a little extra padding. Some potential slow-burn build-up tension is jettisoned which is a shame, but it’s certainly refreshing for a non-action film to trim its story down so succinctly.
Director Stewart Thorndike also wrote the film and should certainly be commended for her work. Somehow, in such a short amount of time, she manages to craft believable, fully realised characters, and despite the horror slant, creates a film that feels tangibly real. Helping Thorndike’s impressive script is a brilliant central performance from Hoffman. She engages the audience within the opening moments, portraying the slightly socially awkward Leah so naturally you almost start to feel like a voyeur into her family’s life. Hysterical women go hand-in-hand with the horror genre, but Hoffman reigns Leah’s hysteria away from camp territory and instead elicits an intense amount of empathy from the audience. This continues to the abrupt climax of the film that will have the viewer pondering where Leah goes next.
A modern day tale of terror, Lyle may be short in length, but is overflowing with quality. Strong performances and a thoughtful script will ensure that Lyle sticks in the brain long after viewing.
Lyle review, by Kat Hughes, February 2018
Lyle screens as part of 2018’s Final Girls Berlin Film Festival.
