Two bright sparks at the ICA

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The Disappeared
Cert 15, 96 mins
**

Two more from the ICA’s present season of New British Cinema that approach good quality film-making but are unlikely to be released in cinemas.

In Beyond the Fire, Irish director Maeve Murphy tells of a romance between a raped woman (Cara Seymour) and a defrocked priest (Scot Williams) who was abused when young.

Johnny Kevorkian’s The Disappeared has Harry Treadaway as a psychologically damaged young man searching for his missing younger brother and discovering that a serial killer is on the loose.

Hoxton is the backdrop for Murphy’s "redemptive romance", which has the ex-priest searching for the man who abused him and finding the woman he begins to love.

They seem a normal enough couple until he spills the beans and says he can’t go to bed with her.

But she is determined not to let go of him.
Williams and Seymour play well together but the main problem is not to make the underlying polemic, about the dreadful nature of abuse and possible forgiveness for the abusers too obvious.

And that is not always successfully achieved.
The Disappeared has an excellent performance from Treadaway, a darkly monochrome atmosphere that suits its grisly story, but a tendency to make its points twice if not three times.

It includes some gritty social realism, ghostly apparitions in the mind of the young man and a full-scale horror finale.

The result is uneven but distinctly promising — you are never quite sure until the end whether the boy is psychotic or on the trail of something ghastly.