Something Rotten on the Isle of Anglesey

First: a disclaimer. Ned Caderni, the writer and director of Worm (2026), was in the year below me at Worth Abbey, where I served seven years. He was even in the same house. I’m forever grateful to him for being the only person who actually bothered to submit an article to my St Bedes’ house gazette, named something like “The Clock Tower Times,” reflecting on the cult legacy of The Room (Tommy Wiseau, 2003).¹With no one else submitting, I had to improvise and ended up writing all the articles myself, including an ode to the clock tower that was cloaked in respectability but was actually one long pisstake, and an interview with our Spanish teacher.

Later, Ned would rise to be the most popular thespian at the school, taking up the eponymous role in Hamlet (William Shakespeare, 1599-1601) despite only being in year 12, not the final year. That performance, splitting the difference between the gravitas of Kenneth Branagh and the Gen X anxiety of Ethan Hawke, is still fresh in my memory even now, anchoring a wildly ambitious (think Hamlet 2 [Andrew Fleming, 2008]) school play that was infamously riddled with all kinds of production issues.

I was thinking about Hamlet’s father’s ghost all throughout Caderni’s feature debut, which is a similarly slippy tale of ambiguous hauntings, taking place on the barren landscape of Anglesey, lying on the furthest reaches of the Welsh coast. The landscape does a lot of heavy lifting in this black-and-white microbudget (under 50K) feature, imbuing a tale of a departed boyfriend’s return with reams of portentous feeling.

Modest in its production yet highly ambitious in its reach, Worm (currently on a roadshow tour instead of a traditional festival run) is a fine little debut that avoids the trappings of British indies (dreary kitchen sink realism) in favour of something far more European; happy to sit in knotty unknowables instead of reaching for simplistic feelings. The Welsh coast has never felt more like Helsingør.

Now: the premise. Freddie Acaster (looking like a blonder, slightly posher Florence Pugh with more aquiline features) plays Bella, celebrating the first-year anniversary of her relationship with her boyfriend George (Joshua Dowden). It starts with a cute, yet believable, seduction scene. After some blank-screen musical scene setting à la 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) — the type that begs for an immersive cinema setting — the film cuts to a darkened room, illuminated only by a half-open window and the wormlike display settings of Bella’s computer. In an ambitious static take, the couple walk in, flirt and eventually consummate their relationship; Edward Glynne Jones’ camerawork and lighting capture both a sweet romantic scene and something far more ominous.

The intrusion of the digital sphere over the real world, a kind of hauntological persistence, permeates every scene, including another dark romantic scene slyly punctuated by the arrival of an email, menacingly lighting up the other half of the frame. These are emails from David, Bella’s deceased childhood sweetheart. His missives, featuring Haneke-esque CCTV footage beamed back from London, feel like odd transmissions from another planet (in a telling moment, Bella refers to Angelsey as the moon), not so much signifying anything in particular, yet extremely unsettling in just their mere presence. These emails²The most terrifying part of these is that they are sent to Bella’s Outlook address. Something about this running on Microsoft just feels scarier than Gmail. threaten to disrupt the otherwise matrimonial harmony between Bella and George as they mark their first year together in his father’s country home.

A love of theatre and the staged, exquisitely framed theatricality of Ingmar Bergman (who put on over 100 plays in his lifetime) looms large over proceedings, with Caderni trusting his first-time feature actors to deliver lengthy monologues and hold scenes despite their abnormal length. But this is then disrupted by more experimental textures, with obvious nods to the work of Stan Brakhage pushing through until everything is rendered into a state of real abstraction.

I could take or leave certain extraneous flourishes (drone footage, dream sequences, et al), yet was highly engaged during more domestic moments, especially the ways that poor George — so nice in such a particularly understated British way — is cuckolded by a past that lingers on through the digital realm. Now, thanks to the internet, people never truly perish, but gain an ominous halflife through degraded phone and laptop footage. Worm is exceptionally attuned to this world, thriving in the spaces between realms, and giving a truly fresh meaning to the phrase “ghost in the shell.”

Now, I wonder if the Clock Tower³If you are interested in such an aside, it’s worth pointing out that, according to the rumours, the man who built the Clock Tower made sure that it rang out every 15 minutes, so that he would never forget the death of his son; a morbid connection to Worm, I feel. Times is still going (I only remember one issue, though; my lack of enthusiasm may have killed it).⁴Ned just messaged to say that he took over the reins himself the following year; he only lasted one issue. It feels like, finally, people from my school might have something interesting to write about.