In 1950s rural Idaho, eight-year-old Seth Dove lives at a lonely gas station with his brittle mother and withdrawn father. After a vile prank on the English widow next door, Dolphin Blue, he decides she is a vampire. Children start to vanish. Then his brother Cameron comes home from the Pacific, where he worked on bomb tests, falls for Dolphin and begins to waste away. Seth sets out to save him from her.

I love how sickly beautiful this is. Philip Ridley shoots the prairie like a child’s nightmare in full sunshine: golden fields, a black Cadillac, a foetus in a barn that Seth treats as an angel (as you do). Jeremy Cooper is a properly unsettling kid, Lindsay Duncan makes Dolphin both prey and villain, and early Viggo Mortensen already looks haunted (something he carries off with ease). It is body horror by way of a fairy tale — radiation as vampirism, grief as something that sits on the skin.

It can drift into the self-consciously strange, the same eye-roll zone Possum never left. But here the images are strong enough that I stayed with it. Not a favourite film but one that is strangely haunting. 

Well worth a watch.

4 out of 5 stars​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​