The Fiend

The Fiend

I was not expecting the musical numbers. They’re all gospely god songs, so it’s thematically on brand, but a scuzzy British seventies kitchen-sink religious themed murder jam, just doesn’t seem like the place.

A story about a crazy zealot mother and her son who likes to murder women (not a spoiler because it lets you know about five minutes in). This has a striking opening where a baptism is intercut with a woman being murdered, bit then kinds of slides into something a little less histrionic and a little more drama focused. A twisted version of a ‘why done it’ character piece where incest, repression, adultery and brain-washing are crammed in and sort of played out during the killings.

The pace is slower than you might expect, and it occasionally teeters on the edge of being dreary, but the whole thing creates such a grimy, mean-spirited, psychosexual vibe that it works.

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