In the usual Rosemary’s Baby fashion, all manner of authority figures turn out to be Satanists - even the school bullies are apprentice witches, allowing for a nice ‘so you’re in this too’ moment. Sissy (Walton), the new gym mistress, invites Faith (the character name is too on-the-nose) to a rambling old house with sinister décor and reveals that she’s the head of a coven with wide-ranging powers in the significantly-named small town (Orchard). Given that it leaps from realistic teenage problems to supernatural botheration, its decision to be non-specific about the country in which it’s set – most characters have English accents but supermarket prices are in Euros – is odd, depriving the film of the gradual escalation from believable to unebelievable found in Wake Wood and such genre touchstones as The Witches and The Wicker Man.įifteen-year-old Faith (Naomi Battrick), a sulky blonde schoolgirl, has enough problems for a Ken Loach film – her chef father (Sam Hazeldine, excellent in a smallish, significant role) is dying of leukaemia, she’s pushed around at school by a gaggle of older girls, is fancied by nice guy Brian (Patrick Gibson) but can’t go out with him because her best friend (Minnie Phipps) likes him more, and tends to get violent on the hockey pitch. While Cherry Tree, which opened the UK’s FrightFest, has some creepy performances – especially from wide-eyed, soft-voiced British scream-queen-in-the-making Anna Walton ( Vampire Diary, Hellboy II, Soulmate, The Seasoning House) as the coven’s presiding witch – and nice use of cherry-squelching pagan imagery, the story is too familiar. This relies too much on Satanic cliché, with tilted camera angles, wailing and buzzing music and odd lighting effects stirring up an atmosphere of dread which tips over too often into ridiculousness Irish director David Keating and screenwriter-producer Brendan McCarthy follow up their effective little Hammer Film Wake Wood with another tale of witchery, sacrifice and conspiracy in Cherry Tree, an overheated, occasionally effective little chiller (not to be confused with Paul Andrew Williams’ 2010 home invasion nasty Cherry Tree Lane) which follows genre rules a little too closely.

Cherrytree lane bew berlin