It Came From Netflix Instant: THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF ROSALIND LEIGH (2012)

The presence of Vanessa Redgrave is enough to give any movie a certain gravitas, all the more so when she appears second-billed on a little-known low-budget Canadian ghost story.  Usually when renowned stage actors do genre work, it's for the money.  Here, that doesn't seem to be the case.  For one thing, there doesn't appear to be any money; though the movie is professionally shot and looks great, it's limited to one setting and features mainly one actor for much of its screen time.  For another, Dame Vanessa doesn't merely recite her lines and run.  As the title character of The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh, she is a presence deeply felt throughout the film.  Her performance is marvelous and haunting, with subtleties that most genre filmmakers are afraid to embrace.

Oh, and she barely appears in the film.  The character of Rosalind Leigh is glimpsed occasionally at certain moments and may be played by a double; I'm not sure, but it doesn't matter.  Ms. Redgrave's performance is pretty much entirely given in voice-over.  She delivers the last will and testament to which the title refers throughout the film, as the framing device for its story.  All of the movie's complexities, all of its tension, all of its sadness, are there in her voice.  She's not a narrator, but rather a character whose role in the story is gradually revealed as her testament continues.  It's certainly one of the best voice performances of all time, and one of the best performances in all horror films.

In a lesser horror film her performance would stick out like a sore thumb, but The Last Will, the feature debut of Rodrigo Gudiño (editor of the horror magazine Rue Morgue), earns her effort.  It's an eerie and thoughtful character study, along the lines of Shirley Jackson's novel and Robert Wise's film The Haunting.  Beneath its traditional haunted-house premise is a quite sad exploration of loss and responsibility.

After his mother's death, Leon Leigh (Aaron Poole) returns to her home for the first time in many years, intending to sell it.  It's implied that he and his mother had had a falling out for religious reasons: she wanted him to believe, and he just didn't.  But while spending a long night in his mother's expansive, iconography-laden mansion, Leon begins to suspect that her spirit may still be there... or maybe something else.  As the nature of his relationship with his mother is gradually revealed, we slowly find out why the two were so estranged, and why she desperately needed him to come back.

Gudiño creates an effectively hallucinatory atmosphere in which each scene feels a bit too quiet, too calm, too settled.  His long establishing shots, often coupled with a foreboding voice-over in the foreground, suggest that a disturbance is always just around the corner.  And when, quite unexpectedly, some creepy-crawlies begin to emerge, he introduces them so subtly that we're not even sure what we've seen.

I'd say the movie has a surprise ending, but I'm not quite sure that it does.  It does, in a sense, pull the rug out from under the story we think we've been watching... or maybe it doesn't.  The movie doesn't reverse its plot, but merely suggests that we may be seeing it from a point of view that's different from the one we thought.  And it reminds us that though Poole is the one with the most screen time (and he's very good), it's Redgrave who anchors the film and has guided it all along.

*** 1/2 out of ****