Check out the poster and new stills for upcoming Irish chiller Nails, which stars The Descent’s Shauna Macdonald and Comedian/actor Ross Noble (Stitches). Billed, promisingly, as being in the vein of The Babadook and Under the Shadow, the film has its World Premiere as part of the Audi Dublin International Film Festival, which runs 16th-26th February, 2017.
As stated in the press release, “Nails is part of a new wave of horror that puts female characters and their emotional lives at the centre of the story.” Macdonald plays “happily-married track coach and mother Dana Milgrom, who’s survived a near-death car accident only to find herself paralyzed and trapped inside her own body. Forced to communicate via an artificial voice program and hooked to a breathing machine, she becomes convinced that a terrifying presence called ‘Nails’ exists inside her hospital room. No one believes her – not even her own husband and doctors, who think she’s experiencing a mental breakdown.”
“Most horror films are about running away,” says writer/director Dennis Bartok, “Nails is the opposite: it’s about being locked inside your own flesh with the terror. I don’t think there’s any other actress who could give the performance Shauna did: her concentration and emotional rawness took the film to a whole different level.”
Bartok – who wrote and produced 2006 horror anthology Trapped Ashes – makes his directorial debut with Nails, in which he also appears. Noble co-stars as Trevor Helms, a nurse’s aide at the hospital who slowly comes to believe that Dana’s paranoid visions may be real.
Nails will world premiere at ADIFF on Monday, February 20th at 20:45. UK-based Kaleidoscope Film Distribution will be releasing the film theatrically and on VOD in the UK and Ireland later in 2017, and will be representing the film for world sales at the upcoming European Film Market at the Berlin Film Festival.
Words: Kevan Farrow (@KevanX)
