Bright Hill Road Parent Guide

Marcy (Siobhan Williams) is an HR manager with a busy company – a job that’s complex when you’re sober, which Marcy usually isn’t. Marcy is an alcoholic trapped in a downward spiral, and the acceleration only increases when she drunkenly ignores a warning from a co-worker about a recently terminated and extremely disgruntled employee. When the man comes back and shoots up the office, Marcy is firmly encouraged by her boss to take some time off. Deciding to visit family in California (and maybe even sober up), Marcy finds herself down, out, and drunk in the Bright Hill Road Boarding House – a creepy old building run by the eminently enigmatic Mrs. Inman (Agam Darshi) – and wallowing in her own misfortune. But when she decides to leave, Marcy finds that it may be harder than she thought…

This film was shot in the miniscule town of Stavely, which marks the rough midway point between my house and my grandmother’s. Despite its relative proximity, I have never once stopped (nor been tempted to stop) anywhere near Stavely. As with many small towns, it emanates its own little aura of depression and boredom. To paraphrase the late great Harry Chapin, “I spent a week there one afternoon”. Even driving past the iconic grain elevators seems to sap about a fortnight off my life expectancy.

So, you’re thinking, that sounds like a perfect place to shoot a horror movie! You probably wouldn’t even need characters; all you’d have to do is shoot the town! Well, I had the same idea, and I was dead wrong. It turns out that when you make a clichéd and slow horror film in Staveley, it really just ends up feeling like you spent too long driving past this speck on the map.

Bright Hill Road isn’t exactly family fare, either. The violence is rather less than you see in other films in the genre, but it’s still too much for kids or the squeamish. What I found particularly unappealing (other than Stavely itself, of course) was the scene of sexual assault. It’s a difficult subject to handle at the best of times, with the best of intentions, and it feels like it was just dropped into this movie to crank up the stakes a bit. Not my favorite.

Let’s do a quick rundown on the premise – alcoholic, remote location, spooky hotel, ghosts of the past…. Yeah, this is The Shining. The problem with playing with that playbook is that The Shining is considered one of the best horror films ever made, and Stanley Kubrick is one of the most innovative and talented directors of all time. In comparison, Bright Hill Road shrivels like a corpse in the desert.