The Origin review – flawed action-horror is a fascinatingly taut vision

The Origin, the debut feature from writer-director Andrew Cumming, bears plentiful flaws, pockmarked all over the film, and yet at its core it remains a refreshingly visceral and taut action-horror, deserving of the big screen experience. In its best moments it makes for full-throttle, high-class filmmaking, delivering a thoroughly immersive experience with minimal means.

The plot is simple enough, though the setting is the hook: we’re in the Palaeolithic era, following a small family of hunter-gatherers in search of new lands, seemingly somewhere in the freezing wilds of Scotland. What appears as a land of plenty quickly turns into a nightmare – and as the group are picked off in the darkness, the film shifts into survival horror mode. In concept, it is not too dissimilar from Prey, the Predator spin-off which arrived earlier this year.

The influence of Robert Eggers is all over The Origin; both The Witch and The Northman made convincing attempts to imagine a world of the past as it would have been seen by those who lived within it (hence why his films treat witchcraft and Norse mythology as a lived-in logical reality and not as something whose logic is filtered through the modern world). Our point-of-view sticks concretely within the group, Cumming constantly ensuring we feel these events very viscerally: when the kills land, they are nasty and brutal.

The exquisite technical craft on display helps matters: the cinematography and sound design in particular are spectacular. Nighttime shots are lit almost exclusively by the lone amber flicker of the campfire, the world beyond a vast empty void of darkness. Daytime scenes make full use of the dramatic Scottish landscape; this world, unexplored by our protagonists, appears as alien to us (one sky-bothering shot makes us feel as if the characters are climbing a rock wall). The sound design aids with constructing this world’s uncanny presence: shrieks and mysterious crunches are continually invading from beyond off-screen space, constantly keeping us on our toes, with the score sticking to stone-age-type instrumentation (although it does make the egregious error of deploying the Hans Zimmer “WHAAAAMP!” at one point).

There are a few other bones to pick. For a film so focused on developing an immersive reality, the actors (who do put in a series of perfectly good performances) look a little bit too well-groomed to convince as Palaeolithic homo sapiens. And the script is also too neatly resolved in the final moments, tidying everything up into a nice bow to make sure the audience understands the underlying message they're supposed to take away. It’s a little bit patronising, and frankly completely at odds with the nastiness we’ve just been witness to.

Frustrating missteps, then, but at the core of The Origin there lies a fascinatingly taut vision., aided by high-quality filmmaking nous that ensures the film’s mission is carried out with success.

The Origin was screened as part of the BFI Film Festival 2022. A UK release date is yet to be announced.