Nick (Sam Gittins) and his girlfriend Annji (Neerja Naik) have decided to spend Christmas with Nick's family ... which is not a good idea as Annji's lineage is of foreign decent and Nick's granddad (David Bradley) is pretty much an overt racist, Nick's pregnant sister Kate (Holly Weston) a hypocritical fool with her husband being a muscle-bound weakling, Nick's father Tony (Grant Masters) someone who demands respect in any situation, even if he's horribly wrong most of the time, and his mum Beth (Abigail Cruttenden) is just too used to her husband to putting up any form of resistance. So it comes as little surprise that Nick and Annji want to sneak out Christmas Day morning ... but find the whole house enmeshed in some sort of metal, with no way of even seeing the outside. But the TV flashes on and tells them to "await further instructions" - which Tony is only too happy to do and orders his family to do as well. But the "further instructions" become wilder and wilder, from warning the family to not eat any food in their home to ordering them to vaccinate themselves with a vaccine that has come down the chimney - which ultimately kills granddad - to pretty much making them isolate the "foreign agent", who they (except for Nick) are quick to identify as Annji, even though she has been the coolest head so far. But whatever they try, the situation gets more and more out of hand, and tensions arise which ultimately lead to Kate's death, Tony's losing it, rooms being gassed, and the discovery that an alien being might be behind all of this. And yet, our family is still trapped in this game they don't know the rules of ...

Await Further Instructions plays a very clever riff on the "humankind is its own worst enemy" theme, putting its heroes in a rather absurd situation and letting them break before the audience's very eyes. This all works thanks to a tight script, a tense directorial effort that makes perfect use of the limited locations, and a very strong cast. Only the ending might be a bit too tentacle-heavy and too directly influenced by Cronenberg's classic Videodrome, but it's a pretty fascinating movie still.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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