An electrician (Michael Thompson) has come to the funeral home to fix
the deep freezer, and just to entertain him, the gravedigger (Nick Neild)
tells him several tales of the graves they recently had to relocate
because of roadwork, one tale more macabre than the next, and with the
graveyard sitting there for more than 150 years, there are plenty of tales
to tell. However, the most macabre is that of Rose Burswick (played first
by Chelsea Boreham then by Melanie Oliver), who has worked at a factory
using glow-in-the-dark paint for two decades - before she died from cancer
as the paint was radioactive. Turns out in her grave, her body has
transformed into a yellow blob - a blob that's somehow alive ... and it's
kept in suspended animation in the freezer - but now that the freezer's
not working ... Being mostly shot in one room, with two persons
just talking, The Gravedigger's Tale ably proves that good dialogue
paired with powerful acting and atmospheric filmmaking can get a movie a
long way: Even though we're only told about most of the macabre occurences
in the movie and never see them, the film gets one into just the right
mood to appreciate everything still, so much so that when the film finally
breaks away from its single-location approach, the audience is already in
the right mood for things to come. Great and very macabre fun, really!
|