silverguide.site –

This horror is set in a world where a highly contagious disease causes itching so severe that the scratching proves quickly fatal; finally, a film targeting the under-served eczema community! The body horror elements are realised extremely effectively, with a woman literally tearing at her skin being the most effective set-piece. Alas, the film doesn’t have the scope (on what was clearly a modest budget) to indulge in very many of these. Much of the rest of the runtime is the pressure-cooker conversation that occurs between a motley crew of so-far-uninfected civilians caught out at a department store. While the reason they are trapped is horrific, this makes the film at least as much a character study as it is a horror, with variable results.

Scenarios from classic films which the film-makers may have had in mind include the hard-pressed band of isolated scientists confronting a shape-shifting monster in John Carpenter’s The Thing, the mismatched duo defending a defunct police station under siege in John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, or even a non-John Carpenter film, Night of the Living Dead, in which survivors hole up in a farmhouse. The key to these types of films is a blend of genre excitement and character dynamics. It would have been great to see more of this from Itch!: on the one hand, a slightly bigger budget for more of the gnarly effects it pulls off so well in some brief scenes, and on the other, a sharper script to serve the human aspect.

As it is, there’s nothing much wrong with the characters as archetypes, but the screenplay struggles to make them actively interesting. The lead is a widowed dad (Bari Kang, also the director and screenwriter) single-parenting a cute kid. There’s the asshole customer (Douglas Stirling) who is introduced through a nicely telling interaction complaining that he could get this exact tin of paint for $10 less on Amazon, plus a handful of other ensemble types. Naturally, we the audience are observing them all constantly for signs of tell-tale scratching, but there’s not quite enough dramatic individuation to keep us invested in their respective emotional arcs.

• Itch! is on UK digital platforms from 20 April, and US digital platforms from 21 April.