Let Us Prey

On a quiet road in a remote Scottish coastal town, a young man named Caesar speeds through the streets and hits a pedestrian. Constable Rachel Heggie, on her first day on the job, sees it happen and makes her first arrest. The victim has vanished, though, until officers find him and bring him to the station. He is a mysterious drifter who calls himself only Six.

That night the small station fills up with the stranger, the prisoners and the officers on duty, and it soon becomes clear that Six knows far more about each of them than he should. He tells people their secrets calmly and quietly, and the town's hidden sins start to come out. The station stops feeling like a place of law and order and starts to feel like a courtroom where everyone is on trial.

Director Brian O'Malley wrote the film with Fiona Watson and David Cairns. It opens with sweeping coastal landscapes and a stranger who seems to rise out of the waves. From there it tightens into a claustrophobic siege thriller driven by a synth score in the style of John Carpenter, with Liam Cunningham giving an unsettling, magnetic lead performance.

Let Us Prey is about judgment and guilt. It puts a supernatural figure in the one place built to judge people, a police station, and shows that the people enforcing the law are often as corrupt as the people they lock up. Six calls himself "just a witness" and not the cause of evil, which shifts responsibility onto the humans. The film suggests that the worst horrors are the sins ordinary people hide: adultery, betrayal, hypocrisy, perversion and cowardice.

The pun in the title turns a prayer ("let us pray") into predation ("let us prey"). It hints that religious ideas of sin and damnation can be turned into weapons, and that anyone who takes it on themselves to "weigh justice in their own hands" may end up judged too.

Six as the Devil: the judgment, the hellfire, the supernatural powers and the number six all point to a satanic figure collecting souls.

Let Us Prey came out of a small-scale revival of Irish and Scottish genre filmmaking and was Brian O'Malley's feature debut. Winning the Méliès d'Argent at BIFFF 2014 and screening at Sitges and the Edinburgh International Film Festival gave it strong standing on the festival circuit.

It was also part of the mid-2010s wave of retro horror that looked back to John Carpenter's synth scores and tight siege structures. The film adds explicitly biblical ideas to that template: the Last Judgment, the Pale Horse and hellfire. Liam Cunningham, who was then well known as Davos Seaworth on Game of Thrones, got a rare menacing lead role, and the film helped cement Pollyanna McIntosh's reputation in horror.

Critics were divided but mostly respectful. Some called the plot derivative and predictable, yet praised the film as compelling, brutal and sinisterly atmospheric. Others described it as an idiosyncratic indie oddity, "inventive, pretentious, trippy, mis-structured," whose dark mood "lingers in the mind." It has since become a cult pick among fans of religious and folk horror.

What viewers praised: Liam Cunningham's commanding, enigmatic performance; Pollyanna McIntosh's strong lead turn; the atmosphere; the striking coastal photography; the brutal violence; and the retro Carpenter-style synth score.

What they criticized: a derivative and predictable plot, pretension, uneven structure, and a story that explains Six too little for some tastes.

Verdict: a divisive but memorable indie horror. Genre fans tend to value its mood and ambition, while viewers who want clear answers or fresh storytelling are often left cold.