Ride the Snake review – low-budget home-invasion horror offers transgressive free-for-all

After a car accident kills her husband, Harper and her daughter kidnap the driver responsible to serve their own kind of justice – but he may not be everything he first seems

Quoting the classics can be a dangerous game for a film – one liable to highlight your shortcomings. When two Gypsies-cum-demons chant Leaning on the Everlasting Arms, Robert Mitchum’s ditty from Night of the Hunter, not to mention bearing love-hate tattoos on their knuckles, it indicates that this low-budget British home-invasion horror is missing the same fairytale concision. Which is a shame, as this messy but entrancing, faintly surrealist feature by Shani Grewal has entirely different qualities of its own.

Blinded in a car accident that killed her husband, Harper (Suzanna Hamilton) has lived alone for several years; until recently that is, as stepson Taran (Viraj Juneja) returns home to find that his mother and sister Megan (Francesca Baker) have kidnapped the drunk driver responsible and shackled him in an upstairs bedroom. This is Sebastian (Michael Maloney), who in their eyes dodged jail with a fake insanity plea; they intend to stage a retrial on their own terms. But, spouting in multiple tongues including one belonging to a sinister entity, Sebastian may genuinely have a few cables unplugged.