Charon’s obol

I was recently granted the privilege of previewing a new British independent entitled Ferryman. A young man with PTSD blames himself for his former sergeant ending up in a wheelchair; only moments after confessing that he had hesitated to use his own weapon, his friend turns up dead and a beautiful girl would seem to be involved. Minutes into Ferryman and you really have no idea where it is going, but one irony is that our well-meaning hero is about to find himself another potential wheelchair user, and another moral conundrum to confront!

Charon was the cowled figure who, in Greek mythology, ferried you across the Styx to the Underworld after your death, a service for which you paid an obol, which coin your relatives obligingly placed in your mouth before burial. In Darren Bender’s new film a secret society provides would-be suicides with a ‘ferryman’ to supervise their passing, and whose payment is to receive a similar service in turn. Well-meaning Ashley breaks this chain (and, with queasy ease, her ferryman’s neck) by preventing his new love’s own premature death. (She has an incurable wasting disease, you see.)

Oliver Lee, as Ashley

At this point you think we might be on for a 13-Tzameti/It Follows-style thriller, but in fact Bender wants to explore the psychology of two young things, desperately in love and wanting it to endure, yet faced with the certainty of death and unsure how to approach it. Eve’s ‘here comes my fit again’ illness, which the script sensibly omits to name, is represented on the soundtrack by a wonderful Cat People leopard’s growl and there are other imaginative uses of sound, or silence.

Ferryman comes a time when suicide numbers, especially in males, seem to be constantly on the rise, and it handles the subject with sensitivity. The performances are uniformly excellent, particularly Raquel Cassidy as Eve’s mother, and the screenplay is even-handed in giving voice to the feelings of all the affected parties.

Apparently the film is doing well at Film Festivals and can be seen in the U.S. from next week. We should wish its cast and crew every success with this thought-provoking drama.