After his wife is left comatose following an attack by a gang of children, Tommy is left with crippling agoraphobia and a baby girl to raise by himself. Unable to escape the rotting council estate in which he lives, he soon finds himself targeted by the same gang. A local priest who has previously encountered the children warns that they want to steal his daughter, and the two of them must face the threat once and for all.
Horror films can sometimes be more effective if instead of their perpetrators being marauding supernatural entities, the monsters turn out to be all too human. From a psychological standpoint, the revelation that all the death and destruction was caused by someone with the same capabilities as the viewer can give quite an impact. While Citadel certainly starts out with a similar core concept, it’s not long before things get muddled by the animalistic nature of the attackers.
The decaying wasteland in which Tommy is forced to remain living is presented well: the empty streets, rusted gates and blackened windows all serve to convey the desolation of the area, an urban purgatory devoid of hope or future, abandoned by the police and all but ignored by public transport. But for all the setting’s engaging dereliction, the story never properly finds itself.
While we can sympathise with Tommy’s plight and the spiralling despair of his life, nothing he does seems to follow any sort of logical progression; he behaves differently from scene to scene depending of each set piece’s requirements, and for a terrified agoraphobe he seems strangely unconcerned about the apparent unreliability of his flat’s locks. James Cosmo as the foul-mouthed and possibly insane priest provides some scene-stealing support, but along with a mysterious blind child and an impossibly cheerful nurse, he’s the only human face in a sea of anonymous violence.
The film’s main problem is it seems unsure of exactly what kind of story it’s trying to tell, as there simply isn’t enough going on for it to be effective as a horror or vengeance flick. It’s possible that it’s attempting to make a statement about the extremes of suburban deprivation and that the behaviour of the children who live there is at least partially a result of having to endure it.
Certainly, the priest’s attitude that they are scum that need to be put down before they’re allowed to spread might mirror the reactionary rhetoric of a Daily Mail editorial, but whether their feral nature is supposed to be figurative of such an attitude or a literal characteristic requiring no further contemplation is never made clear. There was a spate of similarly themed kids-on-a-murder-spree films that emerged in the mid-2000s, such as Eden Lake, The Strangers and Them, but Citadel possesses neither the efficiency of plot or claustrophobic action of any of them.
Overall Verdict: Unfocussed and lacking coherent ideas, as a horror film Citadel has too little plot, as a vigilante thriller it has too little action, and as a piece of social commentary it has too little consistency.
Special Features:
Interview with Aneurin Barnard
Interview with Ciaran Foy
Reviewer: Andrew Marshall