THE DROWNED
**
Directed By Samuel Clemens.
Starring Alan Calton, Lara Lemon, Lily Catalifo.
Horror, United Kingdom, 91 minutes, Certificate 15.
Released On Digital in the UK by Sunrise Films & Vertigo Releasing on 6th October 2025
Over the years, horror has welcomed criminals into its grim little world only to chew them up and spit them out. Whether it’s ABIGAIL, where a gang kidnaps a young girl and quickly regrets it, or THE VAULT, where bank robbers disturb something supernatural, or DON'T BREATHE, where burglars underestimate a seemingly frail old man, horror doesn’t tend to reward the morally questionable. It’s a genre that loves turning the tables.
THE DROWNED, directed by Samuel Clemens, follows three men arriving one by one at a remote house on the edge of a beach. They’ve stolen something valuable, left behind at the rendezvous by a fourth crew member who’s mysteriously absent. As they wait, suspicion brews, but whether they should be watching each other or something else entirely is the real question. There’s a pull in the house, a creeping sense that something is stirring, and it’s not just paranoia.
Clemens’ debut feature has its strengths. The cast is solid, and the setup, a heist gone sideways, is familiar but effective. In the first 20 minutes, we’re given subtle hints through dialogue and performance that something’s off, and none of the three leads are particularly trustworthy. That ambiguity works well. Their motives and backstories are kept vague, and the stolen item itself is revealed only in fleeting glimpses, which adds to the tension.
The drip-feed of those little reveals help build a sense of unease. But once other characters arrive at the house, things start to unravel. The tension ramps up, the story takes a more eerie turn, and while promising to shift the film into truly terrifying territory, it mostly serves to telegraph the ending. I kept wondering how it would all tie back to the heist, and for me, it didn’t quite land.
The score works well, the sea’s darkness adds atmosphere, and there are some great swooping shots in the style of EVIL DEAD, racing from the water toward the house. But those shots also reminded me how well that film used its remote cabin to lift the story and make everything more terrifying and cursed, like the characters were truly trapped. Here, the beachside house may be remote, but it doesn’t carry the same eerie weight. It’s beautiful, yes, but it never feels truly claustrophobic or inescapable.
The film juggles heist, horror, and mystery, but those elements never fully come together. It wasn’t just the location that threw things off. Once the film reached its big reveal, I found myself looking up the stolen artifact online in an attempt to piece the threads of the story together. That extra research helped me better understand what Clemens was aiming for, but I wish more of that meaning had been embedded in the film itself.
If the setting had been slightly different, maybe a river or stream instead of the beach, and the safehouse had been lit and shot in a more disorienting, dreamlike way, the pieces might’ve come together more cohesively. That said, this is a solid first feature with plenty going for it, and I’m genuinely curious to see what Clemens does next.
Bev Tew