The Portrait

Haunted paintings have a long history in horror cinema and literature, but this Gothic tale sees début director Simon Ross, working from a script by David Griffiths (who wrote William Friedkin’s The Hunted), take the idea in a different direction. Here the painting is both a force in itself and a metaphor for what is left behind when a person’s body remains but the mind which once inhabited it is gone.

Alex Debose (Ryan Kwanten) is such a man. A little way into the film, through which he drifts on autopilot, guided by wife Sofia (Natalia Cordova-Buckley), we learn that he has suffered an accident, leaving him with brain damage which doctors believe to be permanent. The accident occurred when the couple were arguing, adding to Sofia’s burden of guilt. Friends and strangers alike advise her that she needs to let go and allow him to be cared for in a hospital, but she persists in believing that she can somehow bring him back to himself. That’s why, as we meet them, she is bringing him back to his childhood home, a spacious mansion surrounded by diligently maintained, elegant gardens. It is in the attic of this mansion that she will discover the portrait of the title.

As viewers, we are privy to a foreshadowing of the portrait’s powers in an opening sequence which depicts a painter’s furious work intercut with scenes of a man dragging a young woman through woodland by her hair and proceeding to violently assault her. What first strikes Sofia, however, is the uncanny resemblance between the picture’s subject and her vacant husband. is this just a family resemblance? That subject is, according to the label on the back, the artist himself, one Calvin Debose. The same label gives the date of its creation as 1937. Calvin isn’t talked about much, says the friendly but forthright woman who introduces herself as Alex’s Cousin Mags (Virginia Madsen). He had a history of violence against women. She is the one person who offers some support to Sofia in her persistence with Alex, telling her “That’s the thing about our family. We always come back.”

There’s plenty of possibility here, and the film is promising in its early stages, with a believable bond between Sofia and Alex. It loses its way a bit in trying to explore Sofia’s loneliness, giving Cordova-Buckley too little to work with as she wanders round the house undergoing a psychological shift which we don’t really get to see. The resolution hinges on an interesting idea but doesn’t quite know how to pitch it. There are elements which will make some disabled viewers distinctly uncomfortable – not in they way one hopes for from horror – and whilst it has something to say about the experience of being a carer, it feels very much like an outsider’s perspective, lacking in depth. As a result, it doesn’t make the emotional impact that it should, and the epilogue just hammers this home.

At the same time, there is an effort here to do something new with this type of heroine, and to give her fresh agency, whilst exploring something of what it is that intrigues many women about the monstrous men in the Gothic. It does so with an appreciation of the difference between fantasy and real life, and whilst it doesn’t quite succeed in achieving its ambitions, its effort suggests that Ross has potential.