The Manor (2021)
They say getting older is a privilege, but it can also be a little scary. How weird is it for someone who’s say, middle-aged to see gray hair and the beginning of wrinkles in their peers and then feel the urge to rush to the mirror? Or blow the dust off their high school yearbooks? It’s life, it’s bound to happen, we choose how we react, and that’s pretty much all there is to it.
At least getting older is generally nothing like what happens in The Manor. Judith Albright has a minor stroke at her seventieth birthday party and decides to check herself into a care facility. Her grandson, Josh looks around at the listless elders sitting at tables and in wheelchairs and tells his grandma that she’s way too young to live in a nursing home. She’s a dance teacher. She can literally dance circles around anyone in the house. Judith is kind but firm. She needs to make a change. Josh shouldn’t worry, though, because she’ll text and call and all that stuff.
The care home seems like a good deal at first. It’s a gorgeous historic home with expansive grounds and gardens around it, and every need is taken care of. Judith meets a rather sprightly group of folks in the kitchen garden who invite her to join their bridge group. She makes friends and they commiserate about growing old and forgotten.
Very quickly, though, it all turns sour. Judith’s roommate seems senile and given to walking around at night and bending over Judith while she’s trying to sleep. Residents have to be wrestled back into bed and Judith lies awake listening to the moaning. A staff member takes Judith’s phone. The residents are treated like children who can’t have any agency over anything. Staff members constantly push sedatives into the residents’ mouths. The doors of the house are kept locked all the time and no one’s allowed out without an escort.
Judith’s bridge buddies warn her that she shouldn’t show any signs of mental instability because the staff will medicate her to the point of lethargy. The only way anyone gets out is in a box. Judith shows signs of Parkinson’s disease and thinks she sees her husband playing the home’s piano. She wanders around aimlessly sometimes and hallucinates.
But then the whole deal takes a very odd turn. I don’t want to spoil anything too much, but suffice it to say, it’s as if Children of the Corn, Black Christmas, Midsomar, and Tod Browning’s Freaks had a four-way collision.
While The Manor is intriguing, in the end it’s just OK. It frequently employs the infamous jumpscares that Chris Stuckmann and probably other horror aficionadoes famously deplore, and I have to agree that jumpscares get old. Yeah, there are a lot of cliches in this movie. In one scene one sweet-looking old lady literally says, “One of us, one of us.”
I rolled my eyes. I couldn’t help it. I’m not a horror buff, but even I felt disengaged and turned my eyes to the mountain scene I was coloring on my Happy Colors app (Don’t judge. ;-) ). I had been hoping the movie would have done more with Judith’s aging and her struggles with Parkinson’s. It would have been interesting from a story standpoint to watch her mental state fluctuate and deteriorate and see how she deals with it.
It’s weird to expect authenticity from a thriller, but again, age and medical problems are the the catalysts for what comes later. While I like Barbara Hershey and always enjoy seeing her, Judith doesn’t act like someone who has just had a minor stroke. She’s mostly nervous about what’s going to happen next and trying to hedge her bets because she doesn’t want her family to see her health really failing.
And what with the way the staff conduct themselves, I kept waiting for someone to play the elder abuse card. It all could have been a really good cinema verite scenario, where everyone, including the audience, doubts what they see. The movie was screaming for this.
But nope. Judith is, for all intents and purposes, plopped down where she really doesn’t belong and then the tropes start.
The Manor could have been so much more. Too bad it got stuck on meh.
The Manor is currently streaming on Amazon Prime. Not rated.
My grade: C
Principal cast: Barbara Hershey, Bruce Davison, Nicholas Alexander, Jill Larson, Fran Bennett, Katie Amanda Keane, Ciera Payton, Nancy Linehan Charles
Directed and written by Axelle Carolyn.