In this job I tend to get sent quite a few shot-on-video, zero budget debut features to review by people hoping to break into the industry. The majority of these are amateurish and poorly made. Having said that, Flatmates Wanted would have to be one of the best zero budget debut films I have sat down to see. It is a film that is easily comparable in the immense assurance of style on display with the aforementioned El Mariachi and Clerks. or, even closer to home, to Peter Jackson’s own zero budget debut feature Bad Taste (1988). That it has been made on such limited resources is a considerable miracle.

The first half of Flatmates Wanted has the rather witty feeling of being inside the mind of someone woken up the morning after a party with a hangover. The whole first half keeps blurring in and out of a weird dream state and comes filled with moments of bizarre humour. It has the sublime sense of a lazy, half-stoned Saturday afternoon in a student flat. Having spent a fair amount of time hanging out around and living in student flats in my day, I found myself laughing out loud during these scenes, so much does Gary Davies have his finger exactly on life in a student flat – be it the piled dishes in the sink that nobody can be bothered to clean to the messy detritus of a flatmate’s room, or the sheer slackerdom of walking through the lounge in the middle of the afternoon to find people in their pyjamas drinking and smoking bongs or playing guitar.

The second half leaves behind the surreal hangover haze to segue into something genuinely spooky. There’s the clear influence of The Blair Witch Project (1999) on the film (and clearly signalled by a Blair Witch poster hanging on the wall in the flat). Many of these scenes are shot on handheld video camera and come with the same suggestion there was in Blair Witch of something of dread chill lurking beyond the edge of the frame. Davies does a superb job during the scenes venturing up into the attic and down into the cellar, where we also move from colour to black-and-white and infra-red shot camerawork. The eeriness and the jolts that come during these scenes, especially the pop-up appearances of a girl dressed in Goth makeup, are really quite unearthly. The film is boosted by some excellent sound editing – the whole film is alive during these scenes with ghostly atmospherics, subliminal throbbing and humming effects and abrupt jumps, as well as the central character’s voice coming over in multiple tracks talking with himself and sometimes pulling away to make observations of striking clarity. The assurance and skill of atmosphere that comes during the latter half is really far better than in any other A-budget horror film that I have seen this year. Flatmates Wanted is a film that really deserves the widest acknowledgement.