The Appointment
Director: Lindsey C. Vickers
Release year: 1982
Ian and Dianna live a comfortable existence with their daughter Joanne in a rural English town. The local wood has been fenced off to stop schoolchildren walking through it after a girl was murdered in it three years before. Ian has to tell Joanne that he’ll miss her big musical recital because his company is sending him away the next day for an urgent meeting, triggering a night of anxious dreams and possible premonitions.
The opening five minutes are properly disturbing as we follow a schoolgirl on a path through some woods after we’ve heard words from a police report describing her death. The way she’s pulled into the trees by an unseen force is terrifying and looks amazing, even on such a low budget in 1982. Joanne regularly talks to someone through the fence sealing the wood after school, and it’s unclear if it’s the ghost of the dead schoolgirl or something else.
Joanne isn’t just a daddy’s girl, her relationship with her father is uncomfortably intense, which he brushes off to his wife, but she is clearly bothered by. Joanne is fourteen and seems to always get what she wants from Ian, and in an angry scene Dianna tells him that their family is out of balance and Joanne has created for herself a dangerously delusional world. Ian seems perplexed and disbelieving, but it could also be interpreted that there’s something sexual between him and his daughter, and he has certainly mixed his daughter with his wife unconsciously, and Dianna’s picked up on it.
All of which gives the second half of the film it’s bite. Whatever is in the woods, through Joanne, attacks Ian through woozy dreams and nightmares that blur with their nightly reality. As Ian sets off on his long trip away from his family, the ending seems inevitable. This is a film about minding boundaries. If you don’t, whatever is in the woods will get you.