As a fan of Christmas horror films, I’m very happy to be able to recommend Await Further Instructions (2018), written by Gavin Williams and directed by Johnny Kevorkian, director and writer of the horror feature, The Disappeared (2008). Await Further Instructions has a lot going for it, including what is essential to Christmas horror—the agonizingly tense family get together (and that’s an understatement when it comes to this film). Await Further Instructions also delivers a pretty provocative message about both violence and technology, along with some fantastic (and beautifully-shot) body horror in its culminating scenes. I’d say this is a must for your holiday viewing.
Check out the trailer:
The plot of Await Further Instructions gets going when Nick (Sam Gittins) and his girlfriend Annji (Neerja Naik) arrive at Nick’s home (from which he’s clearly been absent for a while) to spend Christmas with his mother, Beth (Abigail Cruttenden), father, Tony (Grant Masters), grandfather (David Bradley), sister, Kate (Holly Weston), and brother-in-law, Scott (Kris Saddler). It says everything you need to know about this family that Nick’s bringing home an Indian girlfriend is like throwing gasoline on a fire. The Indian food Annji brings is received with baffled incomprehension, Tony insists on calling her “Angela” (because what else could Annji be short for?), remarks are soon made about inferior “foreign” doctors (Annji is a doctor), and then it’s only a short step to tirades about how immigrants are destroying England. Christmas dinner is explicitly clung to, even in the face of apocalypse, because “our values” must be upheld in “a proper British Christmas.”
Patriarch Tony (Grant Masters) leads an ill-fated Christmas dinner
Even without the turmoil Annji’s presence evokes, though, the Milgram family is profoundly poisoned by the sadistic violence of the grandfather, passed down to his son Tony who, himself, seems to have little choice but to repeat it on his own son. The women in the family either stand by helplessly (Beth) or fan the flames (Kate). If the toxic masculinity and racist zenophobia that poisons this family seem a little too much like a caricature, well, they may be—but only as the film moves toward its middle. At first, Await Further Instructions offers a relatively realistic portrait of a “normal” English family get-together replete with familiar uncomfortable and embarrassing moments.
The Milgrams are momentarily distracted from their dysfunctional internal dynamic by waking up on Christmas Day to find that the house is entirely sealed off from the outside by an unbreakable black substance. Moreover, regular programming shuts down on their always-on TV to reveal a message: “Stay Indoors and Await Further Instructions.” The messages change as the film goes along, getting more alarmist, more directive, and more violent. The characters debate at various points whether they should follow the TV’s instructions, but they (for the most part) always do.
The first ominous message on the TV
The Milgrams’ obedience to their TV marks a couple of messages of Await Further Instructions that have been pretty central to the horror tradition. First of all is the simple fact of their obedience to the TV—something George A. Romero’s films have taken up, beginning with the way the survivors collected in the farmhouse in Night of the Living Dead (1968) gather round the television and then proceed to do exactly what they’re told (and it doesn’t turn out well). The family’s surname, moreover, raises another message of the film—the human tendency to obey “authority” and the bad consequences of that obedience. In naming the family the Milgrams, Await Further Instructions nods to Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiments in the 1960s, in which he controversially showed exactly how far someone would go in inflicting pain on other humans if they were commanded to do so by someone in authority. In Await Further Instructions, there’s no scientist in a white coat, but there is the TV—and what greater authority is there in 2018 than the media?
David Bradley is brilliant as the hateful grandfather
Await Further Instructions got a little over-the-top, predictable, and thus uninteresting in parts of its final third, but the ending turned that around with some fantastic body horror (in the vein of David Cronenberg) and with brilliant cinematography by Annika Summerson. The cast without a doubt helped make this film as good as it was—especially Neerja Naik as Annji and the wonderful David Bradley (best known for Abraham Setrakian in The Stain, Walder Frey in Game of Thrones, and Argus Filch in the Harry Potter franchise) who was brilliant as the smolderingly malevolent grandfather. Await Further Instructions is now on my holiday viewing list!
You can stream Await Further Instructions on Amazon:
For more on Christmas horror films, check out our list of spooky Christmas horror, our review of 2017’s Red Christmas, 12 days of Christmas horror, and our review of Silent Night, Deadly Night.
