The Numbers (2018)

Three people in three different time periods find themselves face to face with fate.

Review

From writer / director Andrew Elias (Tales from the Great War) comes a gothic anthology (Well I'm going to call it an intersectional anthology of weird, gothic, horrors) falling in the bizarre space between short film and feature length. This one runs in at around fifty minutes. Held together by the fortune teller, and the titular numbers, this anthology moves through time with different people and different grim fates. And Grimm is just the word.

A little different from most of the anthologies that you would find reviewed here, the horror of the film is in the background, leaving way for the foreground to be filled with colorful character design and a strong sense of foreboding. From the very beginning the chill runs deep in the blood of this one, and while there is little need for jump scares and gore, the stories fall somewhere between the grit of a Grimm tale, with the twist you might find in something from, say, The Bard.

Playing with motivations and fate, the runtime flies by with Elias having a firm grip on the direction - he plays with the tropes of genre directing well, with many cross genre anthologies being directed by multiple people, and this one not. It's a technical feat, one that you'll miss being engrossed in the film.

The players are fine too, with a short stop from the director himself in the bookend segment - and by far the most gothic part of the film, with excellent turns from Peyvand Sadeghian (90 Minutes) and Lilly Driscoll (The Factory), and our personal favorite, Nicky Stephens (debut feature).

There's a little of everything here for the horror / thriller audience. Each segment has it's own nuance and style from the chilling opening at the turn of the century (sorry, I must be getting old - that would be 1912), to the lighter and more modern horror of the near present day.

It's good stuff from all involved and well worth seeing. Now on Amazon Prime.