Crew
Director/Screenplay – Simeon Halligan, Based on the Novel Habit (2012) by Stephen McGeagh, Producers – Nick Leese & Rachel Richardson-Jones, Photography – James Swift, Music – Claude Foisy, Visual Effects – Tanvir Hanif, Carl Walters & John Whittington, Special Effects – Scott MacIntyre, Production Design – John Ellis. Production Company – Habit Films/Not a Number Productions/Tin Hat Productions Ltd.
Cast
Elliot James Langridge (Michael Burns), Jessica Barden (Lee), William Ash (Ian), Sally Carmen (Mand Burns), Andrew Ellis (Dig), Roxanne Pallett (Alex), Joanne Mitchell (Katy), Robert Beck (Grant), Nigel Travis (Ray)
Plot
In Salford, Manchester, Michael Burns is going to the unemployment office just as he sees a girl being tossed out. Afterwards, the girl Lee comes up to him. Seeing that she has nowhere to stay, Michael brings her back to the apartment he shares with Dig. Lee introduces Michael to her life, an underworld centred around a brothel. Seeing as that he is looking after Lee, one of the prostitutes Alex offers Michael a freebie. However, as they are in the midst of things, Michael sees a man stumble out of another room with his throat slit. He flees but Lee persuades him he was mistaken. She takes him to meet the owner Ian who offers Michael a job on the door. There Michael discovers the downstairs area where dead bodies are stored. Lee and Ian come revealing that they and the girls at the brothel have a taste for human flesh. Ian says he also knows that Michael is one of them. Michael allows himself to be drawn into this underworld of people who enjoy eating flesh.
Habit was the third film for British director Simeon Halligan. Halligan had been working as a production designer and art director since the 1990s before making his directorial debut with the horror film Splintered (2010), followed by White Settlers/The Blood Lands (2014).
Habit is shot in and around the Manchester area. This is not a location that is seen much on film. Simeon Halligan’s camera focuses on the grittier, more rundown side of life – its people are the unemployed, the hookers, the criminal underworld – and we hardly see anybody who is not a part of this with the exception of Sally Carmen as Elliot James Langridge’s sister. The locations are unemployment offices, backstreets and alleyways, massage parlours with entrances through side street doorways, the clubbing scene.
I previously encountered Jessica Barden in the hilariously dark British tv series The End of the Fucking World (2017-9) and was delighted to see her turning up again here. She has less a screen persona than she seems like a force of nature that attacks you with a ferocious Yorkshire accent that could be used to chip wood. She has fairly much the same role here as she did in The End of the Fucking World – that of the waif who drags the young guy onto the wrong side of the tracks. In both works, Barden carries the show along after her. However, one of the disappointments of Habit ends up being that Barden enters with such a strong presence that when her character becomes sidelined in the latter half as the story comes to focus on Elliot James Langridge’s descent into the secret underworld, the film is noticeably lacking in the energy she gives it.
I always make a point of reading no more than a capsule premise about a film before going in to see – not even watching a trailer. And that is the best way to watch Habit. It could proceed for some way in as just a regular work about the petty underworld of Manchester, but then about the 35-minute mark, it suddenly heads for horror territory. It is at this point that it is revealed that Elliot James Langridge has been drawn inside a secret society of Cannibals. There is some undeniable shock value to when Langdridge wanders into the downstairs area and finds Jessica Barden and everybody has been feasting on a dead body there.
Not too much is explained about the Secret Society that these people belong to. There is the repeated claim that some people have an innate tendency and are drawn to it, while those who inhabit the twilight areas of society enjoy the need, although there is nothing more given than that. Simeon Halligan pushes it all the way until we get orgies of people devouring and covered in blood. All of which makes for a remarkable little film.
Habit is not related nor should be confused with Larry Fessenden’s kitchen sink vampire film Habit (1997).
Trailer here