‘By the Throat’ Review: A Claustrophobic Domestic Horror Thriller [FrightFest Glasgow 2025 Review]
Hired as a live-in carer for a grieving mother, Lizzy (Patricia Allison) starts out on familiar footing in the claustrophobic psychological thriller By The Throat. Like the protagonists of Saint Maud and She Will—films with similar concepts that go in very different directions—she finds herself pressured into a position of awkward intimacy with a difficult client, in a tale that modernizes some classic elements of the gothic genre.
Arriving in a quiet English town with almost no information about her new employers, Lizzy is tasked with cooking meals and doing housework for a middle-aged woman named Amy (Jeany Spark), who has become a recluse following the death of her child. At first, Amy seems like a ghost in her own house; a silent presence who never leaves her bedroom, and ignores any attempts at conversation. However, when she finally emerges, her behavior is anything but quiet, rapidly creating a fraught atmosphere with her volatile moods.
As the debut feature from director David Luke Rees, By the Throat just had its world premiere at this year’s Glasgow Frightfest, screening to a welcoming audience of horror fans. Playing with familiar but effective domestic conflicts, it opens as a slow-burn psychological thriller with strong performances from its two female leads. Yet as the story builds to its climax, its tone becomes rather uneven, effectively switching genres to a very different brand of horror during its final act.
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I have a real fondness for this style of small-scale psychodrama, drawing inspiration from the uncomfortable power dynamic between homeowners and live-in servants—or in this case the modern gig economy equivalent. We get the impression here that Lizzy isn’t necessarily a trained nurse. She seems to have found Amy and her husband Alex (Rupert Young) via an online ad for a housesitter, and her job ostensibly amounts to performing basic household tasks while Alex is out of town. From Lizzy’s perspective, this probably seems like a normal gig. However genre-savvy viewers will soon pick up on some red flags: A room that Lizzy is expressly forbidden to enter, a series of violent recurring nightmares, and some lingering questions around the death of Amy and Alex’s child, a topic that Alex doesn’t really address before leaving Lizzy alone to take care of his wife.
Technically Lizzy can leave whenever she wants, although we understand why she doesn’t. Along with the economic incentive to stay at work, there’s a very British pressure to avoid making a scene in someone else’s home. And as Lizzy’s interactions with Amy become more unnerving—either due to Amy’s alarming mood swings or because she’s nudging Lizzy toward unearned levels of intimacy—there’s still an obvious reason for Lizzy to make allowances. After all, Amy is struggling with profound and life-changing grief. Some unpleasant outbursts are probably to be expected.
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By The Throat builds around an ideal premise for a low-budget project, working with a limited cast in (for the most part) a single location. Most of the drama focuses on the three leads, with Patricia Allison (Netflix’s Sex Education) as a relatable protagonist, and Jeany Spark (Da Vinci’s Demons) as a convincingly creepy disruptive presence. In a smaller role, Rupert Young (Bridgerton) plays a very familiar type of awkward Englishman.
For much of the succinct 80-minute runtime, By The Throat holds together. David Luke Rees has a good eye for quietly unsettling moments, whether it’s a fakeout where we’re invited to expect a jumpscare, or a discomfiting scene where Amy bullies her new employee into some unwanted day-drinking. As mentioned, however, that final act would have benefited from a rewrite. Despite some earlier foreshadowing toward the story’s bold conclusion, its tonal shift is too abrupt to really work, suggesting that the film’s creative team was aiming for two rather different kinds of movie when they really should have stuck with one.
Summary
This low-budget domestic horror thriller makes good use of classic tropes involving the tension between wealthy families and their household staff, but its atmosphere falters during the final act.
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