What Remains

Something peculiar strikes as we're lying in makeshift beds in an old medical school. Somewhere between listening to a disembodied child's voice recite a creepy nursery rhyme and the entrance of a man who stalks between the vulnerable audience members with the calmness of a graveyard, a thrill ripples through the room: only dark and dream-like possibilities await. 

What Remains has been a long held dream for horror film fan and Grid Iron co-Artistic Director, Ben Harrison. Together with composer and singer David Paul Jones, they have finally realised their dark fantasies.

Jones plays The Maestro. An obsessive pianist, he greets the audience at the start of its promenade around the University of Edinburgh's medical school and anatomy museum. He plays a complex, beautiful piece on the grand piano. It leaves musical clues of what awaits and nursery rhyme idyll is interrupted by terrifying dissonance.

As the macabre ratchets up, What Remains explores the idea that music can create madness as well as joy. But this is not a slasher horror. There is nothing that goes bump in the night. Rather it creeps under the skin by pulling gauze over the audience's eyes alongside weird piano lessons and ringing phones.

Like all horror films, it succumbs to a bout of silliness towards the end. A talking piano means it does not quite hold its creepy nerve. But with great use of the medical school's eerie spaces, dark corridors and Gothic skeletons, combined with a chilling soundtrack, What Remains certainly stays with you.