Brian O’Malley’s Let Us Prey follows a group of people manning a forgotten police station in a backwater Scottish town when strange and violent events start to happen testing officers and inmates alike.

I really enjoyed this film for the most part. The story was really engaging with a sinister supernatural element to it that boiled just beneath the surface and is rarely directly referenced, most of the time the goings on are attributed to everyone going mad as a result of their incarceration or simply being in this forgotten town.

Setting the majority of it in the police station was a nice choice and really set up a claustrophobic atmosphere, it was easy to enter the mindset of any of the characters and understand what would be driving them insane as the time passes. Like Coherence I really felt like I was in the middle of these disputes which made it feel all the more unsettling.

The cast were excellent particularly Liam Cunningham as the enigmatic Six who just oozes a sense of unsettling menace. He remains silent through a good chunk of the film and when he finally does speak it really feels like something horrible is going to happen. His character was great, casually rattling off information about the darkest secrets the people hold

Pollyanna McIntosh’s Rachel Heggie character was compelling to watch as well, I liked how she was the wet behind the ears rookie launched into this terrible  situation with no experience to inform her actions in trying to deal with it.

I felt that the plot was a little too formulaic and hit quite a few of the horror genre tropes but in general that wasn’t really such a bad thing for me since the tropes aren’t used so offensively as to be unwatchable. Generally the film was very stylishly shot with some great ominous visuals and an excellent score really adding to the atmosphere.
O’Malley’s love for the horror genre is fairly clear in the way things are structured, the ending confrontation feels like an 80s slasher film akin to Halloween with a relentless, seemingly unkillable pursuer. Naturally, the film is incredibly violent and features lots of brutal imagery. Some of this is played for laughs and some is played for shock value. It never goes as far as being gratuitous but it does come close to the mark a few times.