Requiem arrives on DVD
Fresh from its beeb outing, Requiem is released on DVD from tomorrow.
“For me, stories often coalesce when several apparently unrelated ideas collide, and I suddenly notice that they might actually be part of the very same story. Requiem grew out of just such a collision. The first element was my lifelong passion for scary movies… The second key ingredient was a fascination with the nature of personal identity… The final element was not so much a story idea, as a mythological underpinning. I’d been reading about an alchemist and mystic, and I discovered that they had some very intriguing beliefs, based on a world view that was both idiosyncratic, yet surprisingly coherent. Suddenly, everywhere I looked, these philosophies started cropping up, in books and newspaper articles, on TV and in museum exhibits. And it just seemed too good to ignore.” – writer Kris Mrksa
From the team behind The Missing comes a psychological thriller with a difference.
In 1994, a toddler disappeared from a small Welsh village, never to be seen again. Twenty three years later, in London, the mother of rising cello star Matilda Gray commits suicide, without apparent reason.
Among her possessions, Matilda discovers tantalising evidence that links her mother to the Welsh girl’s disappearance all those years ago. And so grief-stricken Matilda travels to Wales, determined to explore this mystery, even if it means unravelling her own identity. In the process, she uncovers long buried secrets in this remote community – including one secret more bizarre, terrifying and dangerous than anything she could have imagined. Dark otherworldly forces are gathering – they have been waiting many years for Matilda to arrive.
If every life is a story, then for most of us, it’s our parents who write the opening chapters. They record and remember our early childhoods as we cannot, acting as trusted witnesses to our lives. But what if you discovered that your parent might have lied to you? That almost everything they’d said about their own history, and yours, might have been untrue?
Requiem takes its inspiration from the psychological horror films of the late 1960s and ‘70s – Rosemary’s Baby, Don’t Look Now, and The Innocents, avoiding easy answers, and instead playing on uncertainty and ambiguity. It’s also a rumination on the nature of memory, identity, and loss, hinging on a universal truth: that when a parent dies, a part of you dies with them.
“About three years ago, Kris [series writer] sent me a two-page treatment. I was immediately struck by how strong it was. I was intrigued by its mix of genres and by the fact that it was influenced by lots of films I really admire, including Picnic At Hanging Rock, Don’t Look Now and Rosemary’s Baby.” -Willow Grylls, Executive Producer
Requiem arrives as a six-part series with a behind-the-scenes special feature on DVD from tomorrow (19th March 2018) courtesy of Acorn Media International.
