She Never Died: Canadian genre wiz Audrey Cummings delivers a finger-fuelled fallen angel, flaky sidekicks and stylish horror
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B-plus
I suppose an all-purpose oeuvre like “genre” had to be invented eventually, as the lines between horror, sci-fi and super-hero movies dissolved.
She Never Died, by Canada’s increasingly self-assured oeuvre queen Audrey Cummings (Berkshire County, Darken), is a classic example – a supernatural story with comic overtones about a super-strong and invulnerable “fallen angel” with off-putting habits, foremost among them: eating people’s fingers for the marrow.
Oluniké Adeliyi getting very angry as a captured Lacey in She Never Died.
The movie is a sequel of sorts to 2015’s He Never Died, which starred Henry Rollins, and it’s written by that movie’s director Jason Krawczyk. It’s a parallel story about a woman (Olunike Adeliyi) named Lacey living the life of a homeless person so as best to go unnoticed. Like Rollins’ character, Lacey is an immortal. Unlike Rollins character, she cares.
A girl’s gotta eat, but if she must, she might as well eat people who deserve it. So, Lacey takes to hunting criminals, her taste for digits eventually attracting the attention of a cynical police detective named Godfrey (Peter MacNeill). Knowing a good bad-thing when he sees it, he declines to arrest her, but points her in the direction of the worst people he knows but just can’t seem to arrest.
Atop the worst list: brother and sister psychopaths and human traffickers Terrence and Meredith (Noah Dalton Danby and Michelle Nolden). Lacey’s life is further complicated when, in the process, she saves an ebullient street-wise young woman Suzzie (Kiana Madeira), who insists on becoming her sidekick.
Madeira is great in this role, constantly asking questions about Lacey’s powers and squeezing reluctant answers out of her, further fouling her mood as the inevitable showdown between these three odd partners and the sibling psychos nears. There will be near-death scrapes, last minute rescues and escapes. And there will be blood.
Cummings’ style has developed since her slasher-film debut in Berkshire County. The camera sometimes seems to have wings of its own as it follows our protagonist via crane shots and ground-level angles. The light and the dark mix nicely, and the tension is maintained throughout.
And, when provoked, Adeliyi has an awesome look of menace that is full-out scary. She is a bad-ass fallen angel whose glare is practically a death sentence.
What becomes clear in the final act is that Lacey is part of a bigger picture that, for the moment, is in development in Krawczyk’s mind (he is currently creating a TV series, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, based on the scenario in these two movies. She Never Died is open-ended, and promises an eventual clash on a celestial level.
Who knows? Since they’re two of a kind, we might even see Adeliyi get to compare bad attitudes with Henry Rollins down the road.
She Never Died. Directed by Audrey Cummings. Written by Jason Krawczyk. Starring Oluniké Adeliyi, Kiana Madeira and Peter MacNeill. Opens Friday, December 6 at Cineplex Odeon Yonge/Dundas.