Director/Screenplay – Erlingur Thoroddsen, Producers – Jeffrey Greenstein, Bernard Kira, Yariv Lerner, Tanner Mobley, Les Weldon & Jonathan Yunger, Photography – Daniel Katz, Music – Christopher Young, Visual Effects Supervisor – Stanislav Dragiev, Visual Effects – Nu Boyana Portugal (Supervisor – Pedro Domingo), Special Effects Supervisor – Nikolay Fartunkov, Creature Effects Designer – Neill Gorton, Production Design – Antonello Rubino. Production Company – Millennium Media.
Cast
Charlotte Hope (Melanie Walker), Julian Sands (Gustafson), Aoibhe O’Flanagan (Zoe), Kate Nichols (Nancy), Oliver Savell (Colin), Philipp Christopher (Franklin), Pippa Winslow (Alice Fleischer), Louise Gold (Katherine Fleischer)
Plot
Melanie Walker is a flautist with an orchestra under the conductor Gustafson. They are preparing for an upcoming concert but plans are thrown awry by the death of composer Katherine Fleischer. Gustafson had been intending to premiere Katherine’s last concerto. Melanie was a pupil of Katherine’s and steps forward and offers to find it. However, Katherine’s sister Alice says that Katherine did not want the concerto played and tried to destroy it. Melanie breaks into the villa and steals it, although finds that the manuscript is incomplete. Melanie knows the way Katherine thought and tells Gustafson that she is certain that she can complete the last movement in time for the concert. However, as she sets to work, the music starts to create unsettling and disturbing things in any person who hears it. Melanie comes to believe that it ties back to the music used in the fairytale The Pied Piper of Hamelin.
The Piper was the fourth film from Icelandic director Erlingur Thoroddsen who had previously made the horror films Child Eater (2016) and Rift (2017) and the thriller Cold (2023).
The Piper is produced by Millennium Media, a company formed by several former Cannon Films associates. Millennium have a habit of buying up the rights to previously successful properties and spinning off further sequels, remakes or reboots as with the likes of The Wicker Man (2006), Rambo (2008), The Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call: New Orleans (2009), Conan the Barbarian (2011), The Mechanic (2011), Texas Chainsaw (2013), Leatherface (2017), Hellboy (2019) and Rambo: Last Blood (2019), among others.
While most of Millennium’s films tend to be action movies or be rehashes of popular franchises, The Piper is an original production and one that aims in more culturally elevated areas than their usual horror fare – it would make an interesting companion piece to Tar (2022). It is nicely photographed and Erlingur Thoroddsen pays careful attention to making the detail of life in a classical orchestra look convincing.
Julian Sands as the conductor Gustafson
British actress Charlotte Hope has been a rising name in various British arts tv programs and serious dramatic films – she even turned up in several episodes of Game of Thrones (2011-9) and had a supporting part in The Nun (2018). Here she gives a serious and intent performance. She engages sympathy to such extent we never even question her actions when she breaks into the dead woman’s villa (twice) to steal her composition.
The most famous name in the film is Julian Sands. The Piper was one of the last 2-3 films that Sands made and was released after his disappearance and subsequent discovery in a mountaineering death in 2023. As the conductor, Sands plays fierce and harshly autocratic. It is a well worthwhile performance for Sands to go out on – the end credits are appropriately dedicated ‘To our master, Julian’.
What I did have was a problem with the film’s concept. It works fine as a work of occult horror – of Charlotte Hope uncovering a piece of music that she discovers is a
Cursed Object that causes people who listen to it to start to bleed, become zombified, even be driven to commit suicide. However, the film also tries to tie this in to the
Fairytale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and suggest that the piece of music was the one that was played by the Pied Piper. We get assorted rats running around in the background and one child disappears, but the film has to distort the fairytale to make its story work. In the original, the music the piper played was a charm that lured rats and children away; here the piece of music seems one that has occult chords that causes bad things to happen to people.
Charlotte Hope and Julian Sands
Moreover, The Piper is a film where Erlingur Thoroddsen establishes good atmosphere but never lets any of it pay off. The film broods, there is the odd nasty thing lurking but you sit back at the end and not a single thing that is memorable or scary in terms of horror effect comes to mind. It is tepid pay off for a film that otherwise does an impeccable job in the set up and promises good things.
The Piper should not be confused with Anthony Waller’s The Piper (2023), which also a horror film that came out the same year and concerned people digging into the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamlin.
The story of the Pied Piper has appeared on film with the tv movie The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1957) starring Van Johnson, The Pied Piper (1972) and the Czech animated film The Pied Piper (1986). More recently, there was the South Korean The Piper (2015), which placed an emphasis on the horror element. The character of the Pied Piper has also appeared in Shrek Forever After (2010) and the tv series Once Upon a Time (2011-8).
