‘So, you call yourself conceptualists, do you?” says the straight-arrow detective quizzing Melissa (Chelsea Edge), a cool-customer art student with three long lacerations on her face. “Mostly. Ashley wasn’t,” Melissa replies. “Unless anti-conceptualism is a concept. She was always about being in the moment. Expressionism. Impressionism.” End of Term has a fondness for bandying around the art-theory big talk, but this silly but stolidly genre project could sorely use a conceptual cutting edge itself.
Melissa is getting questioned after being found strapped to a chair in the blood-splattered basement of Ford Barrington art school. Strangely, there are no bodies – except for that of snooty art critic Damian Self (Ronald Pickup) in the nearby space for the students’ end-of-term exhibition. In Usual Suspects-style piecemeal flashbacks, Melissa fills in the police on the buildup to the butchery and the halls of residence gallery of Cluedo-ish suspects, including her vampish one-time lover Ashley (Nicole Posener), the suave Professor Leigh (Peter Davison, a former Doctor in Doctor Who), and wild card Garth Stroman (Ivan Kaye), a rumoured ghost of a Byronic artist obsessed with a credo that art must involve pain.
Director Mat Menony’s fusion of country-house whodunnit and slasher flick is campy without sparking much excitement. There is barely any heat in the flurry of bitching and bedhopping that serves as preamble, the dialogue is trite across the board, and there is a will-this-do? quality to the featured artwork. Fictional works of art are notoriously hard to pull off, but the ludicrous S&M chair – which proclaims “see no evil” to the occupant while jabbing at their eye cavities – won’t be bothering the Turner prize.
Critically, we never find out Melissa’s artistic principles either: instead, she serves mechanically as the sullen narrator of this avant gardists’ pantomime. Milking the inane artsploitation angle – with Stroman hellbent on achieving his grisly magnus opus Incruxiatis Veritas – would have been fine if the film were not so stilted and drawn out. The artist has to suffer, says the hoary revenant, but End of Term didn’t have to inflict it on the audience too.
• End of Term is available on digital platforms on 2 October.
