This debut feature from husband-and-wife team Craig Alexander and Shelly Higgs received its world premiere on Saturday at the Raindance Film Festival, and their film has much in common with another title in Raindance 2025's horror strand: Dejan Babosek's Hole. Each film is a three-hander centring on a corpse which, rather inconveniently, comes back to life; but while there aren't a surfeit of laughs to be had from Babosek's grimly effective film, humour serves as a cornerstone in irreverent horror-comedy Snatchers. Alexander and Higgs' film is a riff on Robert Louis Stevenson's 1884 short story "The Body Snatcher", itself inspired by the string of real-life murders committed by two Williams, Burke and Hare.
Snatchers transplants the story from one capital city to another, with the action relocated from 19th-century Edinburgh to a dystopian near-future Canberra. As a student, I misspent half a decade in Auld Reekie and can provide confirmation, if any were needed, that it's a fine place to live when the Fringe isn't on. But I've also visited Canberra and consider it to be one of the world's more underrated capitals, so it's pleasing to see a movie that's proudly set and filmed there. Two of Snatchers' main characters share names with their counterparts in Stevenson's story, although Macfarlane is truncated to Mac, and Fettes—in a move that will make many of the author's fellow Dunediners wince—is pronounced as a single syllable.
Mac (Alexander) and Fettes (Justin Hosking) are hospital orderlies who plan on escaping their impoverished lives by entering the burgeoning black market organ trade. Given their jobs, the pair have reasonable access to a supply of dead bodies, and when the immaculate, unclaimed corpse of a young Jane Doe (Hannah McKenzie) turns up in the hospital, Mac and Fettes think they've won the jackpot. With the aid of a surreal dance number, the duo smuggle the body to a warehouse where they prepare to harvest its organs; but just before the first incision is made, Jane comes back to life. From this point on, the wily Jane gets inside the heads of her rattled abductors and proceeds to play them off against each other.
Snatchers is not the first comedic take on this material—John Landis' unfunny yet oddly watchable Burke & Hare and a 1972 film of the same name both tried to reconcile these hideous murders with cheap laughs, and the results in each case were predictably atonal. But Alexander and Higgs have delivered a well-judged effort here, and by basing their film on Stevenson's story they place a much-needed buffer between these characters and the real-life crimes (setting the film on the other side of the world also helps). The performances are likeable, with Alexander proving good value in front of the camera, while McKenzie and Hosking keep things bubbling along nicely as the film heads towards its terrific final twist.
Darren Arnold
Images: Little Train Creative
