Piper review – Elizabeth Hurley dances a merry tune in cheesy rat-based folk horror

The premise for this horror exercise is a potent notion, one that might have yielded a chilling work of Mitteleuropean folk horror: the Pied Piper of Hamelin is a supernatural being still kicking around the German town, luring children to their deaths as punishment for parents’ sins. Unfortunately, the film-makers fluff the brief, with too much showing and telling and not enough simmering mystery. That said, the end result is so comically tawdry and silly you can’t but wonder if its all a bit of a tongue-in-cheek goof, a gag that Elizabeth Hurley at least seems to be in on, judging by her ripe, almost-winking performance. Let’s hope she had fun shooting it and got to keep some of the lush knitted jumpers her character wears throughout.

Hurley plays Liz Haines, a high school history teacher who arrives in Hamelin with her American-accented teenage daughter Amy (Mia Jenkins) to take a job at a local private school. Part of the deal is that mother and daughter get not only a free school place for Amy but also a medieval house to stay in. Later, it turns out to have been occupied by another teacher whose child we see killing himself in the opening scene. Soon Amy’s fingers are being nibbled by rats in the night, while other rodents bedevil Liz in the kitchen, scurrying about despite a colleague’s insistence that the town has no rats whatsoever.

In response, Amy grows up terribly fast, and goes from clutching a dolly in bed to accepting the romantic overtures of a Scots-accented swain with boyband hair named Luca (Jack Stewart). He and his witchy granny (Tara Fitzgerald) try to protect Amy with special pills and an insistence that she must have faith – but something wicked is stirring in the city’s catacombs and the local church’s confessionals. (Side note: whatever happened to the colour promised by the “pied” part of the Pied Piper’s sobriquet?)

Director Anthony Waller lays the cheese on thick in the final act, with children sleepwalking like little zombies while singing a ditty that sounds like a scale for teaching kids about minor keys. There’s just too much going on, with the romance between the two teenagers especially redundant, but perhaps that’s an indication of who the film-makers think this nonsense is for.