The most interesting way to view Brendan Haley’s gay film Scorch Marks is as a reimagining of End Game, the celebrated tragi-comic absurdist one-act play written by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett in 1957, rather than through traditional tropes of mainstream sci-fi horror.

The film opens with a house on a hilltop overlooking a coastal bay and, on the horizon, an unexplained apocalypse. A distressed, angry young man named Beckett wakes from a troubled night’s sleep and, peering through window blinds, finds the world outside and within the house weirdly coloured by a red crimson glow. Any visual resemblance to The Ghost and Mrs Muir ends here, as this is no house inhabited by the soul of a romantic ghost. Beckett is constantly faced by the ghost of his former partner, Joel who has returned to torment and scare him in a damaged world with no apparent end. Something sinister, oppressive, and scary pervades as we wait and watch while Beckett contemplates his endgame.

Samuel Beckett was an avid chess player, and the term endgame in the film’s dialogue refers to the conclusion of a chess game. Scorch Marks is itself a force that burns the surface, with Haley attempting a dimly visible form of metaphysical chess between two players.

The first part of the film is controlled and menacing, featuring widescreen photography by Andrew J Ceperley that alternates dark blue and crimson red lighting with beautifully lit nighttime scenes and softly muted daylight colours. At times the lighting is far too dim to render what we are seeing as plausible.  The soundtrack is rich and varied, including what sounds like goblins from the soundtrack of a Mario Bava film, providing the feel of a modestly budgeted American cousin of the Italian maestro of the macabre.

Dialogue with literary references is intriguing, although the film overuses four-letter expletives without relying on more interesting expressions of faces to convey emotion. During the middle section, complex flashbacks involving backstories of both men also introduce unexplained characters and a folklore ghost which threaten to derail the film.

Scorch Marks regains momentum during its tight running time of 90 minutes with a virtual two-hander anchored by Brandon Shypkowski as Beckett and Chris Salvatore as Joel. There is enough chemistry between both to strengthen intense enclosed interior scenes. Underlying gay references feel organic, including a finely played sexual encounter with a straight man, while the thinly veiled homoeroticism between the two men of Beckett’s source material provides relevant cultural resonance.

As a challenging attempt to adapt theatre into film, which may not totally work, Scorch Marks remains an intelligent and ambitious sci-fi horror addition to the canon of contemporary gay cinema. It is welcome, with a brush-up on Samuel Beckett recommended and a promising director to watch out for.     (https://dekkoo.com/scorch-marks)