From Lynch to Haneke: my cinematic inspirations for The Ones Below

With his taut debut feature The Ones Below, writer-director David Farr wrings creeping dread from an ostensibly ordinary domestic setting.

Mother-to-be Kate (Clémence Poésy) and her partner Justin (Stephen Campbell Moore) are settling into their new flat when another expectant couple (Jon and Theresa) move in downstairs. After the ladies become friends, Kate and Justin hold an awkward dinner party where a tragic accident occurs. Intense emotional strain threatens to overwhelm Kate as the residential backstreets of north London’s well-to-do Canonbury – and especially the flats themselves – become increasingly unbearable.

A lean, quiet psychological drama that lulls viewers in with a false sense of security, The Ones Below eschews ostentatious horror shocks to glide between oneiric scenes that become gradually more unsettling. Lovers of nerve-shredding psychological suspense will lap it up, though pregnant viewers are advised to avoid the film as if it were a night of vodka and chain-smoking.

On a brittle March afternoon in Covent Garden we caught up with Farr, an associate director of the RSC, to chew over his film’s cinematic influences and inspirations. Farr also wrote the glamorous TV adaptation of John le Carré’s 1993 novel The Night Manager currently thrilling viewers with its jet-setting glamour and steely intrigue, so we asked him about that too.

Director: Michael Haneke

Hidden, which I think is probably my favourite film of the last 15 years, has this creeping sense of unease and malevolence that you don’t understand.

It’s very real and its politics are absolutely real and it says something very specific about the politics of France and its relationship with Algeria. Some of the most frightening scenes are so simple. The scene where he has a go at a cyclist for going the wrong way up a street is probably the scene that I remember the most. It’s completely bizarre. The guy is barely in it. It’s an absolutely brilliant bit of cinema because in a moment it captures the city’s terror; that actually what he’s about to go through, this remarkable relationship with this Algerian guy, it’s actually sitting in the city the whole time. It’s sitting in every casual relationship, every cleaner you walk past. It reminds us of the inequalities in the city constantly.

My film, in a very different way, is a film about the city and perhaps that’s where the films connect, in that The Ones Below is also about alienation in the city, except that it’s about a woman who because she is pregnant suddenly feels very alone. Approaching something very primal in a city that doesn’t really do primal any more – it does organic restaurants and civilisation. Her primal fears are something that isolates her from her community.

Director: Roman Polanski

The house in the movie is a character just as much as it is in Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby (1968). It’s almost in every Polanski movie, this terror that it could all be in your head, that you’re the one that’s twisted and evil.

Clémence has more similarities to [Catherine] Deneuve in my head than she does to Mia Farrow. There’s a deliberately B-movie thing going on in Rosemary’s Baby that I love but is slightly different to the austerity of my film. There’s a touch of B-movie in my film, which I enjoy, but not as much as Rosemary’s Baby. Polanski has a love of the B-movie. Obviously because of his upbringing and his extraordinary, unique childhood [as a child Polanski survived the holocaust in Poland] he has a degraded view of mankind, [so] life is a kind of B-movie really. It’s ridiculous, grotesque and very scary, but it’s also funny. I think my film is funny and I think I share that use of humour.

Repulsion has a kind of austerity and I find that frightening and I actually don’t find Rosemary’s Baby that frightening, as I do Repulsion. When Clémence/Kate is falling apart in the film it might well be that it’s her mental descent that we’re witnessing. Repulsion was a brilliant film because it introduced that idea of a stranger coming into London, but there are hundreds of thousands of non-British people living in London and somehow the cinema doesn’t often represent that. Probably for its depiction of London as well, Repulsion is very influential film for me.

Director: David Lynch

Harold Pinter used to talk about exploring the “cockroach under the kitchen sink”. Lynch famously almost literally goes under. In Blue Velvet, he goes into the grass so you have the colours of suburban perfection, picket fences and the like, which always influences me a lot. I saw the film when it came out, when I was about 16, 17. I was from a small town called Guildford. Average small town, very Thatcherite. Someone like Lynch comes along and goes: “What’s under there?” That was a completely unforgettable moment for me.

Director: Philip Kaufman

I was very interested in Body Snatchers, the Philip Kaufman movie, which I really love. I was watching it again and I was very interested in how quiet the film is. I prefer this to an almost conventional kind of proper horror movie. There’s not much music, and the sound – as is so often the case in the 70s – is exhilaratingly good. There’s always announcements and radios going.

Watching [the 1956 Siegel version] again I find the communist element a bit apparent. It’s still an amazing film and what’s best is to watch them both, but the Kaufman is a really well-made movie and the acting is great.

Oh, it’s one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever seen. And I think it did influence me a lot because of that sense that a face can just lie. There is nothing more frightening than that the human face can lie and Body Snatchers is the best quintessential example of this. Also, Donald Sutherland is one of my favourite actors and I’ll watch anything with him in.

I’m very proud of it. Obviously, it’s kind of glamorous and it’s got quite a heavyweight quality, in that it’s dealing with, as le Carré does brilliantly, dark psychological issues around identity. But it does it in a sweeping way and maybe that tension people find interesting. Le Carré is a great writer. Some of his books will become classics. Because of this slight British tendency to put into literary fiction things which we find serious and into genre fiction things we don’t, [his reputation] slightly suffers from that, like everybody’s does.

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is just a great novel – it’s Graham Greene, it’s Conrad. I wasn’t thinking about my film but I absolutely love that kind of genre where a spy movie becomes an interrogation of identity. That’s where spy movies become interesting. When a person has to pretend to be someone else and go into a situation and they are therefore unsure of who they are. It was entirely about ‘who is Jonathan Pine?’ and that’s why he has a series of different names, identities and changes. Will anyone ever find out who he is, least of all himself? And perhaps the one person who might know him better than anyone else is the person who he’s trying to destroy.

The Ones Below was backed by the BFI Film Fund.