MANOR OF DARKNESS movie poster | ©2025 Ridder Films

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Kim Spearman, Louis James, Sarah Alexandra Marks, Rui Shang, Stuart Wolfe-Murray, Stacey O’Shea, Glenn Salvage, Sorcha Verey
Writer: Blake Ridder
Director: Blake Ridder
Distributor: Ridder Films
Release Date: December 9, 2025 (digital, VOD)

MANOR OF DARKNESS begins promisingly, with David Engellau’s HALLOWEEN-esque score accompanying us over a cursed-looking forest landscape, culminating in the isolated title estate.

Lucas (Stuart Wolfe-Murray) is painting something in the basement. He looks up, reacts in horror, and something oozes through the door lock.

We then cut to Laura (Kim Spearman) and her bedridden mother (Stacey O’Shea), who needs surgery. Laura’s job at a café clearly isn’t generating enough to pay for this, even though they’re in the U.K. and have access to National Health Services. (This American reviewer doesn’t understand how the NHS works in terms of cancer treatment, so apologies for confusion about it.)

Laura’s brother Chris (Louis James) is no help with mom. The siblings haven’t spoken after committing a burglary eleven months ago that ended in the kind of disaster that spells really bad karma in a horror movie. Chris’s current brilliant idea is to rope the understandably reluctant Laura into assisting him with a new crime. He and Laura have separate weird experiences, although they don’t compare notes.

With his girlfriend Lisa (Sarah Alexandra Marks) and camera operator pal Andy (Rui Shang), Chris wants to rob a vast old manor, where something worth two million pounds is said to be hidden. Their way in is that the building’s owner, Lucas, wants to hire a crew to make a documentary about the place.

MANOR OF DARKNESS movie poster | ©2025 Ridder Films

The door to the manor is left open for the group. Several unpleasant discoveries are made even before Lucas arrives and things get even weirder. And then they’re stuck in a time loop, with only one member of the group recalling events from the time before.

Writer/director Blake Ridder does well with the human drama, and he stages a suitably scary and dramatic introduction to the time loop. From there, he gets some mileage with a few unexpected moves.

But there are problems. At an hour and twenty-three minutes, MANOR OF DARKNESS has the virtue of brevity, but the time loop doesn’t hit until almost halfway through the movie. This means that we have limited time for the kinds of variations that can make this specific subgenre intriguing.

A flashback to the origins of the house’s curse ought to be helpful, but instead, it creates more unanswered questions. Why don’t we see the curse’s effect on the one person it seems like it should target, and why does it thereafter manifest as a time loop?

These omissions cause MANOR OF DARKNESS to appear insufficiently thought-out. This could be less of an issue if the scares were bigger and bloodier and/or the loop resulted in cleverer strategies. As it is, we feel like we get less than we’re promised at the outset.

Spearman makes Laura serious, guilt-ridden and intelligent. James pulls off Chris’s cockiness but keeps it plausible that he’s got hidden depths. Marks finds the humor in the naïve Lisa and Shang is sympathetic as a man in dire emotional straits. Wolfe-Murray brings conviction to Lucas’s multiple aspects.

MANOR OF DARKNESS is moderately entertaining and has impressive music courtesy of composer Engellau, but it doesn’t fulfill its potential.

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