Crushed (2025)
Directed & Written by Simon Rumley
Starring Steve Oram, May Nattaporn Rawddon, Margaux Dietrich, Ting Sue, Thaweesak Alexander Thananan, Christina Ferriera, Sahajak Boonthanakit, Nadech Chatwin, & Kevin Lea Davies.

★★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains
MINOR SPOILERS.
Turn back, lest ye be spoiled.

The always unsettling and provocative Simon Rumley’s Crushed played Fantastic Fest 2025, easily one of the most important films at the festival because of how it tackles morality. Crushed follows Father Daniel (Steve Oram), his Thai wife May (May Nattaporn Rawddon, and their daughter Olivia (Margaux Dietrich), whose lives are turned upside down after Olivia first witnesses a ‘crush‘ video featuring a cat then, even worse, goes missing. The priest and his wife do everything they can to find their daughter, though they descend down a dark path before coming out the other side back into the light; that is, if there’s any light left at all to salvage.

Rumley’s consistently made horrors/thrillers that are challenging in the sense he’s typically confronting something terrifying about society, in one form or another, from his haunting confrontation of British aristocracy in The Living and the Dead, to his look at post-9/11 violence in Red White & Blue, to his take on the psychological terrors of consumer capitalism in Fashionista. No different with Crushed, as Rumley depicts a crisis of morality in a corrupted world that moves, as well as pushes people, further and further away from the spiritual.
A wonderful juxtaposition in Crushed is the one between Father Daniel and Olivia’s kidnapper, Stanley (Christian Ferriera); a juxtaposition of foreigners in Thailand and of fathers. Later in the film, May laments the presence of men like Stanley whom she says have been destroying her country “for far too long.” The first way Daniel and Stanley are juxtaposed is as foreigners in Thailand, Daniel from England and Stanley from South Africa: one brings positivity, the other brings negativity (to put it mildly). The second way the two men are juxtaposed is as fathers with very disparate ideas about what it means to be a father to their children. Stanley reveals he himself has a child, which is upsetting considering what he nearly allows to happen to Olivia. Daniel is both a father in the literal sense and a Father in the religious sense, each position coming with its own sense of justice, and, at times, conflicting visions of morality. When it comes down to it, God’s rules are rigid, and maybe God had no problem sitting by watching while his only son was being brutalised and nailed to a cross, but the average human father can’t be expected to not take action when their child is being abused in the most depraved of ways.

“That’s what should happen to you
if you do something bad—
something equally bad in return.”

Why does God let terrible, disgusting things happen to people, especially the most vulnerable? This is a question that preoccupies people in real life and one of Crushed‘s most prominent themes, outright articulated by Olivia when she questions her father about God. She tells Daniel she believes God is both “a bad father and a bad God” because he allowed something horrific to happen to his son and clearly allows similarly horrific things to happen to the humans he supposedly created and loves. This is ultimately what drives Daniel to go down the path he and May choose in order to feel as if justice is served after Olivia’s ordeal, not wanting to be the absent father that Olivia sees in God.

The end of Rumley’s film is a masterful bit of storytelling when a brief reunion between Olivia and her cat Missy leaves Father Daniel questioning himself and what he’s allowed to happen in the name of justice. Crushed, like the majority of Rumley’s work, pulls no punches. While there’s nothing overly graphic in the film, it will leave some with a queasy feeling. Crushed sifts through the darkness into which moral quandaries can lead us when we’re confronted with the deep, vast darkness lurking within others. There are no easy questions, nor easy answers in Rumley’s film, but if you were expecting otherwise then you must not be familiar with the director-writer’s brand of social terrors.