‘The Restoration at Grayson Manor’ Review: A Haunting, Hilarious Queer Melodrama [Fantastic Fest 2025]
A movie like The Restoration at Grayson Manor relies heavily on a delicate tonal balance, not just between comedy and horror, but between a dozen smaller explorations of subgenres and emotional resonances. Get it wrong, even for a second, and the film’s darkly comic tone will topple over one edge or another, giving you a film that’s either too nasty to be relatable, or too sympathetic to be scary.
That Grayson Manor manages to keep its tone on track at all, amid two very strong performances from lead actors Chris Colfer and Alice Krige, is in itself something of a miracle. That it does it while also delivering one of the most entertaining horror films you’ll find on the festival circuit this year is something extraordinary.
Grayson Manor was once a proud family estate home to great men and the women who supported them, generations of Graysons dominating the Irish countryside. Now, the slightly decrepit house is home to only two, matriarch Jacqueline (Krige) and her queer piano playing son Boyd (Colfer). The surviving Graysons absolutely hate each other, because Jacqueline believes her sole remaining purpose is to preserve the family legacy, and her son is too interested in bringing men home for sex to care at all about giving her an heir.
It’s a recipe for venomous disaster, and sure enough, just as Boyd’s about to flee Grayson Manor for good, an accident leaves him without his hands. Jacqueline, devoted mom-ster that she is, pours all of the family’s resources into drafting doctors to give Boyd the latest and greatest in prosthetics, so advanced that they’ll bond with his system and move with a thought, just like real hands. So, we’ve got a mother and son who hate each other, experimental medical technology, and theoretically detachable hands that can probe the son’s spite-filled subconscious. What could possibly go wrong?
Yes, this is a killer hand movie in the proud tradition of The Beast With Five Fingers, and director Glenn McQuaid (who also co-wrote with Clay McLeod Chapman) is absolutely in tune with that kind of old-school, supernatural thriller vibe. It’s all a bit of fun, but it’s played deadly serious for everyone involved, giving the film an earnest boost amid the camp and the more over-the-top visual effects. The longer the film goes, the more you start to feel you’re watching one of those classic Amicus Productions British horror films of the 1960s and 1970s, a film devoted to atmosphere and Technicolor shocks above all else.
But The Restoration at Grayson Manor is not just a throwback. By positioning Boyd as a piano player who hopes his talent might help him escape his family one day, then taking away his hands, the film immediately calls up questions of agency, power dynamics, how the world works when your parents control the purse and your literal physical wellbeing. In giving us the story of a young queer man desperate to find his own place in the world, then ripping all sense of power away from him, the film asks us to consider our own place in heteronormative balances at a time when queer kids the world over are deprived of owning their narrative. Once disaster strikes and the plot kicks in, it’s a literal fight for survival for Boyd, and that adds a layer of gravity to the whole narrative.
Thematic weight aside, though, the true main attraction of this film is the dynamic between Colfer and Krige, and their grasp of the melodrama at the heart of this story means that The Restoration at Grayson Manor soars. Colfer, seething throughout yet desperate to be vulnerable and open with someone, can break your heart and make you cackle over bitchy dialogue in the span of the same scene, going toe-to-toe even with Krige’s seasoned might.
One of our finest genre actresses who’s turned in some of the best horror performances of the past decade with films like Gretel and Hansel and She Will, Krige channels Katharine Hepburn, Delphine Seyrig, and Bette Davis into one unforgettable villainess. Yet even when she’s at her most arch, communing with the mansion as though it’s the only child she has left, Krige finds space for tenderness, for grief, for shadows of the person she once was. It’s a masterful performance, and it makes everything else in the film work.
The Restoration at Grayson Manor emerges from this festival season as a raucous, beautifully paced, horror-comedy romp. Once this film gets its hands around you, it won’t let go, and I can’t wait for a wider audience to find it.
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The Restoration at Grayson Manor
Summary
The Restoration at Grayson Manor emerges from this festival season as a raucous, beautifully paced, horror-comedy romp.
Categorized: Reviews
