A Ghost Story Plugged Straight into the National Grid
Some horror films whisper their themes; The Power flicks off the lights, locks the doors, and screams them down a hospital corridor. Set in early 1970s London during a miners’ strike that forces nightly blackouts, Corinna Faith’s film doesn’t just use the darkness as atmosphere—it treats it like an accomplice. What starts as a simple “nurse alone in a creepy building” setup turns into a rage-fueled haunting about abuse, silence, and institutions that run just fine as long as no one turns the lights on. It’s a ghost story with a conscience, and just enough jump scares to make you reconsider every flickering hallway bulb you’ve ever ignored.
Welcome to the Night Shift from Hell
Rose Williams’ Valerie—Val to literally everyone who wants something from her—is a freshly minted nurse sent to spend her first night at the East London Royal Infirmary. This would be terrifying enough even without a power cut, because the hospital is the kind of place where paint, humanity, and funding all seem to have peeled away at the same time. But thanks to the miners’ strike, the building gets plunged into near-total darkness, with only emergency generators and bad vibes to guide the way. If you’ve ever thought, “Hospitals are creepy even in daylight,” The Power answers, “Oh, honey, you have no idea.”
Val: Good Girl, Bad Memories, Worse Night
Williams plays Val as a walking tension headache. She’s polite, eager to please, and clearly terrified of doing anything wrong—which, in this particular environment, is code for “vulture bait.” Raised in an orphanage, she’s learned to survive through compliance, and you can feel that brittle “yes, Matron” reflex in every movement. The beauty of her performance is that she never turns Val into a cliché victim; instead, she’s a pressure cooker. Every flinch, every tight smile hints at a past she’s trying to bury, right up until the building—and something inside it—refuses to let her.
The Hospital: NHS Gothic with Malevolent Wallpaper
The East London Royal Infirmary is easily one of the film’s best characters. Every corridor looks like it smells of disinfectant and resignation. Shadows swallow corners; wards feel abandoned even when people are technically in them. The architecture screams “old authority”: high ceilings, echoing floors, and rooms that seem designed more to contain problems than solve them. Once the blackout begins, the place turns into a maze lit by torches and oil lamps, which is really just the 1970s saying, “We can make Victorian horror too.” The setting isn’t just spooky window dressing—it’s a physical manifestation of an institution built on power imbalances and silence.
Matron and Company: Management by Intimidation
Diveen Henry’s Matron could curdle milk just by entering a room. She runs the hospital staff like a military unit where compassion is a privilege, not a job requirement. Val is quickly reminded she’s at the bottom of the pecking order, and every supervisor or doctor higher up the food chain seems to take that as an invitation to be either dismissive, predatory, or both. The male staff, particularly Charlie Carrick’s Franklyn and Theo Barklem-Biggs’ Neville, ooze the casual entitlement of men who know the system is designed to ignore whatever they do. Correct diagnosis: the real horror is the patriarchy, the ghost is just there for emphasis.
Darkness, But Make It Thematic
The blackout is more than a convenient excuse for jump scares and spooky silhouettes—though the film does deliver those with admirable enthusiasm. In the darkness, patients become shapes, nurses become shadows, and the hierarchy that seemed so rigid in daylight becomes something more slippery, even sinister. The power going out becomes metaphorical pretty quickly: who has power when the lights go off, who loses it, and who takes advantage of being unseen? The miners may have triggered the blackout, but the hospital already lived in a moral darkness long before someone cut the electricity.
Possession as Protest
When Val starts encountering a supernatural presence, it isn’t just haunting for fun. The entity that latches onto her is furious, wounded, and very specific about where it wants its revenge to land. As Val becomes more deeply entangled—psychologically and physically—it becomes clear that the ghost isn’t just a random ghoul; it’s the voice of someone the system chewed up and conveniently forgot. The possession sequences are uncomfortable in all the right ways: Val’s body, already policed by hospital rules and patriarchal expectations, becomes a literal battleground for suppressed truth. It’s less “spooky demon” and more “weaponized trauma.”
The ’70s Setting: Polyester, Power Cuts, and Patriarchy
Choosing early 1970s London isn’t just a cool period-drama flex. It’s a perfect storm moment: social upheaval, strikes, a crumbling empire, and an NHS under pressure. The film threads those details in with an admirably light hand. We get just enough sense of the political background to understand that the blackout isn’t accidental—it’s the visible symptom of a larger struggle, while the hospital’s own abuses remain conveniently hidden. You’ve got a country freaking out about literal power, while no one notices the metaphorical power being abused in the women’s ward. That’s one hell of a double exposure.
Scares with a Side of Righteous Anger
As horror, The Power is satisfyingly old-school. There are eerie sounds in the dark, things moving just outside the torch beam, and that slow-building dread that makes you wish everyone would just clock out and go home. But what makes the scares land is the anger beneath them. This isn’t a haunted-house ride built around random jump scares; it’s a story about what happens when institutions bury abuse—and what happens when the dead refuse to stay buried. The supernatural phenomena feel like the building’s conscience finally shorting out. It’s cathartic and deeply uncomfortable, like watching a cover-up unravel with teeth.
A Quietly Savage Little Horror Gem
Corinna Faith’s direction keeps things intimate and focused, never letting the film spiral into spectacle for its own sake. She’s more interested in the horrible logic of how a place like this could exist than in overloading the screen with CGI spooks. The cast across the board sells that realism: Emma Rigby’s Babs, Shakira Rahman’s Saba, Gbemisola Ikumelo’s Comfort—all feel like people who have learned to pick their battles just to get through a shift. Val, tragically, doesn’t have that survival instinct yet, which makes her the perfect lightning rod when the past decides it’s done being polite.
Final Diagnosis: Systemic Horror with a Beating, Angry Heart
The Power isn’t here to provide cozy, forgettable chills. It’s here to remind you that sometimes the monsters aren’t arriving from another dimension—they signed your timesheet and told you to stop making a fuss. It’s a tightly wound, atmospheric horror film that respects both its ghosts and its themes, using the darkness of a blackout hospital to shine a very harsh light on institutional abuse and the cost of staying silent.
If you like your horror with purpose, your ghosts with grievances, and your final act soaked less in cheap gore and more in justified fury, this little British nightmare is absolutely worth plugging into. Just don’t watch it before a hospital stay—or during a power cut—unless you’re prepared to side-eye every corridor and wonder what else the dark is hiding.
