This review is an expanded English translation of our original German review, first published in 2017.
Some horror films terrify you with ghosts. Some with monsters. Exhibit A does something far more disturbing — it terrifies you with a father.
I’d had this one recommended to me more times than I can count. It sat on my watch list for longer than it had any right to. When I finally watched it — a UK import, late on a weeknight — I understood immediately why people kept bringing it up. Exhibit A is the kind of found footage film that doesn’t announce itself. It just gets under your skin and stays there.
Exhibit A (2007)
The Story: The King family — mum Sheila, dad Andy, daughter Judith and son Joe — are an ordinary family in an ordinary Yorkshire suburb. When Andy begins hiding a devastating financial secret from his family, the pressure quietly builds until the facade cracks entirely. We watch it all happen through Judith’s video camera.
💀 Our Verdict: One of the most underrated found footage films ever made — and one of the most genuinely disturbing. No ghosts, no demons, no monsters. Just a family and a secret, and the slow, terrible unravelling of both. Not for the faint-hearted.
Director: Dom Rotheroe · Cast: Bradley Cole, Brittany Ashworth, Angela Forrest, Oliver Lee
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Powered by JustWatchWhat Exhibit A Is About
The King family are, on the surface, perfectly ordinary.
Andy (Bradley Cole) is a devoted father and husband. Sheila (Angela Forrest) is warm, grounded, holding the family together. Daughter Judith (Brittany Ashworth) carries her video camera everywhere — documenting birthdays, Sunday dinners, family arguments, quiet evenings in front of the television. Son Joe (Oliver Lee) is the family joker, always pushing buttons, always getting the last word.
The Kings are planning to buy a house by the sea. Andy has been promoted. Things are looking up.
Except Andy is hiding something. A financial secret — the kind that starts small and grows in the dark. And when the pressure of that secret begins to crack the surface of his carefully maintained composure, what emerges is something nobody in the family saw coming. Least of all Judith, whose camera catches everything.
Exhibit A Trailer
Review: Exhibit A (Spoiler-Free)
This is not a horror film in any conventional sense. There are no jump scares. No supernatural threat. No monster waiting in the dark. What Exhibit A offers instead is something considerably rarer — and considerably more unsettling: the horror of a person you thought you knew becoming someone you don’t recognise at all.
Dom Rotheroe’s direction is invisible in the best possible way. The film was shot with an almost documentary restraint — handheld, naturalistic, never calling attention to itself. The entire cast improvised their dialogue from a detailed plot outline, and you feel it in every scene. These people don’t feel like actors playing a family. They feel like a family being filmed.
Bradley Cole as Andy is the film’s extraordinary centre. What he does over the course of 85 minutes — the gradual, terrible shift from devoted family man to something unpredictable and frightening — is one of the finest performances in British found footage cinema. The most disturbing moments in the film aren’t the violent ones. They’re the quieter scenes where you can see Andy holding himself together with what seems like enormous effort, and you understand that the effort is failing.
Brittany Ashworth as Judith gives the film its moral centre. The camera is her camera, which means we see everything through her eyes — and her growing unease, her refusal to look away, her instinct to keep recording even when what she’s recording is unbearable, gives the found footage conceit a genuine emotional logic. The footage doesn’t exist because someone pointed a camera. It exists because a daughter couldn’t stop hoping that what she was documenting would somehow resolve itself.
A word of warning: the film’s climax is genuinely difficult to watch. Not because of gore or spectacle — the violence is handled with restraint — but because of what it means. By the time the ending arrives, Rotheroe has built such a complete picture of this family that what happens to them lands with the weight of something real. I found myself thinking about it for days afterwards.
One honest caveat: a small number of scenes — particularly those involving physical confrontation — lose some of their credibility. The film’s greatest strength is its naturalism, and anything that breaks that surface is felt immediately. It’s a minor complaint in the context of everything Exhibit A gets right, but worth noting.
Did you know?
The entire cast improvised their dialogue from a detailed plot outline rather than a traditional script. Director Dom Rotheroe wanted the performances to feel lived-in rather than rehearsed — and the result is one of the most naturalistic ensemble casts in British found footage history.
The film was produced by Warp Films — the Sheffield-based production company behind This Is England and Four Lions. That social realist DNA is all over Exhibit A: the Yorkshire setting, the working-class anxieties, the refusal to aestheticise what it’s showing.
Closing Shot
Horror without demons is still horror. Exhibit A understands this better than almost any found footage film I can name.
Dom Rotheroe built something here that the genre rarely attempts and almost never pulls off: a film that is genuinely frightening about genuinely ordinary things. Financial pressure. Family silence. The gap between who someone is and who they turn out to be.
If you can handle found footage that doesn’t offer you the release valve of the supernatural, Exhibit A is essential viewing. One of the most underrated British horror films ever made.
Where to Watch Exhibit A
Powered by JustWatchSimilar Films to Exhibit A
Exhibit A sits in a rare corner of found footage — no supernatural elements, no genre scaffolding, just a camera and a family falling apart. If it worked for you, these films occupy similar territory:
- Man Bites Dog (1992) — the original found footage serial killer film. Darker, more provocative, and just as uncomfortable.
- Zero Day (2003) — two teenagers document the days leading up to a school shooting. Devastating and brilliantly acted.
- The Dirties (2013) — another film about ordinary people doing unimaginable things, caught on camera. Quieter than you’d expect.
- Lake Mungo (2008) — different in tone but shares Exhibit A‘s interest in family secrets and the gap between who we think people are and who they actually were.
