Christopher Rhoten
Misper director Harry Sherriff and writer Laurence Tratalos have delivered the film they wanted to make. Even if the duo’s off-kilter, very British tragicomedy walks a tonal tightrope, it uses this strange perspective to explore the horror, sadness, and even comedic potential of people trying to make sense of tragedy. Set in a dying seaside hotel after a girl’s disappearance, the awkward Leonard tries to make sense of her demise, but it’s the permanence of her absence that truly starts to haunt him.
Ahead of the film playing at the 2026 Chattanooga Film Festival, I got to speak with both Harry and Laurence about their inspirations, their take on the true-crime obsession, and going against the grain in more ways than one. This transcript has been lightly edited for flow and clarity.
Misper runs the gamut between scary, sad, mournful, and very funny. I feel like it really captures life in a way that’s not often portrayed but is very realistic. Was this a goal going in?
HARRY: Absolutely. Tone is something we talk about a lot. We pitched Misper as a unique take on a missing person story. It isn’t a conventional procedural where an everyman becomes a super detective overnight. We like those shows, but in developing Misper, we felt the interesting element was the outsiders to the case and the people who knew or thought they knew Elle. We kept asking ourselves, “What would it be like if this actually happened to you?” And one answer that kept coming back was how unsettling a lack of information would be.
Everything Laurence writes tends to have humor in it, and we’re big fans of dark humor that borders on the taboo. Satirists like Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker. With the humor in the film, we were always careful not to make a joke of the situation directly; it was always people’s lack of awareness or their inability to handle certain situations.
The film is something of a mystery, but it’s more concerned with the different ways people react to grief and death. What influenced this?
HARRY: I was working in Manchester when the bomb went off at the Ariana Grande concert, and when I went back to work, it was an extremely anxious and stressful environment. A lot of people justifiably went off sick, and even though I was miles away from the incident, I was surprised by how much I was impacted. Other staff members carried on like normal, laughing and joking, whilst other staff members would cry in the staffroom. In the pitch deck for Misper, I wrote [that] it was like living in someone else’s nightmare. I wanted to get that feeling into the film…as well as laughs!
Laurence and I would often talk about how a lot of films and TV shows are too concerned with clues and not feelings. Some shows feel like you’re watching someone figure out a crossword puzzle. There’s a level of satisfaction to those shows, but at some points, you even forget that this is all about someone who has been killed. On certain shows, it feels exploitative. It was important to us to create something that took a different approach.
What made you want to center this story on Leonard instead of, say, Elle’s father?
HARRY: The point of view of the film was always mainly from Leonard’s. We wanted someone who would be far removed from the case in a way that Elle’s dad wouldn’t be. Someone who felt close to Elle and yet didn’t really know her at all.
The hotel feels ancient and eerie, but it’s very important to these characters. Talk about what makes it a location that matches this story.
HARRY: Originally, the film was set in a shop, and then we found out the practicalities of that are far more complicated and expensive than you would believe! Luckily, we had found the Grand Hotel when location scouting for another feature, but decided on making Misper instead. Suddenly, we had the epiphany of transplanting the story set in the shop to the hotel, and it instantly elevated the material. A dying seaside hotel says so much. Big empty spaces and trapped lost souls. The cliche is a location is a character but that would undermine the importance the Grand has on our film.
The scene with the “fan” really brought the film together for me. What do you make of the true crime obsession, and how did that element work its way to the surface in the film?
HARRY: Thank you. We’re both very fond of that scene as well. Partly to do with the reaction it gets at screenings and the fact that we rewrote that scene with the help of Samuel Blenkin and Jordan Brookes, the actors, about thirty minutes before shooting. It was important to us to show this morbid and sadly true-to-life element. True crime can be entertainment, and it can be exploitative, and it can be both those things at the same time.
It’s a complex topic. Leonard watching evidence on his laptop, coming into contact with a “fan,” and the ending of the film are all about true crime, and we often forget these are real people.
Laurence, I’m sure you had production in mind when writing this film. How does that affect the writing process?
LAURENCE: I think you should always have production in mind, particularly with an independent feature. This was our first time producing a feature, so we knew we wanted to try to foolproof it as much as we could, and this all started with having a short script (it was seventy pages) and setting the film in predominantly one location.
They say constraints force creativity.
LAURENCE: The location played a huge role in the writing process because every time we’d visit the Grand, we would discover a new location, such as the creepy basement, and then that would end up in the film. And this confinement also gave us a level of flexibility as we essentially had free rein in the hotel, so that we could get extra scenes and have moments of improv with the cast. I always like to feel that the script is permanently evolving, even during the shoot, so having the awareness of production from as early a stage as possible plays into that.
Brevity is an increasingly lost art these days. Harry, you mentioned Pickpocket in another interview I read, and I loved that, because short and to the point is exactly what makes a story like this memorable. As a director, why do you think length is conflated with quality?
HARRY: I think the cardinal sin is being boring, and next door to that is losing the audience’s attention. Very often, Laurence and I leave the cinema, and the first thing we say is “That was (insert amount of time) too long.” It’s a great shame because a big percentage of these films could have avoided this. In some cases, it’s almost unbelievable that they didn’t realize what they made [was] too long.
Whether it’s a director’s hubris or a loss of objectivity in post-production, we can’t be certain, but with Misper’s length, it was always by design from the get-go. We went into production with a 70-page script, and in post, we didn’t cut much. We did have an 85-minute cut that worked well, but the 73-minute version plays better. To keep that objectivity is one of the hardest parts of the filmmaking process. I wish I had a smarter answer, a Curtisian comment blaming it on our capitalist society, or a damning indictment on the ego of man. They did a study recently, and it was proven that films, on average, have gotten longer. But are they getting better?
