‘The Restoration at Grayson Manor’ Brings Killer Hands to FrightFest

Glenn McQuaid’s The Restoration at Grayson Manor is set to make its UK premiere at FrightFest Glasgow tonight, bringing a deliriously gothic mix of science fiction, horror and high melodrama to the festival’s late evening line-up.

Screening at 8.50pm on Friday 6 March, the Irish-Austrian production arrives with a pedigree that stretches from Fantastic Fest to Bankside Films, and a cast led by Chris Colfer, Alice Krige, Daniel Adegboyega and Declan Reynolds. McQuaid, along with Colfer, Krige and Reynolds, will be in attendance to introduce the film and take part in a post-screening Q&A.

Set inside a decaying family estate that doubles as a battleground for legacy, control and desire, The Restoration at Grayson Manor centres on Boyd Grayson, an Irish heir who delights in provoking his lineage-obsessed mother Jacqueline by bringing men back to the manor and reminding her that the family line will end with him. That act of defiance takes a brutal turn when a freak accident leaves Boyd without his hands and dependent on Jacqueline’s care.

What follows is where McQuaid’s film swerves into stranger territory. With family wealth at her disposal, Jacqueline transforms part of the manor into a futuristic recovery wing and recruits the ambitious Dr Tannock to fit Boyd with experimental prosthetic hands powered by subconscious thought. The technology promises restoration, but the results are anything but stable. As Boyd adjusts to his new limbs, the hands begin to move with a will of their own, turning buried impulses into physical threat.

McQuaid has described the project as melodrama rather than camp, and that distinction appears central to the film’s identity. Co-written with Clay McLeod Chapman, The Restoration at Grayson Manor pulls from gothic chamber drama, queer family conflict and vintage genre influences, while channeling the killer-hand tradition through a more emotionally volatile, fiercely stylised lens.

Colfer, best known for Glee and Struck by Lightning, takes on the role of Boyd, a damaged aristocrat whose rebellion masks deeper wounds. Krige, a veteran of She Will, Gretel & Hansel and Star Trek First Contact, plays Jacqueline as a matriarch who sees legacy not as inheritance but as obsession. Adegboyega’s Dr Tannock brings opportunism and scientific ambition to the story, while Reynolds plays Lee, whose warmth and optimism place him at odds with the manor’s suffocating atmosphere.

Produced by Fantastic Films, the company behind Vivarium, Sea Fever and You Are Not My Mother, the feature was shot over five weeks in County Laois, with post-production completed in Austria. McQuaid also co-composed the score with Reuben Harvey, further shaping a film that appears to thrive on tonal precision as much as genre excess.

For FrightFest audiences tonight, The Restoration at Grayson Manor promises a mansion full of ghosts, grudges and malfunctioning limbs, all wrapped in a barbed family drama where recovery comes with a body count.

The Restoration at Grayson Manor clip