One of the most hard-hitting of the slew of New French Extremity films which slithered into being in the early Noughties, Inside (2007) is now one of the latest famous, or infamous titles to have received the Second Sight box set treatment, and we have one of these box sets to give away thanks to our friends at Aim Publicity.
For anyone not familiar with the film, here’s the lowdown: a pregnant woman (Alysson Paradis), recently bereaved of her husband and baby’s father, is faced with another brutal ordeal when she is tracked down and threatened by a mysterious, nameless woman (the incomparable Béatrice Dalle) intent on stealing her unborn child. Directed by Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury – this being one of the films which made their names as filmmakers who refuse to avert their eyes from the worst excesses of human nature – Inside still packs a hell of a punch for its intensely grisly and unrelenting assault on a pregnant mother, something which is still incredibly rare, even in horror. Sure, childbearing and childbirth are often made into subject matter for horror films, but like this? The way Bustillo and Maury did it, and the extremes they went to? Nah. Rare. This film was and is a game changer.
Anyway, before I get into one of my keynote monologues about how Béatrice Dalle is one of the most magnetic actresses in showbiz, here’s how you can win. It’s pretty straightforward: simply email the site using the title ‘Inside’ for your message, including your name and address (as ever, personal details are held on our server only until the competition is drawn, and then deleted.)
The competition will run until Monday, 5th Feb at 12:00pm (GMT), the release date, and will be drawn later that day. The winner’s details will then be passed to Aim, so that the prize can be sent out directly from them. We are only able to offer this prize to UK residents, sorry.
Why would anyone go camping, ever, for supposed ‘pleasure’? It seems to be a lesson lost on South Koreans, too, if we can judge at least a little bit based on The Human Trap (2021). However, the camping aspect of the film is only a minor aspect of what the plot eventually has in store; what a shame, then, that we spend a good hour hanging around the tents before anything actually happens. It’s a film by turns spirit-level flat and incredibly garbled, restricted by the double-whammy of poor writing and reduced finances and unable to truly land its wait-and-you’ll-find-them, more intriguing aspects.
Here’s how it all starts: after a round of speed dating (speed dating, unbeknownst to the young man on the date) we end up, quite spontaneously, heading off on a camping trip (and how? His phone rings, he agrees to go when a friend asks him and, when she hears, his date Ji-ae apparently wants to go, too). We can begrudge some respect to him, by the way, for only agreeing to all this as he thinks he’s on a promise; his other motivation, that boys need to take girls with them or else camping is suspiciously gay, is more of a puzzler perhaps, but regardless, before too long we’re with a bunch of Characters, waiting for a lift into the woods because their car has broken down on the outskirts. Alongside the manager of the campsite, they head off, with no one really perturbed by the manager’s phone conversations with someone already up there with a gun to ‘shoot boar’; the audience, meanwhile, get some glimpses of what looks like a semi-feral chap padding about amongst the trees.
Forget about him for a while, though: aside from popping in on them to steal a bit of food, he doesn’t figure prominently, not at the moment. Instead, we get a hell of a lot of settling in, character development and verisimilitude about the whole camping experience, though interestingly, phone reception at the site seems highly reliable (all the phones go missing shortly after this bombshell, though, so it’s of little comfort then.) Here’s something else odd: despite fairly quickly working out that a succession of other young people may have been at the campsite before them, shedding photos, phones and jewellery as they passed through, no one seems in a particular rush to do anything about it. Now, The Human Trap (or The Trap, as it was previously known before someone thought to make things a little more overt) certainly doesn’t have much budget to play around with, and given that a lot of the Korean cinema which has reached the West has tended to be rather stylish and swish, it certainly looks different to your Park Chan-wooks and similar – but of course, Korea has a low-budget indie cinema scene just like anywhere else. Fine, though you soon start to manage your expectations in terms of what you’re actually going to see done here: there sadly isn’t some grand denouement, or some gory explosion that they’re saving everything for.
The real issue, though, is in the film’s writing and as such, its pace. Earnest, if amateurish performances can’t mask the fact that almost nothing happens until nearly the hour mark, and then a couple of film’s worth of plot gets hastily thrown in. Given that the end credits roll at 1:21, you can only imagine what that means for the film’s overall shape, development and exposition. Endless chatter pads out the film for its first two thirds, but that chatter is usually dull and undistinguished, so that even when the film begins to reframe and reconsider key scenes from different perspectives later, backfilling some aspects of the plot, it’s too late to properly build a sense of threat or some consistent idea. I’m not entirely sure that the promotional blurb for The Human Trap which claims that it is ‘in the tradition of The Evil Dead and The Cabin in the Woods‘ does anything other than set it up for a fall, either, given that it bears no resemblance to either of those films, beyond having trees in. (The blurb also omits to mention a key plot element, instead making mention of one the film’s Christian characters: this could be to avoid spoilers, but also, it suggests that Christianity will be important as a theme here, and – no such consideration from this hack – it’s not really, not with everything else going on.)
You can pick out some quite interesting subtext to this film which marks it out as belonging to a non-Western tradition, even if you can quibble on the use made of Christianity; gender and sexuality would be one aspect (poor Chae-rim is consistently characterised as being physically unattractive compared to Ji-ae, which is perplexing) but the main takeaway is in the theme of the ferocious financial issues which so often beset ordinary Koreans (the same issue which propelled the storyline of the wildly-popular Squid Game a few years ago – 2021, actually). Speaking of which, The Human Trap is a 2021 film which has likely languished somewhere for a few years before being picked up for release but, well. I don’t know what’s happened to the past few years either. It’s just a shame that a film which clearly does have ideas has distributed them so unevenly across its modest runtime, that its potential for some effective drama and scares get lost in the mix. Only go in for this one if you are of a forgiving, patient temperament.
The Human Trap (2021) is now available on Amazon Prime.
It’s no surprise at all that frontier horror, or Wild West horror, continues to hold such great potential for new storytelling. Consider it: an uncertain, changeable point in history; the arrival of immigrants from different parts of the world, coming together as strangers in a strange land; the land itself, potentially hostile, unknown and peopled with monsters of its own folklore, some familiar-seeming, some new. There have been superb horror stories set against this background, and these continue to be made, such as in the case of Who Goes There? (2020), a brilliant short film which blends old and new supernatural beliefs, generating abundant scares and unease.
We begin as we (almost) end – with one, guttering firelight against the darkness. A man (Liam McMahon) sits at a fire, somewhere out on the prairie. He seems a little ill at ease, perhaps as anyone might, stuck out there in the remote and unfamiliar darkness – but, suddenly, he is troubled by a sound. It’s the kind of sound which should be impossible, if he’s genuinely alone – as he hears a whistle. He peers into the darkness, clearly alarmed, and – we cut to the opening credits. The man’s situation features in our story, but we move on for now, seeing the same area in daylight (somewhat gratefully: shooting at night can be tough to get right, but director Astrid Thorvaldsen and her team nail it, taking only a few minutes to bring us a genuinely unsettling, almost pitch-black scene). Now, a young woman, Ingrid (Nina Yndis) is gathering medicinal plants to take back to the tiny shack which she shares with sisters Liv (Siri Meland) and the youngest, Ada (Rikke Haughem). Ada is dangerously ill: her illness presents a little like tuberculosis, but there are other symptoms, too. Safe to say, she is in desperate need of care which she is never likely to receive, not all the way out here. It’s not immediately made clear why there are three unaccompanied young women living in this way, but you get an immediate sense of how harried and easily alarmed they are; why would they not be? They are possibly days away from any kind of help. So, when a strange man appears on the edge of their property, they are terrified.
The women’s remote, pressured existence is about to be put under further pressure: this man is the terrified man from earlier in the film, and he now appears ill, confused. When a terrified Ingrid approaches him and tries to scare him off her property, he simply asks for a drink of water before collapsing; her better nature gets the better of her, and she helps him to the porch, giving him the water he asks for. Liv is outraged; there’s now a potential threat amongst them, but when he casually mentions that he’s a travelling doctor, beset by bandits and lost on his way to his next call, it seems both plausible and tantalising; Ada really, really needs any sort of medical help she can get. But can this stranger, who has thrown himself on the mercy of these women, really be trusted?
The vulnerability of three young sisters in such a remote location could be horror enough, and Who Goes There? knows this: alongside the sisters, the audience is made to feel doubt about what is going on here, and whether very worldly, or otherworldly horror is threatening to break out. Then the film cleverly escalates the threat, building in a well-paced, simmering supernatural element. The sisters each respond differently to this, depending on the level of either their desperation, their fear, or even hope. Their code-switching between Norwegian and English is also important, highlighting that the film is set at a relatively early point in American colonial history, when immigrants held onto their native languages before more finally adopting the lingua franca of English. It neatly makes the point that the sisters are likely to be somewhat unfamiliar with their current location, even if they know enough to collect the right herbs for medical purposes. They are outsiders, faced with an outsider. And it’s impressive just how much characterisation the filmmaking team gets into this film, with only limited dialogue and, obviously, its short runtime (a little over twenty minutes). There are many feature-length films which couldn’t equal it. Performances are very strong, and the subtle layering of ideas around religious faith – around a clever, sparse script – are great, timed perfectly to introduce a new kind of paranoid discomfiture as the minutes tick by. A lot – though not all – of the visual elements are low-key subtle, too, but do more than enough to make the horror land.
All in all, this is an incredibly successful short horror film, one which knows just how much to reveal and how much to leave to the imagination. It’s of no detriment to the film that you’re left wanting to learn more as the end credits roll: Who Goes There? tantalises a blend of older horror elements and, potentially, quite new ones, as the rules simply don’t always apply out on the prairie. It gets its period details right, too, proving more evidence of a careful eye and a deft touch. A convincing timeframe, a convincing setting (the film was actually shot in Wales) and a convincingly scary story: this film really is good.
You can watch Who Goes There? now over on the Alter film channel, available on YouTube. Watch the film now by clicking here.
It’s a strange thing – I was prepared to write this review of The Frightened Woman as if this film is nothing more than a quirky time capsule, a pretty, picturesque piece of cinema coming from some very particular social and cultural mores. Of course, it is all of that, but its story of a wealthy philanthropist working through his frustrated misogyny on the weekends isn’t something we’ve exactly left behind us, is it? It’s too much to say that director Piero Schivazappa was some kind of seer, but he’s certainly, possibly accidentally made a film which can still resonate on some level. That, and a film which is bizarrely good fun, increasing its black comedy elements as it progresses. It’s a lurid, inventive slice of late Sixties gender paranoia, and well worth a look – if you like that kind of thing.
We are introduced to the man of the moment, thrusting executive and philanthropist Dr. Sayer (Philippe Leroy) as he’s in the process of chastising a light-fingered colleague. There’s just been a meeting to decide what to do with him; Sayer warns him that he’s lucky to only get expelled, and not given a criminal record, too. Aggrieved, our thief (who has just nicked a golden letter from a commemorative bust, just to make the point) lingers for a moment when he glimpses one of the organisation’s other employees – a young woman, Maria (Dagmar Lassander). The film is choc full of this kind of furtive watching. Maria, as it turns out, has business with Sayer too, visiting his office to ask him for some documentation which will enable her to complete a report on ‘male sterilisation in India’. How the chilly spring evenings must fly! Sayer, surprisingly and instantly hostile at the very notion of sterilising any man (I suppose if you’re philanthropically minded, this can extend to other men’s gonads) nonetheless agrees that she can have the material she needs, but she needs to collect it from his house. Safeguarding hadn’t been invented then, which is a boon for this type of cinema.
Maria goes to Sayer’s house as arranged; little does she apparently know that the working girl witnessed in the very opening scenes has a link to Sayer, too. So far as Maria goes, as they exchange a few vocal parries and as he offers her a standard-issue glass of J&B, she quickly slips out of consciousness, waking up restrained and being observed from a distance by a glowering Sayer. He begins to expound his philosophy, which seems to have been triggered by a horror of women’s desires to be self-sufficient. This cannot be; he envisages a future where males won’t be needed at all, and he’s appalled. His response is to double down on old, entrenched gender roles, resetting the clock by tormenting women, making them feel extreme fear. It just so happens that Maria is now the woman in the frame, seeing as Sayer’s original plans have come to nothing. She’s his new captive.
A series of warped domestic scenarios hereafter merge with weird and wonderful set pieces, as a rather literal battle of the sexes emerges. Sayer is clearly very practiced at this, and depends on such strictures in order to enjoy any sort of erotic interest in women; however, whatever kind of schedule he has used recently has perhaps met its match in Maria, who may make it look as though she is – begrudgingly – playing her role in Sayer’s strange set-ups, but is rather more worldly than he gives her credit. She’s watching and observing, and wants to turn things around to her favour. The film uses an often ingenious and ambitious structure where its worst, most sadistic scenes get repeated later with a different emphasis, as each key player here has a different modus operandi. It also manages to sustain a few different shifts in tone, moving from straightforwardly nasty to gently teasing and even funny, intentionally funny, even as a whole host of anxieties and nervousness are explored.
Most of all, though, The Frightened Woman is a swirling, heady study of sexual neuroses as they were on the brink of the 1970s, as the feminist movement grew and women did seem, to some, to be edging towards being sinisterly self-sufficient (another film which sprang to mind whilst watching this one was Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973), which took a similar stance towards the perils of sexually licentious women, albeit with some light-touch sci-fi at its own core). And, as much as The Frightened Woman creates a bit of a pastiche of these men who would now probably refer (to themselves, only ever to themselves) as Alphas, there’s some real-world context pressing in at the edges, and such shifts in sexual or gender roles did, and do, generate a lot of unease. The film plays quite liberally with this.
We also see other thoroughly modern predilections in the film, perhaps most notably psychoanalysis: many exploitation films of the era find time and space to include the talking cure, though perhaps Schivazappa and his design department go one better by building an entire vagina dentata sculpture to emasculate its men. The push/pull between modernising tastes and reactionary retreat leads to a fascinating interplay in this film, as in others of the same era; in terms of comparison with some of those other films, The Frightened Woman isn’t especially gratuitous, nor is it grisly, but it’s heavy on the psychological warfare, a careful and often clever film with a strong aesthetic sense (that house!) and strong production values. This Blu-ray release makes the film look incredibly fresh and surprisingly modern, too, for all of its late Sixties trappings and fashions. It makes for a good visual balance overall.
With extras including two roughly thirty-minute interviews with Schivazappa and with Dagmar Lassander, and a frankly display-worthy new cover design, Shameless Films release this Blu on January 8th 2024. This is good work from them, as always, and an unusual, weirdly inventive piece of 60s cinema for your collections.
Brandon Cronenberg may not have the most extensive filmography on the block – as of yet – but, based on the films he has brought us so far, you could suggest that selfhood and the performance of self are important themes. Infinity Pool (2023) is certainly no exception, but as Cronenberg continues to grow his own style and approaches, adding in bigger and bigger worlds for his alienated protagonists to play around in, a few issues or kinks – make of that term what you will – have perhaps crept in. But, despite a few minor glitches, it’s nonetheless a visually arresting film, with some punishing, magnetic performances and plenty to puzzle over. Whatever you may think or feel about his work, you can’t deny that it always leaves some sort of indelible mark, and Infinity Pool is no exception.
We move from bold colour, blaring opening credits (paging Gaspar Noé) into full blackout; a young couple in bed, which turns out to be Em (Cleopatra Coleman) and husband James (Alexander Skarsgård), pondering some cryptic phrase just spoken by James, though Em debates whether he was asleep or awake – it gets harder for her to tell, it seems. James also appears disenchanted, asking ‘Where am I?’ It turns out they’re in an exclusive resort, located somewhere called La Tolqa – a fictional somewhere and nowhere, albeit a place with its own alphabet and a curious, complex legal and jurisdictive culture (more anon). The way in which the opening camera shots wheel upside down, spinning and taking us queasily with them (page him again) makes the point that this place is detached from reality, and so are its inmates. It’s the end of the tourist season: only a few wealthy, nothing-to-do couples remain. James, a failing author, is reinvigorated briefly when he encounters a fan of his first, and so far only, book: the woman, Gabi (Mia Goth running at 100% Mia Goth) invites James and Em to dine with her and husband Alban (Jalil Lespert) that evening. James’ vanity holds sway: he agrees.
They do say that you should write about what you know: I’m talking about Cronenberg here. It turns out that this is a very artsy crowd, albeit with some issues. Gabi is an actor, Alban a former architect, James an author and Em springs from a moneyed publishing house (hence, she jokes, her father’s aversion to writers and by extension, to James). But all of these people are in some kind of stasis – they’ve moved on, or failed to move on, or they have found a way to make an artform of failure. Exasperatingly, they’re all still at this no doubt exclusive resort, finding ways to afford it; could there, possibly, be some needle here from the director towards the kinds of inert, inexplicably wealthy people he may have encountered? In any case, the dinner passes with only momentary discomforts, and the Fosters agree to leave the resort on the following day – an ill-advised action – for an excursion with Gabi and Alban. The barely-there flirtation between Gabi and James turns into something very much there during their time at the beach, but that’s not the key issue at this particular time.
On the way home, with James offering to drive, he accidentally hits and kills a pedestrian. A moment of panic ensues, but Gabi is adamant that they mustn’t call it in. La Tolqa, she points out, is an authoritarian state, and we’ve already seen that the locals have a clear aversion to tourists. Reluctantly, they try to re-enter the resort after their hit and run, but it turns out to be a pointless attempt to escape the consequences; early the next morning, police arrive, taking James and Em to the local station and charging James with manslaughter. Lots of crimes attract the death penalty in La Tolqa, and this is one of them. Gabi, Alban and Em, too, have already pointed the finger of blame at James. The die is cast.
Except…La Tolqa has a different means of ensuring justice is meted out, but that one of its wealthy visitors is not killed in the process. James has the option, for a fee of course, to be copied – his double, who will be fully culpable because he will have all of the same memories, will be killed by the family of the victim in his place. Part of the ritual insists that he has to bear witness to the execution – after which point, everything is sorted. James can go back to his own life, debt to society paid.
Now, for many directors, probably for most directors, this plot development would likely be the high point of the narrative, a grand culmination of the bubbling absurdity and unease which have already been established. For Brandon Cronenberg, it is instead a kind of interesting bump in the road, a means of establishing that the wealthy of this place can buy themselves out of any situation, regardless of the deed. All that is important is that justice is seen to be done, even if the mile-high loophole La Tolqa has in place is really only available to people of means. People like James for instance, although like many writers he is diligent about spending other people’s money, so that he can purchase his ‘research time’ by proxy. And, after witnessing ‘his’ execution, it seems that James has entered a closed community of seasoned holiday-goers who have themselves undergone this same process for their own misdemeanours in the past, developing a kind of devil-may-care attitude like no other now that they have seen themselves, effectively, die. This includes Gabi and Alban, but James is not an easy fit for their group, and we begin to focus closely on his burgeoning crisis of identity.
From all its charming, bizarre little touches – which start early, with its mawkish masks, the same waiter appearing in different restaurants, the invented setting altogether – Infinity Pool still feels like it has the most recognisable, even workaday beginning of any of Cronenberg’s films so far. You’re jerked out of normality very hard and very early in Antiviral (2012) and particularly in Possessor (2020), but a dreamy holiday resort, a strange couple? It feels, at least at first, more normal – a term to use under advisement here. But the film tightens its grip steadily, expanding its vision as it does: this fictional country has its own forms of policing, law and justice which soon collide with the type of body horror Cronenberg Jr favours. It tantalises interesting technology and indulges in a few neon-trippy scenes as the copying process takes place – putting Skarsgård through the wringer as it goes – but really, it uses this motif to get at its big questions about values and morals, and then moves on to look at wealth and the inexplicably wealthy, monsters with no fear of death for their deeds. It’s good, by the by, to see the doppelganger making such an engaging return to the horror/sci-fi genres here. It’s developed engagingly, too, becoming a scapegoat as much as a conventional, accusatory symbol of failure and wrongdoing.
If the film has one key issue, it’s perhaps in how it groans under the weight of all this subtext, some of which feels a little overfamiliar in places, for all the neat developments and stylistic tics along the way. It’s not fair to suggest that Infinity Pool was made to be analysed rather than enjoyed – despite the current ‘fan gap’ between critics’ reviews and audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes – but it repetitively leans on its eat the rich vibes in places, across two hours mind you, sometimes with some clunky dialogue which loses the slick humour of a close parallel such as (and I’m ready to argue this) Society (1989). There is doubtlessly some humour to be found in here though – James’s final straw being made to hear a bad review of his book, for instance! – and the cast is great, with Mia Goth in particular revealing why she is something of a genre cinema darling these days. All in all, this is still a lush, queasy, interesting film, despite not being an unequivocal triumph like the extraordinary Possessor.
It’s not just a big action biopic. That’s probably the first thing to get straight about Ferrari (2023), a film which could well just be a fairly straightforward story of making fast cars, racing fast cars and occasionally filling us on on the human drama unfolding nearby – always within reason, of course. Rather, Michael Mann’s take on the history of the legendary car manufacturer at a critical point in its timeline opts for an often oblique approach, a social and personal history which gradually comes together to tell a more orthodox story. It won’t be for everyone and petrolheads will probably feel cheated, but there’s a great deal to recommend this ambitious and complex narrative. Stick with it.
We start with a brief introduction to the legendary firm first established by Enzo and Laura Ferrari post-WWII, spliced with some newsreel-style footage – some contemporary, some edited to include lead actor Adam Driver as Enzo (one of the film’s only genuinely weak sequences, actually) racing his early vehicles. But then we skip ahead a decade; whether or not Enzo chooses to drive his respectable family car as if he’s still racing, he’s retired from the sport and his company is struggling (as were a lot of the other big names at the time). Essentially, whether or not Ferrari survives is down to its success in the racing world, which is presented to us as an oddly surreptitious pursuit, with messages being phoned in hither and yon, drivers arriving, drivers departing – there’s a lot going on. Enzo, now middle aged, is presented as a sullen, changeable soul, but gradually, we see sound reasons for this. He has been bereaved of his son, Alfredo, and he has a fractious relationship with his wife Laura (so, not the woman we see him waking up with at the start of the film. That’s his long term mistress, Lina). If the film makes one thing clear, as it gradually unfurls its various plot points and characters, it’s that we start our narrative in a place of turmoil – though maybe with some new beginnings, or else more and more irrevocable endings.
There’s certainly a new beginning on the cards for hopeful newcomer De Portago (Gabriel Leone), when an accident deprives Ferrari of one of his best vehicles and star drivers (there were no seatbelts then, which seems like one of the most bizarrely slow learning curves in human history). Ferrari needs him; he begins to see that, without racing glory, the factory will soon be finished. Laura also owns half the firm, and she’s less and less in the mood for compromise.
Whilst there are, naturally, some high-octane racing scenes as inevitably pushed forward by the trailer, and there is a bit of car lingo for car people (this reviewer is perfectly happy to drive a car with only a notional idea of how they work), this isn’t The Fast and the Furious with a period setting. Ferrari is a very careful, low key film for the most part, creating engaging characters who are clearly flawed without this being spelled out for us in simplistic terms. The way in which the film opens almost in medias res, with the audience playing catch-up to determine what is actually going on, works very well; it captures the chaotic, rather desperate state Ferrari was in at the end of the 1950s. And if Enzo himself is often unknowable – to us, and to people in his life – then his counterbalance is the mesmerising Penelope Cruz as Laura, in what must be one of her best performances. Laura is a parade of explosive or suppressed emotions by turns, alert to every slight and secret as only a deeply hurt woman could be, a fierce custodian of her own dignity. She dominates every scene she’s in, a deeply sympathetic character who can communicate just as much with a smile fading into tears as she can with her note-perfect takedowns.
There are a lot of other ways in which Ferrari creates depth and complexity, one of which is in its completely plausible frame. A film needs some serious budget to really – really – do a period setting, something which I wish even the most ambitious indie filmmakers could appreciate, as it’s fertile terrain to just trash the entire premise. Here, the post-War Italy created on film is very convincing, looks wonderful and is – aside from that opening newsreel sequence – fully consistent. Mann and writers Troy Kennedy Martin and Brock Yates play around with humour, too, which feels welcome, and often comes at the expense of religion, or at least is linked with religion (such as the men timing racing laps during Mass; the priest who avers that, had Jesus been born in 20th Century Modena, he would have made cars). But as part of a picture of a modernising, but struggling Italy, of course the Church is important. This is a country dreaming of carving its own path, of being self sufficient – hence Ferrari’s reluctance to take outsider backing, American money, to keep his factory running. It was a risky kind of pride, given Italy’s economic state at the time. Necessity is the mother of invention here, but accompanied by very human stories of loss, jealousy and desperation.
All of this elevates the races themselves, as we see how much is riding on them: Enzo develops a kind of monomania, but not out of nowhere, and the film explores this confidently. Ferrari does feature, without question, some phenomenal race scenes, though doled out carefully – thanks God, because much more of that balletic carnage would have shredded the nerves (and incidentally, the film makes good use of opera, too, either by including operatic music and performances, or by itself turning into a bit of an opera. It makes sense). Some of the accented English spoken in the film – whilst the decision is appreciable – can make the dialogue difficult to parse at times, but it’s not a continual concern. This is overall an impressive, sensitive, unorthodox exploration of the Ferrari story, and its decisions pay off.
Every year – and I have done lists like this for quite a few years now – I wonder what I’ll say for the little preamble: before getting straight to talking about the films themselves, it always feels proper to say a little something first. Well, this year I’ll start by saying this: 2023 has been a genuinely very difficult year to call. There have been lots of important external factors (such as the Sag-Aftra strike) which have affected what has made it to our screens; lots of these big questions over creative control, ownership and intellectual copyright will continue to have a profound impact on the world of film, as well as having the more obvious impact of keeping titles off our screens which would have been completed and released by now. Also, as much as the main Covid lockdowns are now some years behind us, Covid continues to have an impact on cinema, whether because people have written films which they could feasibly only make around reduced crews and locations, or because the huge dent made in profits and possibilities is continuing to bite; still, films are staggering to market, after years of being hamstrung by the impact of the pandemic.
But even taking all of these things into account, compounded by the fact that the cost-of-living crisis ruled out a lot of in-person festivals and events this year, which has doubtlessly had a massive impact on the titles making my list, 2023 has turned out to be a very varied year for film in terms of genres, budgets and approaches. On one hand, last-minute entrants like a certain film from a certain Toho Studios have showcased impressive SFX and a sense of scale like no other; on the other, tiny indie productions have got things done, too, despite clearly needing to make tough decisions and think carefully about how to bring their narratives into being. So this list contains a little of everything, and has had to miss a few titles out of the full list for reasons of expedience rather than indifference (hence a raft of titles getting honourable mentions.)
That’s enough preamble, isn’t it? Let’s get to it then.
TO FIRE YOU COME AT LAST
Perhaps in the fittingly opaque hinterlands between feature-length and short film, To Fire You Come At Last feels familiar, taking a little from the darkest examples of A Play For Today and/or other, mid-twentieth century Gothic, which is itself a weird palimpsest of ideas stemming back to the murder ballads and penny dreadfuls of centuries before. A simple enough story in many respects – fulfilling a promise to a dead man, come what may – it really lands through its sustained, artful atmosphere. It absolutely nails its night shots, importantly, engendering a pleasing sense of foreboding which runs throughout the film. You can check out the full Warped Perspective review here.
SALTBURN
A late 2023 release, it’s nonetheless no great surprise that Emerald Fennell’s latest Saltburn has made quite an impact; had a film like this with those scenes and that conclusion just merrily rolled past audiences, then that would have been truly remarkable. So it’s a film engineered to provoke in many respects, but this doesn’t take away from its sharp British humour, assured performances, and most of all in how it captures an idyllic summer (then spends the last act almost merrily taking it to bits). Barry Keoghan has form for being a disruptive presence within a family, but he takes it to a new level here, with what you could at least agree is a committed performance (rarely have so many bodily fluids appeared so readily in a mainstream film). I am still enjoying (?) myself by pondering how much Ollie knew he was going to do, and at what point. Saltburn absolutely has a life beyond itself, an outrageous, hyperreal riot. Check out my full review here.
VINCENT MUST DIE
Imagine if your very presence seemed to trigger random acts of violence in others? And, if you tried to seek help, it seemed to trigger even more, until you could no longer live your life in any normal way? What starts out as a grim, but somewhat funny farce in Vincent Must Die soon transfigures into a sizable, society-wide nightmare which drags up interesting questions and considerations, all whilst never letting up in its mission to shock. Played with humanity and humility, Karim Leklou’s plight as Vincent is the unerring focus for the first act of the film, though gradually the film expands its viewpoint to take in someone close to him, too: as this unfolds, the film is reminiscent of any number of contagion cinema titles, perhaps most notably The Crazies, but it’s by no means a do-over, and has a real charm of its own. One of this year’s Fantasia titles, check out my full review here.
VINCENT
First things first: this is a different Vincent. Is this Vincent a monster? We certainly see …something which indicates that he might be, but the whole film gently encourages us to interrogate the idea of the ‘monster’ throughout – so, when we first meet Vincent (Mikkel Vadsholt) supping on what looks like a bag of blood, oh and working out of an ice-cream van, then it seems we’re being led to believe that this man is a straightforward threat – maybe to children, right before we encounter a deeply unhappy young man whose own love of cinematic monsters seems to be all that’s keeping him together. But the film is rather cleverer than simply offering up a victim to a standard-issue monster, and turns our suspicions back on us, asking us – how much can we really know? Enough to judge? It’s a touching, clever film about unorthodox friendships and a learning curve taking place against a potentially supernatural background, successfully spanning different genres with ease. As I said at the time, this is one of those indie films which keeps you looking for gems of a similar quality. You can read my full review of Vincent here.
PEPPERGRASS
Peppergrass is just such a thoughtful, charming homage to a range of horror genres, one which sustains all of its different notes. What’s not to love? When I initially reviewed this film back in the spring, co-director Chantelle Han commented ‘we made this film for you’; so, yes, it is very much a fan’s film, it knows its influences, but it weaves everything together into a distinctive whole. In short, it’s the sort of love letter we want: it’s saying the right things in a different way.
Starting out as a road movie, then a home invasion, then a failed heist turned survivalist horror, Peppergrass depends for its success on its close focus on key character Eula (also Chantelle Han), a pregnant restaurant owner who needs a break and decides to make it happen by attempting to steal a rare truffle from a reclusive veteran. Things move from the ridiculous to the sublime in a clever film which uses the backdrop of the pandemic in a meaningful, plausible way (and may well have been impacted by the Covid pandemic itself, given that it was actually completed in 2021. But whatever the slight delay, I’m very glad it got a release this year.)
GODZILLA MINUS ONE
First of all, Godzilla Minus One is one of those rare birds for me where I haven’t written up a full-length review; having only seen it last week is one reason for that, but also, sometimes it’s just nice to go and see something without crowding your head with mental notes. In effect, you can, on occasion, just watch the damn film. Still, we need some justification for its inclusion on this Best Of list, so here goes: it’s a Toho Studios prequel to the original Gojira title, placing it squarely back in its own origins and excising a lot of the guff which primarily US studios have felt the need to add in through more recent decades.
In Godzilla Minus One, whilst there is some justification offered for Godzilla turning up (we’re back to the WWII setting of course) no one is seeking to find a reason here for Godzilla’s behaviour. He just is, he just does. As he decimates a Japan which is already pretty decimated, GM1 manages to sustain some engaging characters in an unorthodox little family unit, which includes a three year old tot acting her little heart out; that’s charming, but it’s protagonist Shikishima (Ryonosuke Kamiki), a failed kamikaze pilot who can’t shake his personal guilt for Japan’s surrender, who really holds the film together, a central focus for proceedings – which range big. A world of failed optimism but the desire to survive, of a loss of hope in government to protect the people, but of hope in the people themselves, GM1 has interesting things to say about Japan and Japanese history, but this is a monster movie and it works fantastically, with some superb shots and sequences. It has to move its pieces around a bit quickly at the end to get things in place for the first film – its real time sequel – but it holds together, and it’s a brilliant film, in which Godzilla is unequivocally terrifying again.
WHEN EVIL LURKS
When you’re a horror fan, sometimes you just crave the obliteratingly nasty – non-horror fans may find that difficult to understand, but so it is. Well, Argentinian horror When Evil Lurks – Argentina certainly isn’t messing about when it comes to its horror cinema lately – is nasty, a supernatural horror of possession and all its attendant bodily breakdowns, one which feels kind of familiar, but also throws in a few curveballs which play with ‘the rules’ of possession horror. If you have seen the film, and many of you reading are likely to have, then I’m ready to bet that the choice of image, above, has triggered some quite clear memories of your viewing. Not that children are always victims here, though: in the universe of the film, they can get past the whole ‘bad language and self-harm’ thing to start swinging weapons around as a small rural community is beset by a body-hopping kind of entity which favours baseless, irrational violence. It’s shocking, it’s often ingenious, it knows just when to skirt near to dark comedy and it’s an enjoyable slab of very grisly entertainment. Why press in on the edges of your horror film with awkward subtext, when you can just have someone caving their own head in with a hammer – just in case?
NEW LIFE
There has been an impressive spate of sci-fi in recent years that pares back the sci-fi elements as much as it can to allow the human consequences to come to the fore. That is the case with New Life also, though it’s a film which brings plenty of horror to bear on its science fiction, via its examination of how protocol and ‘doing the right thing’ balances against humanity in an unprecedented outbreak of something as-yet unknown. Whilst the film does move around, it’s not a film which grows and grows in scale; New Life is instead a story of two ill-fated women whose paths join: whilst it tantalises what would happen if this situation grew further out of control, its focus is on the initial situation, as explored through an interesting, detailed though broken timeline. It also lands an incredibly moving sequence come the end, with a line of dialogue which speaks to a world of pain beyond itself. Impressive stuff from John Rosman. Check out a fuller review here.
INFLUENCER
Shudder has, over the years, steadily built itself up from simply being a horror streaming platform to a film development programme, commissioning and/or screening new cinema of its own. And it’s probably fair to say that Shudder Presents features often have a lot in common: slick, modern, with a sense of the need to both charm and appal a relatively young, well-versed audience. Influencer (2023) is by far and away the best of the new Shudder productions I have seen, as much as it has a lot in common with other, good titles in its sharp visuals, good production values and knowing pace. Notably, however, it dispenses with supernatural horror and plants its feet in a recognisable, if (for many) unattainable world: that of the social media influencer, those affluent young people who magically manage to get into the enviable (for many) feedback loop of spending a lot of money to have a good time, to make more money to spend on a good time. Social media has been creeping into horror for as many years as it’s been such an important component in people’s lives, but Influencer does sterling work asking a series of important questions: who is watching these feeds? What do they get out of it? And what will they do with the information?
A careful, devastating and brutal film with a knock-out, sinister antagonist and a cleverly winding plotline, I was absolutely gripped by Influencer and it’s certainly a film which could stand another viewing or two. Clever, unsettling fare. You can see a longer review of the film here.
SISU
It’s absolutely only the presence of Sisu in the world that could ever knock Influencer from the top spot; that it popped up, seemingly out of nowhere, the brainchild of Rare Exports director Jalmari Helander makes it even better; a safe pair of hands for an inventive and horror historical fantasy. So – if you missed it – how do we define what it’s all about? Well, it’s a gleeful fantasy of redress and justice, a grisly superhero movie, a splatstick comedy and a version of a Wild West revenge flick – only relocated to the frozen North. When the retreating Nazis decide to rob a mute gold miner in the Finnish wilderness, they get far more than they bargained for as the man turns out to be more than adept at survival. In fact, he could turn out to be the adversary they have long feared – and their fateful engagement with him their last ordeal on Earth. Once you are happy to suspend your disbelief, and you should (or must), then every note in Sisu is a pleasure to behold. It’s one extraordinary man’s odyssey through ultraviolence, and as I suspected at the time, it hasn’t been bettered. Bravo, Jalmari Helander! Here’s a complete review of this wild ride of a film.
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
And, finally, here are some other 2023 films which deserve praise:
The low-key but visually impressive moral meanderings of RUBIKON, with its space sci-fi and environmental portents; similarly, the thoughtful sci-fi of RESTORE POINT and its idea of life as a file which can be backed up and re-run at will – unless, of course, someone deliberately eschews this process; the high weird relationship horror of GOOD BOY; INVOKING YELL, which brings more of the lo-fi atmospherics of black metal + horror to the screen than many far bigger budget projects; SPAGHETTI JUNCTION, a careful, science fiction-adjacent coming-of-age story with beautiful characterisation and character development; the quiet and thoughtful character study of SOMETIMES I THINK ABOUT DYING, and – another viewing from very late in the year – the unashamedly fun slasher THANKSGIVING, in which Eli Roth shows us once more that, whatever else, he is more than capable of a damn good, high entertainment horror.
Eli Roth is one of the best-known horror directors out there, which is perhaps surprising, given his relatively small body of work: some of that body of work has been pretty divisive, too. But his love of genre film has never been in question, he’s a horror guy, and his feature-length take on Thanksgiving is very much him at his best: having fun, blending comedy with horror and crafting a defiantly decent modern-day slasher with a back story which has enough depth to keep things together. It’s set in Plymouth, Massachusetts and makes good use of the city’s historical links to the Thanksgiving holiday, right down to the historical names and faces used in the film. But out of all this, it weaves something which feels very up-to-date, with plenty of ideas. You’d be hard-pressed to be bored, genuinely bored, even though the film runs to around one hour forty-five minutes.
We start with a Thanksgiving dinner, and this recurs as a theme throughout: single cop Eric (it’s only Patrick Dempsey!) joins a family group for the meal, which includes local RightMart manager Mitch (Ty Olsson) with his wife Amanda (Gina Gerschon) and the owner of the store, local bigwig Thomas Wright (elite hunter Rick Hoffman) and his new, arm candy wife Kathleen (Karen Cliche). But proceedings are broken up when Mitch gets called into work; the big Black Friday sale is, apparently, beginning on Thanksgiving evening, and the hordes are gathering (if you’re an American and you think that’s consumerism gone mad, then consider the fact that we get that in the UK and Europe now, too, despite not celebrating Thanksgiving – for obvious reasons). The group begins to peel off – pun not intended, now that it’s been noted – and call in to the store themselves, including Wright family heir Jessica (Nell Verlaque) and her high school age friends. That they jump the sizeable queue and get inside ahead of everyone else adds outrage to the already simmering, please-part-me-with-my-money crowd, not helped by how they mock the waiting shoppers through the plate glass windows. As this unfolds, we get a few glimpses of local rivalries, issues and double-crosses. Remember them: they might come in for something later. You never know. (You know.)
But for now, it’s enough to know this: things are about to get retail ugly. Collapsed entry doors, tramplings, rioting, fleeing, screaming people: the only person not terrified seems to be Jessica’s jock friend Evan (Tomaso Sanelli), who livecasts the melee on his phone. Interestingly, this sequence happens before the film’s title even appears on screen: this zombie-adjacent horde descending on a mall (okay, a mart, but there’s little difference) calls to mind Romero’s seminal Dead films, right down to the sense of fun he hung onto in Dawn, and the grisly, scalp-ripping riot that happens once the windows come down is definitely nasty, even if just a hectic prelude to the main event. Because, after this, we skip ahead by one year. In that interim, Plymouth has mourned its dead, the teen friendship group has been disrupted by the disappearance of Jessica’s boyfriend Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks) and some of the townspeople are protesting any return of the early Black Friday event taking place this year. Wright is keen for it to go ahead anyway – those profits! – but it seems someone might be about to take things further than a placard and a slogan. The historic Cutter house, linked to pilgrim figure John Cutter, has been trashed and graffitied. Oh, and a large display axe stolen. Oh, and someone has set up social media accounts under the name of ‘John Cutter’, threatening vengeance on a selection of the people of the town, including Jessica and her friends.
Slasher incoming! Whilst this genre is, by some margin, not one of my favourites, Thanksgiving strikes a great balance between reverence for the classic slashers (which were themselves inspiration for the faux Thanksgiving trailer directed by Roth for Grindhouse, way back in 2007) and enough fresh ideas to hook jaded modern audiences who may feel they’ve ‘seen it all’. There’s a lot of flair here for pitch black humour, right down to some ingenious splatstick, and a sense that every kill needs to be an OTT, memorable set piece. It’s fast paced and always feels fast paced somehow, despite the runtime, never taking itself terribly seriously for too long (as this would probably be the weak spot which unravelled that pace altogether). Similarly, the characters walk a decent line between archetype (jock, boss, geek) and greater depth which only develops over time, and only as much as is needed for the story at hand. So, as we see the plot move forward with a grisly plan starting to come together, it’s Jessica who becomes our common denominator, with access all areas and enough about her to hold our interest. Hey, if some of her lines are very heavily meant to foreshadow later events, it’s all good – it’s all in the spirit of the thing, character, plot, pace and all. It works.
Sure, there’s nothing super-subtle here about how Thanksgiving handles its big themes of corporate greed, consumer culture or social media, but it really doesn’t need to be: it has a lot of fun, successful set pieces, confidence in its approach and a seamless blend of comedy and tragedy. This is a colourful, gruesome horror comic which pokes fun at/holes in an array of culpable characters. What’s not to love? Add to that the fact that it doesn’t scrimp on the final act in any way, shape or form and you’ve got a winner, even for this miserable anti-slashers reviewer right here, who wound up totally on board. If this ends up being the last horror movie I watch in 2023 – as it well might – then it’s a great way to close the year.
Thanksgiving (2023) will be released on VOD January 1st 2024.
Horror and art: it’s a faithful, longstanding relationship which continues to turn out a few films – good and bad – every single year. And then we come to ThePortrait, a film which you could be forgiven for assuming was a fairly straightforward horror story – but it isn’t. Paring back the horror to moments of intense, introspective and even doubtful personal experience, the film turns out to be more of a psychodrama centred upon the plight of an individual. But I said it turns out to be that: the film’s opening scenes are far more in keeping with traditional horror as we witness a young, screaming woman, being dragged bleeding through the woods by a blankly hostile man. As this unfolds, we see a portrait being painted, and we are clearly to infer that something about this creative process is linked to the violence. Then we must store up that information, primed to see this painting reappear at some point later.
We next cut to the modern day, and a couple heading through the hills to a beautiful, remote house – which turns out to be the old family home of the man, Alex (Ryan Kwanten, last seen negotiating with a mysterious entity in a toilet cubicle in Glorious). No rain-lashed, Gothic mansion, this: it’s a pleasant, bright place – but there’s something very wrong with Alex. As his wife Sofia tries to engage with him, he is by turns sullen and reactive; it transpires that he has received a catastrophic brain injury, hence the unpredictable behaviour. And Sofia (the superb Natalia Cordova-Buckley) is doing everything in her power to build a bridge to the man Alex once was: she hopes that spending time in his old house will trigger something, some breakthrough.
We get a few leading clues that the house contains some supernatural presence, mainly as-gleaned by the camera shots from the inside of the house, watching our married couple as they approach the property, and then as they get settled in: is something indeed watching them? Oh, and there’s the small matter of the decidedly unfriendly wall art which greets them inside: here’s our link to the pre-credits. But we spend time with our very much alive protagonists first of all. Alex, it seems, received his injury in the heat of a confrontation with Sofia, which put him in the path of an accident. Sofia, as such wracked with guilt and horror, has made it her life’s work to help him recuperate, and also to do anything within her means to assuage her own feelings (which she harbours needlessly, as the audience is almost certain to infer).
But very much like Miss Giddens in this film’s close relative, The Turn of the Screw, Sofia is bringing a great deal of her own complex emotions and neuroses to bear on her situation. As such, upon exploring the house, she is struck by her discovery of a large portrait in – where else? – the attic. It’s a self-portrait, painted, as she infers, by a previous occupant with a link to this house and – most surprisingly of all – the man in the painting looks uncannily like Alex. In her heightened state of anxiety, this simply compounds her feelings that something awful, something inescapable is heading their way; if the clues were already there, then this discovery serves as some kind of evidence: desperate people often rely on the notion of fate, and the painting feels awfully like fate.
As a few new characters begin to drift in and out of the periphery here, Sofia talks to Alex’s cousin, Mags (Virginia Madsen), who obligingly provides a large slab of backstory on who the man in the portrait is, and what his links are to Alex. It captures Sofia’s imagination: almost on cue, she begins to experience strange visions and dreams, and life in the house becomes ever less bearable. Mags’s story of a tortured, torturing artist concealed somewhere in the family history could be an explanation, of sorts, for the phenomena Sofia begins to suffer through, or else it could just be another weight for Sofia to carry.
The film is strikingly successful in presenting Sofia’s deep, fragile unhappiness and Natalia Cordova-Buckley is absolutely key to this. You really empathise with her lot; she is lonely, vulnerable, and her husband is no longer her husband (though the snippets we see of his behaviour before his accident show us that life was no walk in the park for her beforehand, either). There’s an uncomfortable atmosphere through every second of this film’s runtime, and the sense of dread conveyed is what feels very much like the conduit for the supernatural activity we witness. This happens via some highly effective scenes, doled out very carefully and deliberately – jump scares do not punctuate or define this film. Akin to lots of the very best ghost stories then, events move slowly, always casting doubt on what is happening, hinting at the contextual problems at play here: families; family legacies; the toxic effects of privilege; the lives of women.
The overall of feel of The Portrait is oppressive and claustrophobic: assuming this was the aim for director Simon Ross and writer David Griffiths (who has had a hell of a career shift, from Goldman-Sachs VP to screenwriter) then – well played, this is a hard watch, but a thought-provoking one, with an intriguing and well-developed take on an established horror idea. Whilst not one for fans of high action, for those of you who enjoy pondering the links between human psychology and supernatural phenomena, and pondering them over and over again long after you’ve watched the film, this truly is an unexpected, oblique little gem.
It’s the most terrible time of the year: it’s the present day, and – Santa has mysteriously stopped delivering presents, ending winter. Writers and directors Manuel Camilion and Benjamin Edelman have created a retro-feeling homage to both Mary Shelley and Father Christmas here that sometimes finds its feet, but other times feels frail. With few comparisons to be drawn with other holiday horror films like the modern classic Krampus or A Christmas Horror Story, as the subject is so unique, I must say this leans more towards monstrous than merry, channelling Frankenstein’s Monster in all its moaning, undead glory. Given that the Monster pre-dates even Nosferatu on film (the Edison Frankenstein appeared in 1910), our directors have picked a sufficiently antique being to meld with the ancient origins of Christmas also under consideration here.
The focus in our brief introduction is that the town’s coroner has been experiencing thefts—body thefts, that is. One night, in a mix of hijinks and larceny, the bandit is caught in the act frightening a worker with a faked zombie reawakening (nice foreshadowing). When finally unmasking the culprit, however, we see it is a man called Max Causey (Jared Korotkin) who has been experimenting with corpses, and tomorrow is going to be a big day—it’s Christmas, after all. Flashing back twelve years, we see how Max created a Mouse Trap style contraption to prove the one thing all kids crave: that Santa is real and he was the one who captured the mythical figure. When Santa arrives right on schedule though, gifts in hand and well wishes for Max to return to bed, the trap is set off and works all too well; old Saint Nick is ensnared and maneuvered right into… an unfortunately placed fire poker.
Twelve years later, Max is still in possession of Santa’s brain, and, together with his corpse stealing, seems to be trying to right the holiday season and resurrect its champion. Together with his friend and lab partner Paige (Ophelia Rivera), the pair think they might have the science right this for an A+ on their science project, all while other peers are creating conspiracy theories as to where Santa might have gone (hint: think big coal). A class experiment with a handmade device resurrects a dead mouse, showing that Paige and Max have their formula dialed in, and while the class is planning a retro Christmas party to blow out the holiday, Max is wondering if he can take his experiment to greater heights – namely, a human being.
Another imaginative holiday entry, Santastein brings creativity and charm as another film trying to recreate Santa. With a nostalgic feel, deep colors and lighting that pops, and camerawork which lends itself to another time, this makes the film feel like it’s not quite in any time period at all. The star of the show, Santastein, is a monster to behold and is brought to life with a bang by actor Michael Vitovich. Santastein’s arrival to tear up the whole town down at the Christmas party is definitely the high point of the film, though, as this story unfortunately lacks a lot of compelling backstory or character development, even for its supposedly deeply damaged lead. Performances are solid enough, but some of the writing (with what I assume are classic B-movie jokes and holiday hijinks) sometimes land flat, whilst much of the introduction is a slow build towards the science experiment we all know is going to end in catastrophe, with the pace not quite picking up until the halfway mark.
That all aside, I can’t fault this indie for letting its budget show too much, as its title monster is so creatively conjured and brings about plenty of splatter. Practical effects make this a messy affair with some memorable murders and some added special effects that don’t break the bank, whilst creating the electrical flair that a Frankenstein retelling should bring. I will say I enjoyed this rendition of Christmas more than some of my previous ventures into holiday horror this season. Having a raging undead Santa tearing out innards to a classic holiday tune is sure to be enjoyable, and with plenty of gore and town terrorizing to follow, overall I think this is a simple watch that achieves its goal and doesn’t overthink anything. For some easy viewing of a newly resurrected Saint Nick, check Screambox for this film, streaming now.
Cinema teaches us that female travellers in remote climes are not in for an easy time of it. Perhaps it’s sending a message: get straight to work. Don’t risk a gap year or a prolonged vacation; it’s just not worth it. The Royal Hotel (2023) certainly starts out along those lines, though it shifts things around almost from the start by having our protagonists Liv (Jessica Henwick) and Hanna – no extraneous ‘h’ – (Julia Garner) running out of money aboard a party boat, a place every inch the monstrosity you’d expect it to be, namely a thumping, pan-global queue of whooping party people trying and failing to ask one another the question, ‘So, where are you from?’ Come to think of it, it’s not a bad summary of the film to follow.
The girls can’t stay here; they need to earn money to see them as far as their Shangri-La, Bondi Beach, so they find an agent who promises them temporary work at a bar in a remote mining area of the country. Said agent warns them that they might be in for a certain amount of ‘male attention’ there, and Liv – we imagine, rather naively – seems good with that, though in the next breath she’s asking if there are any kangaroos. To her, unwanted male attention and roos are all part and parcel of the Australian experience. The girls make their way to the Royal Hotel, through a clearly vast expanse of land requiring travel by rail, bus, and finally a lift from sometime bar manager Carol (Ursula Yovich) who picks them up a couple of miles out.
The Royal is an emblem of faded Colonial grandeur, way out in the wilderness: the film isn’t terribly subtle with its visual cues, and the Royal is no exception. It’s the same colour inside as the sandy landscape outside. Even the tattered leather sofa upstairs is a shade of beige. The girls get settled in to their new digs, and then they’re thrown into the job itself, after some rudimentary training from landlord Billy (Hugo Weaving), which seems to mainly mean slamming things as hard as possible to ensure closure. That could be another visual clue, or else Billy has really neglected the upkeep of the bar, which could be the same thing. As for the bar, it gets lively and yes, they get a bit of pushback from the locals, but Liv clearly takes to the work a lot more readily than Hanna who – come to think of it – looks haunted and rather wan, even a bit – beige. She immediately wants to leave; amongst other things the casual Oz deployment of the ‘c’ word leaves her cold – but Liv think this is too hasty. After all, the two British girls they are about to replace – there’s a day’s overlap – seem to have done alright? They can clearly hold their own, have held their own. And when Liv and Hanna get to see a few of the sights, finding some time for more standard holiday activities like swimming and sunbathing, even Hanna warms up a bit.
So what, or who, is going to precipitate the crisis here? We know it’s coming. We can feel it. The incidental music (excepting Kylie) speaks of it. There wouldn’t be a film otherwise. Perhaps it’s when Billy begins to absent himself for days at a time, leaving two inexperienced girls to fend off the attentions of the predominantly male clientele, amongst whom the surprisingly-named Dolly (Daniel Henshall) is the figurehead, always pushing the ‘smile, darling’ and ‘it was just a joke’ banter into threatening territory. Or perhaps the crisis will stem from the girls themselves? There must be a reason Hanna is so closed-off and taciturn and, well, to remove the charming suffix Dolly gives the descriptor, a bit ‘sour’.
A lot of what makes and keeps the film engaging is in wondering about this: this process could, admittedly, be coloured a certain way if, like me, your experience of Australian film has tended to come from Ozploitation, so you may be expecting ultraviolence to break out at any moment. But this ain’t Wolf Creek, and nor is it Outback, where the threat comes from the harsh environment. And that’s fine, as, while we wait, there’s lots to enjoy. The people here are rounded enough to hold interest and the cracks running through their lives are fine and plausible, even whilst not overwritten. The two girls are perhaps a little obviously adrift and clueless at first, with some clunky lines and notions, but things improve as events begin to unfold around them; they are fleshed out more by how they respond, often quietly, to life in and around the bar And, along the way, the sheer amount of casual drunkenness in the film generates a lot of fumbling, retching unease and disorientation, with some humour and pathos too. It’s all doled out carefully. It must be building up to something pretty special.
Fans of languid, journey-not-destination cinema, which is happy to disrupt expectations, will likely remain enthused by the ways things play out in The Royal Hotel, but many viewers will feel a sense of diminishing returns here. Even those harsh visual cues, with their hard, obvious symbolism – snakes, storms, axes – surprisingly peter out, as does the seemingly smouldering, festering misogyny, pressing it at the film’s edges. So attention turns to Hanna, with the assumption that Garner’s rather staid performance must be poised to reveal something deliberate at the heart of her character. Instead, we get a rather disconcertingly janky ending which feels like a ninety-minute non-sequitur, especially after hinting at something tangible, some reveal or purpose.
Did the film know it was going to end this way? It all feels oddly unclear at the end, another shouted question in a rowdy bar, with no clear answer. So perhaps we come full circle, in a way, but the shift in pace, tone and detail at the end feels like something gone awry. Being left with questions at the end of a film is fine, but equally, we should feel able to glean something via what has come before. The Royal Hotel doesn’t give us that, which makes for a thin, rushed conclusion to an otherwise carefully-drawn and engaging preamble.
