Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

Past Life (2025)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Syria: six years previously. Journalist Jason Frey (Aneurin Barnard) and a female colleague have been captured by Isis; the woman’s refusal to fulfil their kidnappers’ demands, to read out an address on video, results in her losing her life, whilst Frey is maimed, having his hand smashed. He, however, does survive, and escapes: once back in the UK he resumes his journalistic career, doing pretty well out of it, but at great personal cost. We are already clear that our lead character is carrying around a motherlode of trauma and grief, yet part of him misses the fieldwork, and when we first catch up with him, he’s even considering returning to Syria.

This sets the stage for some difficulties at home. Heavily pregnant wife Claira (Pixie Lott) is understandably none too keen at being left on her own at this point in her pregnancy; distraction luckily comes in the form of a night out, as they have planned to sit in the audience of a talk show hosting famed hypnotist Timothy Bevan (Jeremy Piven, here balancing our Aneurin with a Bevan). He’s there to promote a new book about his specialism: past life regression. Momentarily – and only momentarily – the film starts to feel a little bit like Late Night with the Devil (2023) as Bevan attempts to regress an audience member. Jason is nonplussed by the whole affair – so much so, that when Bevan calls for another volunteer, he puts up his hand, perhaps to disprove what he perceives to be “bollocks”. Ethics and checks be damned; suddenly, the poster boy for CPTSD is being hypnotised in front of a live studio audience, and entirely predictably, it goes horribly awry. Jason doesn’t just remember snippets from Syria; there’s someone else there, another woman, and he witnesses the woman being attacked. Soon, there seem to be more faces from a point in the past, looming up into his present.

This tumble of traumatic flashbacks and something else sticks with Jason long after he leaves the studio, and just at the point when he needs to give his answer on Syria. But all of the work he’s done in therapy seems to erode under the weight of his new visions. He needs urgent help, and the only way he can think of to get this is to finish what he started with Bevan.

Past Life leans heavily and with relish into its horror and giallo elements, feeling reminiscent in several places to Last Night in Soho (2021): this is a mystery, a mystery which expands every time the morally-ambivalent Bevan takes Frey under. The sequences intended to show Frey under hypnosis are very cleverly handled, playing with by-now cultural expectations about this particular kind of altered state: the metronome, the corridor, the pendulum, the light. It’s all woven expertly into ‘the real’, using careful edits, linking motifs and an excellent, immersive musical score to ensure this. Back in the real, the investigative elements have been updated with very modern features. Internet searches and true crime podcasts help to punctuate the process of unfolding new information; these are nicely contrasted with very plausible flashbacks to the Eighties, when earlier events took place. The film, and its director, have a meticulous eye for detail which helps to make these sequences a formidable visual and aural experience. The casting, too, comes from an impressive roster of names. Barnard has the requisite brewing, brooding, barely-suppressed emotions which underpin the film, helping to sustain its interest and impact. There are some nice curveball casting choices in here, too.

Of course, as a supernatural-tinged giallo, Past Life is a horrific fantasy at its core, but it carries within it an intriguing premise: generations of violence against women which transcends place and time, spreading its misery outwards, in a kind of monstruous ripple effect. Here it is negotiated through the backstory and the up-to-date efforts of a decent man trying to solve a mystery, but even so, his issues in dealing with his own past and his later actions still bring down a storm (at times literally) on his marriage, risking harm and trauma to his own wife. Due to this moral weight, the resulting film often feels hefty, discomfiting and paranoid, as it almost should do, given its topics. And if some of the film’s surprise elements settle more into an expected mode – often reliant on montage and some expedient, though less realistic developments in places – then Past Life still works as a whole. It is well-handled, well-paced and offers an effective finale, one which rewards our attention. There are also shades of director Simeon Halligan’s earlier film Habit (2017) in Past Life‘s night scenes. The script studiously avoids naming Manchester, even though we later see its name on a map, but it’s Manchester alright (or Stockport, to be more specific) and again, Halligan has done great work turning the city into a fitting backdrop both for a grim, gritty plotline and supernatural, fantasy elements.

Past Life is in cinemas from 20th March and on digital from 6th April 2026 (Miracle Media)

City Wide Fever (2025)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Oh, we know what’s coming as the opening scenes of City Wide Fever (2025) appear on screen, and it’s good: as soon as we start to roll, the New York cityscape blends with a nightmarish montage of masked figures and gritty set pieces, showing the audience a film which wears its neo-giallo credentials openly and proudly. That in itself will endear it to many, but there’s much more to like here than just well-realised fan service. Despite being up against a miniscule budget, City Wide Fever does a great deal with what it has and pushes the limits on what it can do, weaving together an engaging piece of independent film choc-full of love for film itself.

Here’s how things start: a young woman, Sam (Diletta Guglielmi/Nancy Kimball) is walking the streets, minding her own business – when she happens to spot a discarded USB flash drive, which she picks up and takes home. As luck would have it, it’s relevant to her interests; Sam is a film student and exploitation film cineaste, and her place is full of film memorabilia (including, oh hello, a copy of that fabulous exploitation cinema bible, Nightmare USA). As she looks through the contents of the drive, her interest is soon piqued: she finds herself looking through a series of stills and info on a whole host of tantalising-looking exploitation cinema made by a director whose name she doesn’t recognise. His name is Saturnino Barresi, and he’s the cult film maestro who never was, his work disappearing into obscurity whilst the likes of Mario Bava and Dario Argento moved into the fore. It’s a crying shame; it’s also, as Sam realises, a damn good opportunity for a film student like her to investigate and perhaps to restore Barresi’s name.

Using a still image and the title of his last, unfinished film – which shares its title with ours – Sam begins to investigate this singular mystery. Starting with her film studies professor and following a trail through a number of interesting and insalubrious film people, she seems to be getting closer to finding out something more tangible, but once she’s really on the brink of discovery, her position grows precarious. Interestingly, and in keeping with the genre of the film, she realises that whatever it is doesn’t seem to be bound by the rules of reality. This is a giallo director and a giallo project, after all. But that doesn’t mean the risks to her are any less real; her search for information on Barresi means that she, too, is being pursued. Baressi’s work seems, somehow, to want to remain unknown.

Firstly, the amount of thought, ambition and affection which goes into every frame of this film is clear, especially when we consider that it’s constrained by a small budget: City Wide Fever may have had to curtail itself somewhat when it comes to SFX – relatively costly and time-consuming – but elsewhere, it layers and re-layers influences, mood and visuals throughout, ensuring everything here counts, as well as looking and sounding good. That means that the film also acknowledges the foibles of the giallo genre, too: the script goes from being hyperreal to more-or-less comedic in places, though never lingering on this so long that it starts to unravel the overall atmosphere and impact (in fact, it’s all part of that whole). It pokes a bit of fun at film people, too, which is fine – it all comes together to suggest insider knowledge and awareness. The film is, above all else, a film fan’s film, from the sets, references, characters, dialogue and filming style to the props glimpsed in certain key scenes. It’s also interesting to see depictions of Times Square and 42nd Street, once the backdrop for a whole host of exploitation cinema classics, now part-gentrified, but not quite sleaze free: director and writer Josh Heaps also tackles the overlap between horror, exploitation and pornography – one outsells the rest – and in the world of this film, they sail very close to one another. Also of note: the fourth wall in this film is always a permeable barrier, and nothing is every quite certain.

Narrative rules are made to be broken in City Wide Fever, which stops things ever settling too much into one mode or routine. It hangs onto its identity-fracturing plot points for a long part of its runtime actually, and it’s a winning tribute to classic giallo from a modern-day perspective, shot on video with smartphones, flash drives and computers being brought to bear on archetypal giallo ideas and developments. Personally, I’d now love to see Heaps get handed some of the funding which filmmakers Cattet and Forzani always seem to get hold of, to see what he could do with it: hey, we can dream. But as it stands, the film he has made is a genuinely pleasant surprise and more evidence of what independent filmmakers can do with their own fandom and passion for genre film.

City Wide Fever (2025) receives a US theatrical release from April 15th.

Final Girls Berlin Film Fest 2026: Dead Lover

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

A nameless female gravedigger (director Grace Glowicki) has a work-related issue: she stinks. This has made finding a partner very difficult. Who wants a girlfriend who smells of grave dirt and dead things? She tries to fix the issue by concocting perfumes for herself – which don’t work. The day (or night) job goes on, and so does the search for love.

However, a particularly busy evening of funerals, with graveside eulogies to match, throws a young man into the gravedigger’s path. He’s there to grieve his late sister, but when the gravedigger saves his life (apparently from an aggressive, pursuing dog mask), they begin a passionate relationship. Not only does he not mind her smelling the place up; he quite likes it. Someone for everyone, etc.

Their relationship is disrupted when the gravedigger’s lover has to head overseas to seek a medical cure for his infertility. It’s clearly not coincidence that a film starting with a Mary Shelley quote for its epigraph is going to have someone dying tragically at sea, leaving only a disembodied finger (rather than a heart). Moving on from this, the film perhaps inevitably starts to channel Frankenstein, as the gravedigger starts to bring her rudimentary scientific expertise to bear on the thorny issue of reanimating her man. To do this, she will have to make use of what’s available: his finger, his dead sister, and some inventive experimental thinking.

Dead Lover (2025) wears its non-existent budget on its sleeve as a point of pride, looking partly like a 1920s silent film (cosmetics, wigs and all) and also somewhere between Ed Wood and Garth Merenghi’s Darkplace – though with extra gurning. Whether it’s all a choice or not quite, it also deliberately blurs its timeline: some of the costumes and hair look like something from the 18th century; some of the accessories (and fabrics) look positively 1980s. There’s also the small matter of the ground-breaking male fertility treatment; all of this makes an initial impact, true, but once seen and acknowledged, it all starts to feel like diminishing returns. Once you’re immersed in the film’s visuals, you start to scan around for different aspects to enjoy. So there’s a script (deeply self-effacing, blending jokes with accentism, cliches and fart gags) which relies heavily on dramatic monologue, voiceover and stage play elements, such as the presence of a dramatic Chorus. Glowicki, who also co-wrote Dead Lover, winds up carrying a lot of the film: in a project with such a small cast, she is responsible for much of the film’s ongoing tone, pace and style, too, right down to sex scenes and Victor Frankenstein-akin experiments, all in the service of keeping her lover around for good. There’s also a number of set pieces which must have been fun to storyboard, and some deliberately provocative and unflinching scenes.

In a word, then, it’s odd. More than that, it dearly wants to be odd. That, plus its love for gender-bending, unprecedentedly weird intimacy and self-effacing dialogue/monologue will endear it to many audiences who’ll note certain inclusions and chalk up the ensuing film as a much-needed piece of social commentary, but not all films offer, or need this kind of meta-analysis. Whilst the film’s lo-fi bloody-mindedness is to its credit – it sticks to its guns – it felt throughout as though not only was it winking at someone in the audience other than me, but perhaps not quite landing any deeper points, either. The aesthetics are bold, but it’s not too long before the film starts to groan under the weight of not-very-much. To cut to the chase, there simply isn’t enough here for a feature, even a relatively short one like this. It may offer something for a late night screening and just the right assemblage of people, but Dead Lover positively revels in its limitations in ways which just don’t land for this reviewer.

Dead Lover (2025) screened at this year’s Final Girls Berlin Film Festival 2026 on Saturday 7th March.

Final Girls Berlin Film Fest 2026: Folk Horror (Shorts)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Antibody

Like many film festivals, Final Girls Berlin understands the value of short films and includes themed blocks of these on the schedule. This particular block – loosely grouped under the ever-popular title of ‘folk horror’ – is an eclectic range of films from a diverse roster of countries, though there are still, appreciably, thematic similarities. We get takes on the relationship between wider society and the individual; we see the importance of ritual, whether or not the origins of those rituals are obscure; then, perhaps most interestingly of all, the films included in this block all move beyond what would often be the film’s final moment. Here, folk horror encompasses consequences: what is the legacy, what are the implications of the events which we see (or have suggested to us) on screen? That is a novel approach given that in so many of the canonical, early folk horror films, we see almost nothing of that. A woman’s perspective, perhaps, moves beyond the crisis itself to pick up the pieces.

In Lok (‘Men’, d. Mahmuda Sultana Rima), we find ourselves in rural Bangladesh – and there’s a mob of men on the move. They are heading to the house of a woman they deem a ‘witch’, hammering on her door and seeking admittance. “Why won’t you open the door?” yells one man over the clamour. It’s amusing, and ridiculous, that he has to ask that question. Eventually, and finding no other choice if she wants to keep her door intact, the woman does open it. The men are looking for one of their number, another man who has disappeared, and despite turning the place over, they can’t find him. Leaving the woman and a young girl alone once more, we are asked to consider: what has actually transpired here? Is she as powerless as she appears to be? Whilst Lok is more of a tantalising snippet than a fully-fledged narrative, it nonetheless offers us something from beyond the limitations of a Northern European witchcraft tradition, hinting at variations in magical practices and toying with men’s fear of magic, even whilst they rail against it (and reduce in number).

Striya

Striya (d. Paige Campbell) starts in a similar way to Lok, although there’s no overt mob politics on display. The men who open this film speak in a measured manner, but they are deciding on the proper course of action for a bizarre quandary: how to deal with a vampire, the ‘Striya’ of Jewish lore and the film’s title (the film itself also features Yiddish dialogue). As the men speak, we glean evidence of the patriarchal power structures which shape this response (and curtail it). The woman, Gele, cannot be simply dispatched, as her father is a respected community figure and he pleads with the rabbi for leniency. Yet, her father promises that love, not scripture, can prevent her from causing harm. Striya is well-acted, lit, framed and scripted, with interesting historical and theological inclusions. This Rembrandt of a horror tale also comes with a message, perhaps, that all the theology in the world has its limitations.

Kill Tradition (d. Juliana Reza, featured image) also looks at the parental role, only this time from the perspective of a mother, whose community is on the brink of an annual festival of some kind in which she takes no interest: she switches off the radio when an announcement about the event is being read out. She seemingly prefers to spend time with her child – presumably her only child – though she has to head out of the home, leaving the little girl alone for a few hours – at which point, their quiet and self-contained lives change forever. There’s an early sense that the intimate and the familial is about to come into conflict with wider society, and it does; focusing on the emotional impacts rather than explaining the finer details (the film’s title suggests something much harsher and more overt than we get), Kill Tradition (Mati Adat) is a beautiful and very painterly film, offering numerous set pieces from a domestic setting in a way which feels very unusual. It’s a subtle and engaging film which eschews ritual detail to focus on the emotional impact of upheaval from without the family unit.

Antibody (‘Anticuerpo‘, d. Ludmila Rogel, Sofia Chizzini) has an ominous start: a conversation in a slaughterhouse, where a young woman makes a series of unusual requests of the slaughterman – which go unfulfilled, it seems. She leaves with a bundle, with notices displayed outside suggesting that this is some kind of dystopian reality, though hitherto given a subtle treatment here. The woman takes her sheepskin bundle to another woman but, when they discuss some upcoming event, it seems that only one of them will attend. The event itself looks to be an underground club night – a surprising inclusion – but despite the lack of trad-coded ritual activity, things turn ugly. Again only hinting at a dark culture and its attendant practices, Antibody boasts striking, wintry visuals, and the physical presence of Nina (played by Chizzini) really contributes to this film. With some May (2002) vibes in places, the film offers a sense of a bizarre project taking place against a background of loneliness and disorder.

Hafermann

Lastly in the block, we come to Hafermann (d. Helena Haverkamp), where monochrome, stylised opening credits cede to an idyllic pastoral. A young woman teases her baby brother with tales of the ‘hafermann’ or ‘oat man’, a harvest spirit who protects the fields. However, and as she is warned, names have power: speak his name, and he will follow. Forging a link between the opening credits and the now-ruined nature of this idyll, the film turns into a riddle, one which has particular psychological weight for little Arthur, now grown and seeking answers. But, despite the personal path he takes during the film, Hafermann retains its riddles, favouring symbol and idea over straightforward explication. All of this, together with the film’s unusual shooting style, keeps the audience at a remove – but still engages us in this dreamlike and often disturbing journey.

For more information about the Final Girls Berlin Film Festival, please click here.

FrightFest Glasgow 2026: Bone Keeper (2026)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Director Howard J. Ford has had a go at the lot over the past couple of decades, variously delivering independent films on zombies, cannibals, climbing – and now, extra-terrestrials. Moving around subgenres in this way, no wonder there’s been some variability: Bone Keeper (2026) is certainly evidence of that. It’s by no means the first of Ford’s films to start with a rather flawed, even a cliched premise (even by horror and sci-fi standards, the framing device here is pretty preposterous). And, unfortunately, many of those initial issues hang over the film throughout its runtime, even if it’s able to deliver some fairly engaging monster set pieces as it moves things along.

The film starts with a meteorite smashing into earth (via a genuinely effective sequence which looks good) using CGI only briefly, whilst showing us that there’s more to reckon with here than just a natural disaster. The meteorite has brought with it some kind of betentacled creature, which immediately finds its way below the earth’s surface. It re-emerges to eat some of a sheltering Neanderthal family and then – as far as we’re concerned – it hides out, until it becomes the subject of interest for a journalist who goes to investigate the cave system in the 1970s, leaving only a piece of Super-8 film behind (tough stuff, that Super-8 film). Then, there’s an unaccountably long interlude until the journalist’s daughter waits for middle age and then goes to look for clues on what happened to him; she also disappears. Then her daughter Olivia (Sarah Alexandra Marks) decides to go and look for what happened to both her grandfather and her mother, taking a group of friends along with her to investigate.

When they’re on their way to some undisclosed location somewhere in the British Isles, the group pauses to pick up a hitchhiker/Influencer called Ashley (Sarah T. Cohen), despite half of the party not really wanting to; in a very British way, they just grimace through it. This could potentially grant the film an additional found footage layer, given Ashley’s love of mobile recording devices; at least, that seems likely. The film has already managed to bring together analogue and digital tech, so anything’s possible. Before descending into the caves, the newly-expanded group calls on a local expert, Professor Harrison (John Rhys-Davies, whose acting style is very different to his counterparts) who admits that he spoke with Olivia’s mother before she disappeared. With some pretty watertight reasoning behind him, he essentially tells them not to go and doesn’t offer to accompany them either, but of course they still go. Armed with microscopes, mobile phones and very little in the way of spelunking know-how, off they go, to be essentially picked off by a very unfriendly lurking alien creature. That’s…kind of it, honestly.

Bone Keeper clearly has no illusions about how cerebral is is or isn’t; it has the caves, but it’s no Descent and offers rather little in the way of characterisation to justify this expedition, other than Olivia needing to ‘find out’ what happened to two generations of her family by doing the exact same thing which likely killed them. Realistically, a creature which offers no harm to anyone not burrowing directly into its lair might be best left alone, but never mind all that: it wouldn’t be much of a monster movie if everyone agreed to leave things be. Furthermore a film of this kind clearly lives and dies on its creature FX, and as it foregrounds the tentacles from almost the opening scenes, it’s obvious this is where the appeal is intended to lie. On this front, it’s not bad. There’s a fair amount of practical FX, some decent (if derivative) ideas, and the film’s dark environment definitely helps to minimise any CGI-wince; it helps the additional effects as a whole to hold together, keeping them sympathetic, rather than too jarring (though woe betide any filmmaker attempting to pass off AI in a film; the tide, so far as that’s concerned, has already long since turned.)

There are other positives, though. It’s nice to see an ostensibly British monster movie, even though it comes via a slightly disorientating smorgasbord of unrelated regional accents and a place undisclosed in the script (though the film was in fact shot in locations along the Welsh/English border). In any case, the landscape shots are great, and it’s a nice reminder that there’s absolutely no reason why Britain can’t offer up its own cryptids and alternative histories for cinema of this kind. When it comes to the cave shots, of course a whole film team can’t get too deep into these systems, but to its credit part of the film was shot on location and Bone Keeper still manages to create an impression of the group dispersing deeper underground, though this works best initially; some cave locations and scenes do start to become a little familiar as we go.

It’s just that…by the time we reach the midway point, by which the film has settled into a rather unengaging panic – disperse – get picked off – panic – disperse mode, it’s clear that nothing much else is going to happen. We don’t really find out anything which we didn’t know at the start of the film, and nor do we really get the expected different layering of shooting styles from the multiple phone cameras we’re shown going into the cave system with the group (which could be a red herring, or indeed a bit of fun at the expense of the bonus Influencer who joins the party, but in practice this feels like a bit of a waste). Without a sense of real characters with relationships and histories, it’s all a bit weak on the whole. Sure, there are some neat monster-y set pieces – some of which clearly emulate ideas from other films, mind – but they do need to be meaningfully connected by something, and unfortunately here it’s flimsy rationale after flimsy rationale. Massively implausible inclusions (a SWAT team in the English countryside?) compound these issues, as well as flinging in a few unlikely resolutions to wrap everything up by the ninety-minute mark.

It has its moments, but Bone Keeper can’t really do anything to set itself apart from the films it takes for inspiration, and whether or not it’s aiming at a B-movie style, too many aspects feel unconvincing for this to truly make the grade as a memorable monster movie, despite some crowd-pleasing scenes.

Bone Keeper (2026) received its World Premiere at Glasgow FrightFest on Friday 6th March and gets a digital release from 6th April.

Jimmy & Stiggs (2024)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Starting with a couple of fake 80s DTV trailers (The Piano Killer and Don’t Go In That House, Bitch!) Jimmy & Stiggs – presented by Eli Roth – feels a little like an in-joke in places, and the Roth fan service and nods are clear to see, particularly in the early part of this feature. This is also, undoubtedly, a Joe Begos film: from the very beginning, the acid colours, the booze and drugs and the out-of-control behaviour set the tone for what’s to follow. Jimmy (Begos) is an out-of-work filmmaker who has faceplanted into oblivion; we pick up with him at around the time he’s had a long period of missing time, but it’s not just regular drinker missing time. We have seen something in the apartment with him: it’s alien (think standard-issue ‘greys’) and – as we shift over from Jimmy’s-eye-view to more conventional camerawork, we see Jimmy trying to work out what has happened to him.

Somehow joining the dots between the fact that he can’t remember…anything, the strangely lurid blood all over his apartment and a hypothesis that a) he’s been abducted, b) they’re coming back and c) he’ll be ready to unleash a tirade of violence upon them, Jimmy reaches out to his estranged best friend and movie collaborator Stiggs (Begos frequent flyer Matt Mercer), asking for his help. Stiggs – who has been on the wagon for a few months – heeds the call, though he gets very little time acting as the voice of reason before it transpires that Jimmy may be a mess, but he’s right. The aliens are back, and they’re hellbent on tearing some humans into little pieces.

That’s it, really.

The whole film takes place in Jimmy’s apartment, like a kind of splattery remake of Hardware (1980): this, too, is a sci-fi/horror spin on a closed environment with a killer intruder. Aside from a bit of heart-to-heart between the two old friends (and there is some chemistry between these guys, unsurprisingly, after working on so many projects together), the rest of the film takes us through an intensely violent, lurid, practical FX frenzy, clearly made as an homage to the direct-to-video gore of the 80s which Begos likely grew up on. Part and parcel of that is the film’s teenage vibe (alcohol is toxic to aliens!), teenage dialogue and fixations and blaring, headache-inducing audio and visuals; homage or not, many of the film’s key elements stand to divide the crowd, and you will either think that Jimmy & Stiggs is the ultimate no-brainer midnight movie, or find it all very self-indulgent. Personally, I’m on the fence: I admire its bloody-minded dedication to its simplistic plotline, but in several places the pinballing camera and ‘Jimmycam’ perspective become very wearing, even across a sensibly curtailed runtime and no clear pretensions to doing anything more than blasting through an Attack The Block-style story in a limited location with a tiny cast.

It’s also worth adding that Jimmy & Stiggs started life as a ‘pandemic project’: on balance, looking back at the oeuvre of films which have come into existence due to the lockdown boredom and restrictions of half a decade ago, there are very few films which really stand up. At least this one doesn’t stray too far into alternate timelines and the multiverse, but on the whole, it’s not the strongest Begos film out there: that accolade still goes to VFW, with a strong showing from Christmas Bloody Christmas. Jimmy & Stiggs is a reasonably fun, if flawed, practical-FX-laden tribute to the horror genre, and depending on your outlook its limitations could even be its strengths. One more thing: can we expect to see the Snoop-voiced Don’t Go In That House, Bitch! appear, as is now the way, as a full-length feature? Watch this space…

Jimmy & Stiggs (2024) is available now on UK and Irish digital platforms.

“Wuthering Heights” (2026)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Rarely does a film exercise the public this much before it’s even been released, but Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” – speech marks and all – has done it. This has been rumbling along for months actually, and certainly for longer than usual, even for most contentious film adaptations. Long before the trailer landed, it was all about who’s in the film. Fennell’s casting decisions – too old, too blonde, too pale – have been picked up on with what you could term accusatorial glee by people ready to get bent out of shape to prove their knowledge of the source text – knowledge which has turned out to be a bit piecemeal in places, if we’re being harsh. This continued; Catherine’s dresses were anachronistic; even the fabric was ‘wrong’; the accents were not up to scratch; finally, Fennell herself shouldn’t have bothered, being as she is too posh, and therefore somehow out of the running to direct a film where the spectre of class and wealth casts an undeniable shadow over the relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff… or, maybe that could work rather well? In some cases, hatred for the film feels more like personal hostility towards the director; perhaps consider what she could be doing with her unstinting privilege, and be grateful she’s making bold, original feature films instead.

Forget all of that. Or, rather, if you’re determined to be annoyed by “Wuthering Heights”, then fill your boots: there’s already a raft of affirmative reviews for that out there, many of which have had a blast evaluating a film against criteria it was never suggested it had. This fever dream version of the novel is visually stunning, captures elements of the book’s subliminal energy and passion that haven’t yet been brought to the screen, and though it plays fast and loose with key plot points, to this reviewer it feels affectionate and engaged, not cynical or jaded. If it’s all a bit much for you, then feel grateful that the novel’s worst excesses have been left on the page: tortured wildlife, hanged pets, imprisonment, domestic abuse, even unearthed corpses. Remember also that Wuthering Heights has been adapted for the screen many times, and not one has been a faithful retelling of Emily Brontë’s novel – a novel which, by the way, her sister Charlotte apologised for in her preface to the book, noting that it contained characters full of “perverted passion and passionate perversity”, which wouldn’t be a bad description of the 2026 film. In Emerald Fennell’s rendition, arguably her second take on the novel (oh come on: Saltburn essentially follows the same story arc), the second generation of Heathcliffs and Lintons never come into existence; the film sticks closely with the first-generation love story, not lingering on the legal apparatus later used by Heathcliff to disinherit those who wronged him, but staying very, very close to the mutual passion which made Brontë’s Heathcliff want to avenge himself in the first place. It’s a singular reading of the book, sure, but it’s valid, daring and gorgeous.

Starting with a public hanging which instantly conflates and foreshadows the film’s big, bold links between sex and death, we meet Cathy as a little girl. Her father, here a hybrid between the kindly, if odd Mr. Earnshaw who brings home a ‘Gipsy brat’ from a sojourn to the dock city of Liverpool and Cathy’s older brother Hindley (played with zeal by Martin Clunes) divides his time between getting grotesquely drunk and squandering all of his money on gambling, but finds a moment to bring home an abused and rootless little boy from the marketplace, christened Heathcliff by young Cathy. The child actors in this part of the film are fantastic. Owen Cooper, who plays Heathcliff, made a ferocious impact playing Jamie in the TV series Adolescence in 2025 and he’s great here, too, balancing the slow-burn of an ardent attachment to his foster sister with a masochistic, taciturn streak which turns readily into tangible cruelty in adulthood. Young Cathy (Charlotte Mellington) comes closest to capturing the ‘wild wicked slip’ epithet bestowed on her by Nelly Dean in the novel; it’s worth remembering that, landowners or not, the Earnshaws live on a working farm; there’s no long stays at school, no lessons in etiquette and no mother to keep her daughter in line. Little Cathy is a headstrong menace, even if her heart is (sometimes) in the right place. The Heights here is a like Fellini’s Satyricon (1969) come to the edge of the Yorkshire moors, by the way: the striking visuals of the house help to position the whole narrative somewhere on the fringes of reality and possibility, making the whole thing feel like a febrile hallucination. If you can get your head around that and accept it on its own terms, then you’ll likely enjoy the rest.

In adulthood, Cathy is at a loss what to do with herself: when she’s not dragging her skirts through pigs’ blood, she’s stuck in a childlike inertia, unmarried, without occupation and reduced to stamping her foot at her father’s ongoing excesses as the house threatens to disappear from under them via a slew of unpaid bills and debts. Her sexual feelings for Heathcliff, still on hold at this point, are quite suddenly lit by a touchpaper when she becomes innocently exposed to the fact that the servants are conducting assignations of their own in the darkest corners of the house; she sees this at the same time as Heathcliff does, but before anything happens, Cathy’s curiosity over the new, wealthy neighbours down at the stately Thrushcross Grange throw her into the path of the kindly Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) and his ward – not his sister, in this film – Isabella (Alison Oliver). Catherine sprains her ankle trying to peer into this Secret Garden world and ends up staying for a period of time to recover. She returns to the Heights as a lady, or at least looking like one, and shortly afterwards – here compelled by the spectre of imminent poverty – she finds herself engaged to Mr. Linton. Heathcliff overhears her say that she has accepted Edgar, and that it would degrade her to marry Heathcliff. He disappears, leaving Cathy to the comfortable boredom of the Grange, but once he’s a made man, he returns to stand by the words he spoke as a child – that he would take any punishment for Cathy’s sake. This being finally out in the open, their affair becomes by turns all-consuming, soul-sapping and toxic; it’s worth remembering that these are not nice people – and were never intended to be – but their lust for one another is undeniable, pushing the film onwards to its fatalistic conclusion.

Where the novel hints (but hints strongly) at the romantic and sexual attraction between Cathy and Heathcliff, Fennell’s film thinks, let’s just go for it. Just once. Let’s do a version of the story where Cathy and Heathcliff’s love is about as far away from unconsummated as it’s possible to get. Admittedly, even all this passion gets a little plodding, but there’s undoubtedly chemistry between Robbie and Elordi; the age difference doesn’t seem like a problem, and some of the set pieces used are absolutely painterly. Heathcliff, once the street urchin, has no problem clambering in and out of Thrushcross Grange when he wants; Edgar seems perfectly clueless at first, though when he eventually begins to take back control of his house and his wife, he essentially imprisons Catherine in her room, finally forcing the impasse between her and her true love. Thrushcross Grange here is an enchanted space, lush and strange, a doll’s house world within a doll’s house world, but a gilded cage nonetheless. Catherine’s room, bizarrely, is a facsimile of herself, the walls decorated to resemble her skin, walls which are bled just like she is during her illness. Like The Masque of the Red Death, every room has a colour and a theme, and every room bears closer inspection. It’s not real, and doesn’t want to be. Had an obscure arthouse director come up with this, and had audiences had to seek it out, the film would be lauded around the world.

Of course, no film is perfect and “Wuthering Heights” has a few less successful elements, beyond the repetitive nature of Cathy and Heathcliff’s hook-ups. There are misfires; for example, against an array of earthy Yorkshirewomen grudgingly cleaning up Mr. Earnshaw’s vomit after a libation, we get a strange, strained version of Nelly Dean (Hong Chau) who turns out to be some illegitimate offspring of the landed gentry, dumped at the Heights to alternate between a maid-of-all-work and a haughty lady-in-waiting, sometimes joining in with the housework and sometimes sitting aloft like a moral cipher. There’s no real vigour to the role, and it feels on several occasions that this Nelly is only around to play receptacle to some of the novel’s finest lines. Which, by the way, this film does contain: lots of Cathy and Heathcliff’s most ardent speeches are included and still pack an emotional punch. Some reviewers have been uncomfortable with the few tension-busting moments of humour in the film, but they work: remember, again, that the film is based on a book which has its own, awkward moments of comedy too. Audience discomfort with the most strident reminders of the film’s sexual undertones show a director utterly confident in the version of the story she’s created, who doesn’t much care, and feels like she can joke. It’s refreshing.

There’s a huge weight of expectation around any literary adaptation like this, but Fennell has gone her own way, and whether you can get fully on side with that or not, she deserves praise for it, not snide hostility. She doesn’t owe you social realism, folks, no film ever does, and if you’re feeling a tad “smooth-brained“, go back and read the book.

“Wuthering Heights” (2026) is on general release now.

The Mortuary Assistant (2026)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

There’s an embalming taking place as we open on The Mortuary Assistant (2026) – embalmment being normal practice, rather than an occasional thing, in the US. Here, intern Rebecca (Willa Holland) is being assessed on her skills in the field, so she can finally be signed off as competent – though I tell you what, I wouldn’t be wearing my hair loose doing that job. But she does well, completes her probation and – as she’s told by the rather ominous funeral home owner Raymond (Paul Sparks) – she’s now ready to work alone. She’ll be doing the day shift: only ever the day shift. And, Bluebeard-style, she’s banned from one room in the premises – the basement. Of course it’s the basement.

Outside work and later on that day, we get a sense of who Rebecca is: a young woman who has been through a run of personal trials and tribulations, struggling to get sober after a long period of addiction. However, we leave it there, because after all the solemn avowals that she’ll never be asked to work the night shift, Rebecca gets called in after dark to deal with a sudden influx of cadavers. Pathetic fallacy abounds as, with a storm raging outside, Rebecca gets to work. Soon, there are questions: these bodies all seem to show momentary signs of life, and they’re all unusually mangled, displaying signs of extensive violence.

Up against all of this, timelines soon begin to blur and fracture: aspects of Rebecca’s troubled past begin to merge with inexplicable phenomena at the funeral home, whilst Raymond offers occasional guidance (by phone!) on what may or may not be going on here. The one thing which is clear is that the mortuary itself is key to deciphering the horrors soon unfolding around this vulnerable young woman. Whilst it’s not quite clear whether ‘it’ is already inside with her or fighting to get in, the film offers up a slew of creepy, effective set pieces in service of solving this riddle.

The more ‘hidden’ death has become in modern society, the bigger the fascination with what goes on back there: who’s responsible for handling the dead? And what happens when they do? This can be horror enough (see, for example, Broken Bird), but interestingly, horror cinema has tended to explore this particular anxiety through a supernatural lens. Perhaps it’s a way of making it all matter by adding some kind of a gloss of an afterlife, even if a deeply dysfunctional one. Regardless, in films such as the underrated Unrest (2006) and The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016), the funeral home segues into being a haunted house: The Mortuary Assistant does something similar, albeit blending mortuary practice and occult ritual in a series of novel, intriguing ways. There are even some hints, arguably, of the same sorts of OTT, tricksy, jubilant entities of Evil Dead/Evil Dead II, meaning a dark night of the soul and then some for Rebecca. The use of graphic, practical SFX will almost certainly endear this film to many horror fans, and it’s also heartening to see some male bodies on the slab – not just formerly nubile young women, as is the norm.

Once we set our table, the middle act of the film feels like a shift away from the initially quicker-moving pace and plot (which requires some element of explication via the script). From here, the horror becomes much more repetitive and grinding, reliant on the sense of an inescapable nightmare for its impact, which will not be for everyone: onwards impetus is not really what The Mortuary Assistant is all about. However, if you can get on board with this, then there’s a lot to love: visually strong and nicely atmospheric, the film looks every inch a slick ‘Shudder Presents’ title, all muted tones and unflinching gore by turns (it’s also directed by Jeremiah Kipp, whose excellent earlier film Slapface (2021) was another Shudder title). You certainly don’t need to be familiar with the video game from which this title has been adapted, either: this works perfectly well on its own terms, and doesn’t feel artificially loaded with nods to the source material, despite a handful of sequences which resemble gameplay. Admittedly, fans of the game may well have more bones to pick with this one, and this seems to be the case in some other reviews. But for the rest of us, it’s a horror film, it works as such and there’s plenty to like here for those just looking for a Friday night movie.

The Mortuary Assistant (2026) releases on Shudder on March 26th, 2026.

Roof (2026)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Here’s what we discover from the earliest scenes of Roof (2026): Dev (Asif Ali) doesn’t come across as a very nice person. As he practices affirmations into the mirror while getting ready for his working day, he’s concurrently ignoring voicemails from both his girlfriend and his mother. He doesn’t have time for their special pleadings; today’s the day he’s going to change his life. Which is a bit like the Confucian curse, ‘may you live in interesting times’, as his life is certainly about to change.

Dev works in finance and, thanks to some insider trading, he’s poised to plunge a lot of company money into what turns out to be a bad tip. The worst, in fact, and he compounds this by making the same error again, thinking the whole thing is some test of his nerve, rather than an unmitigated disaster. As he watches the share price drop through the floor, his self-interested error becomes horribly clear. So what do you do, just ahead of potentially getting fired and maybe even getting landed with a criminal record? You literally flee the building, in this case heading up and onto the roof for one last smoke whilst you think about what’s going to happen to you.

When he gets up there, Dev realises he’s not even the only person present. He arrives just as another employee, Mary (Bella Heathcote) is mid-argument with someone on the phone, and it’s bad enough that he just catches her launching her device at the roof’s surface which, as you might be able to guess, will shortly be a portentous error when it transpires that Dev has let the door slam behind them. That means they’re trapped up there. It’s a holiday weekend, and just for good measure, Dev had handily ignored a power outage in his race to get the hell away from his desk. So with the workforce of LA all pouring out of their buildings due to the power cut, then heading off for a long weekend, oh and no phone to call for help – what are these two going to do?

If the alarm and panic about being on the roof sets in perhaps surprisingly quickly, then that is easily balanced out by the film’s excellent qualities – all of which are abundant from very early on in its runtime. There’s an earthy, snappy script, solid performances from our cast of largely two individuals, and a knowing use of tone, blending moments of dark humour with rising peaks of genuine tension. Roof also makes the absolute best out of its mostly fixed and limited set, whilst still affording a sense of scale via glimpses of LA just going about its business: it’s one of the most connected cities on earth, but our protagonists may as well be on another planet for most of this film. Diverse camerawork and good incidental music also help to weave these elements together. The only minor error here are some CGI sequences which could really have hit the cutting room floor and benefited the film as a whole; the film is at its best when keeping it simple, clear and believable, which it usually does.

This is such a simple set-up: whilst by no means a horror film, Roof often feels like it could easily become one, and several horror titles have riffed on a limited set and number of characters, seeing these elements through into something ghastly, such as Frozen (2010). As it stands, the film can find the time to be funny in places – pointing out how the world of work with its rules, regulations and vigilance breaks down when that vigilance would actually be useful, be that a lone wolf crashing his firm with a piece of bad advice with no one to stop him, or two people leaving their desks and getting trapped, just a few floors away from where they were meant to be. But it’s not just about work: in fact, it stops being about work, and then it’s about the characters, and who they are once their work personas are sloughed away by hunger, thirst and heat (LA in July is a bit warm: who knew?) Once the humour begins to dissipate, particularly when Dev and Mary’s situation grows more desperate, what we get instead is a spiritual lesson which, whilst never feeling overwritten or overtly moralistic, nonetheless works well as a point of direction for the film as a whole.

Director Salvatore Sciortino has built his career in a range of high-profile projects over the years – including a number of Star Wars titles and the brilliant 10 Cloverfield Lane – but Roof is his directorial debut, and happily it’s a great, genuinely encouraging indication of what he can do now and will in future. To reiterate, Roof is such a simple idea, but this gutsy little indie does great things with its wealth of clear-headed, well-explored ideas and elements. It’s always a pleasure to happen upon an independent film like this; its confidence pays off.

EST x IFFR 2026: The Hole

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

We’re busy, busy, busy as we get underway with Indonesian horror movie The Hole (2026), aka The Hole, 309 Days to the Bloodiest Tragedy (which rolls less well off the tongue). Leading with a notice which we normally see on the end credits of a film – ‘Any similarity to actual characters, places or events is coincidental’ – the film follows this up with what feels for all the world like a realistic framing device, because it is: ‘On September 30th 1965, seven high ranking army officials were murdered’, an event which, we’re also told, was considered a national tragedy, and forms the basis for a version of events we’ll see unfold.

In most films, we have the realistic introduction and the reminder that the film is fictional separated by around ninety minutes or so: here, as well as being inverted, it feels rather fitting that the lines are somewhat blurred, as The Hole does struggle to settle into one mode of storytelling, only finally deciding the issue towards its close.

Continuing straight on from the opening credits, we see a woman’s body being deposited into a (or who knows, possibly the titular?) hole in the ground in an Indonesian village – a village where two guards, one pausing to pretend to read from a torn page from a grimoire, are disturbed by women’s screams: one from a longhaired ghost in the woods (oh come on, it’s clear) and one from the wife of the chief of police, when she finds his murdered body. Which has a big hole in it. Ah. The guards flee in each direction to attend to each situation; we don’t see the immediate aftermath, however, as we switch to a more functional situation, the wedding of army officer Sugeng and new bride Arum back in Jakarta: they’re adopted siblings, but no matter, as with very little time to celebrate anyway, Sugeng has to head off to investigate events in the rural village of Lobang Boaya – site of the gruesome events we have already witnessed, and a few more besides.

As Arum commences her marital duties by tending to her by-now very frail father and father-in-law, finally convincing him to move to Jakarta where they can care for him, Sugeng is soon faced with the harsh realities of a spiralling murder case: bodies are turning up carved with rather negative words which – the army fears – given the influential figures who have been bumped off, could point to some sort of incoming political coup (hence why it’s Sugeng doing the investigating, rather than the police). His investigation seems to be a fairly conventional whodunnit, at least at first; Arum, meanwhile, is being hit with a slew of supernatural phenomena, from which derives the film’s most successful supernatural scenes. It’s made fairly clear to the audience that the supernatural phenomena are real, although the film prevaricates to an extent on whether this film is going to be more of a political or a supernatural horror – as in, which elements will come to dominate the screentime.

In establishing its characters and themes, The Hole also leans very heavily on on-screen text to tell us who everyone is – names, job roles, and other relevant context; together with the shifts in timeline and location, this can make the film feel rather hectic, as well as – whisper it – confusing, particularly in the first thirty minutes. But it’s at great pains to paint a picture of a community tarnished by corruption and nefarious practices, something it does successfully do, picking up on the spectres of mid-20th Century political upheaval in Indonesia: Communism, Islam, the status quo – these all spend time in our eyeline, each contributing something to the fomenting tension (in, by the by, a pretty plausible 1960s setting).

So it has a real set of social and cultural anxieties at its core – but, given its supernatural content, is The Hole a scary film? Its director, Hanung Bramantyo, has enjoyed a very successful career in his native Indonesia to date, with his film Miracle in Cell No. 7 (2022) the seventh highest grossing title of all time there. But that’s a comedy, and as much as he has turned his hand to several different genres, it’s fair to say horror isn’t his most frequent output, nor his first love. Perhaps as a result of this, The Hole struggles from the outset. Clearly an attempt to marry the supernatural horrors of what’s now broadly classified as J-Horror (which didn’t seem to either really derive from, nor infiltrate Indonesia much at the time) with more down-to-earth fare – essentially, the evil that men do – it’s ambitious, for sure, but with a more streamlined plot and more time for concerted, abundant horror content, it could have all landed more successfully.

As much as a black magic storyline seems to be absolutely de rigeur for today’s Indonesian horror audiences, it never quite takes off in The Hole, at least – and this is important – for this European reviewer. It feels like a dash to get everything across the finish line, too, although to give it its dues, The Hole does manage to tiptoe a few horrifying ideas past the film censors along the way, even if this is more implied and CGIed than overt. However, for all that, it’ll almost certainly find its audience, given the reputation of the director and his attempts here to splice criticism of Indonesian (rather than, say, Dutch or Japanese) power with something paranormal and inexplicable, all centred on a rural village which comes to serve as a microcosm for a range of social ills.

The Hole (2026) receives its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam on February 3rd 2026.

No Other Choice (2026)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) has it made: we know he has it made the moment we first see him, barbequing eel outside his spacious home whilst wearing a contented smile and a ‘happy at my level of maturity’ moustache. Not only that, but the eel was sent as a gift by his impressed new bosses at Solar Paper, the company where he has slaved and spent his best years. How pleasant to be appreciated; thing is, the gift turns out to be a sop, thrown his way ahead of a brutal round of restructuring in which Man-su loses his precious job. And it is precious to him: it’s his way to find meaning, secure the good opinion of others, keep a roof over his family’s heads and stave off debt. Early in the film he’s cast, along with a number of others, into a flimsy kind of self-help workshop where weeping men are encouraged to deal with their run of bad fortune with equanimity. Spoiler: none of them really can.

Suddenly, doting wife Miri (Son Ye-jin), who at first comes across as a bit of an Act One Nora Helmer, is the one who intrinsically understands the sacrifices they will need to make, as a family, to keep from foreclosure. Man-su turns out to be a less practical thinker; torn between shame and the hell of abortive job interviews in a surprisingly crowded recruitment pool, his only moment of clarity relates to how he will likely never get ahead, not with all these talented co-applicants there before him. As he begins wasting money to find ways to make money, one thing becomes clear: his best bet is to remove the competition.

Oldboy (2003) this ain’t and Lee Byung-hun, probably best known to the likes of us from his unsparing roles in A Bittersweet Life (2005) and I Saw The Devil (2010), isn’t a natural to the world of surveillance and elimination. In fact, the first part of the film sees him flailing around in his newly-chosen capacity as a hitman, pratfalling with the best of them (this is, in many places, a deeply funny film). One of his main problems, aside from his lack of acuity, is that he immediately comes to like the men he is targeting; you get the distinct sense that Man-su may have been lonely even whilst riding high at Solar Paper, and that he’s definitely lonely now, smiling along as he overhears rival Bummo (Lee Sung-min) and his wife Ara (Yeom Hye-ran) reminisce over their courtship and early lives. The film plays with ideas of doubling in places, and this feels prominent whenever Man-su gets really close to a rival. In another set of circumstances, perhaps they could be friends. He almost forgets why he’s there, and when he remembers, he makes a hash of it.

However, as his desperation grows, so does his cruelty. Not for him, come the end, the deeply misguided idea of dropping a heavy plant pot onto a man and hoping for the best. He gets far more comfortable with the kinds of early-days Park Chan-wook cruelty which we may expect, albeit that the director’s work has grown more and more morally opaque over the years, with No Other Choice perhaps the most morally opaque of them all. You do not come out of this film feeling that lessons have been learned; if anything, lessons have been dodged via a sequence of extraordinary coincidences and events, which rescind the Happily Ever After that they at first suggest.

It’s very fitting that all of this happens to a paper mill technician, now fighting for dominance over other paper mill technicians (of varying levels of specialty and seniority) in a century where, more and more often, we are told to expect to live in a paperless society. South Korea, one of the most hi-tech nations on the planet, can still sustain numerous paper mills, at least up to the point in time in which this film, and I’m sorry, unfolds. Paper has endured for hundreds of years, but it’s also a fragile substance, flammable, easy to damage and easy to throw away, just like its handlers. Paper also offers a pushback against an increasingly ephemeral online world and yet, given all the layoffs (the film is based on a book, The Ax, which refers to the American English idiom ‘getting axed’) the business is in a precarious state. As much as wives plead with their husbands to retrain, to try something else, the level of specialist knowledge they have built up over decades of hard graft won’t die; they can’t just set it aside, and they’d rather drink themselves stupid than lose face in an inferior trade (this would be a very tranquil short film, if we got the version where Man-su stuck with his new job in the warehouse and Miri helped him to save some cash).

As much as No Other Choice toys with how possible choice could actually be, it creates an often largely sympathetic portrayal of people we would recognise: always one pay cheque away from losing the lot, hamstrung by ideas of status and success and caught in nonsensical materialist contests with the neighbours. Old habits die hard here, right to the end scenes. If it all makes us laugh then yeah, perhaps we ought to laugh; South Korea has excelled lately in ridiculing the precarious nature of late stage capitalism, even if No Other Choice largely avoids the Grand Guignol stylings of Squid Game, even whilst working away at a similar point (though also briefly throws in a few larger-than-life Americans to cause problems). Perhaps the most galling aspect of this film, for me, is in how Man-su gradually loses his voice in order to gain what he wants, in a kind of grim Hans Christian Andersen story reworked to point to the alienation inherent in the modern, AI-assisted workplace. ‘Be careful what you wish for’ seems to be the only clear lesson in an otherwise murky, often hilarious, often horrifying piece of narrative film where you end up risking everything to gain back a fraction of what you had. In its way, with or without anything like the clawhammer sequence in Oldboy (well, okay, one tooth needs to be pulled), No Other Choice has some bitter, discomfiting sequences, and its slow slide from farce to fierce works very well indeed.

No Other Choice (2026) is on general release now.