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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So this is Glacier National Park, Montana in the 1960s and we start with a question: why are two people open-air camping in grizzly territory? Roll opening credits – genuine retro footage of people behaving stupidly around wild brown bears and the discomfiting reminder that the incidents in the film, open-air camping and all, are ‘based on real events’. But here’s another question: how is director Burke Doeren’s debut feature film meant to be read? – Horror, exploitation, or plausible drama? The answer to that question is a while in coming, and when it’s finally clear, it comes with several issues.
Back to the park: we meet a team of rangers with other concerns than bears (namely, forest fires) which mean that sole female ranger Joan (Lauren Call) will have to be the one to lead a group of visitors on an overnight hike and camping trip combo. Then we cut to the park gift shop, where employee Julie (Brec Bassinger) and some friends are each deciding on what to do to entertain themselves, which can only mean, in rural Montana, choosing between a number of …camping options. Steadily, more and more people are heading into the back of beyond (where there is, however, a camping chalet as an impromptu hub and meeting place). Off they all go, steadfastly ignoring park rules, ignoring what clearly sounds like a bear grunting off-camera, oh and in one case actively trying to attract grizzlies to the chalet by feeding them. “How does anyone think this is okay?” asks one of the few sane persons present; you might well ask, sane person. You might well ask.
At this point, it feels as though the film is gearing up to be a fast-and-loose kind of ‘based on real events’, because the early suggestions are of a film which is altogether too quirky and casual to really wind up presenting the impending bear attacks in a wholly serious light. The negligible grounding in the 1960s, the breezy accompanying music, the uncomplicated script, the acting to match…surely, Grizzly Night is heading in the direction of Seventies exploitation cinema, a decade when animals attacked in a series of increasingly OTT ways? Bees, frogs, piranha, even rabbits were ready to get in on the action. Bears are therefore a shoe-in for a bit of nature vs man entertainment; there was also Grizzly (1976), of course, which made light work of the same real events used as a basis for Grizzly Night. Then you look at the Grizzly Night movie posters and you think – yeah. They’re definitely leaning heavily on Seventies exploitation. Fine, that could really work.
However, the more recent film shifts gear once we link back up with the opening scene, and there’s a parting of the ways as we see the same event – someone getting dragged off into the woods – with a fresh pair of eyes, now that we know some of the characters a little. From this point on, Grizzly Night is a very different film – unless this reviewer has misread the tone of the opening set-up somehow, as once the first (of the historically-accurate two) attacks takes place, the film lurches into a much more serious, sombre, and even turgid mode. Nothing is seen on-camera – in that, of course, there’s even more similarity with the cash-strapped exploitation films of decades past – but people spend a great length of time looking for it with torches here. And that’s as much as we see, too. The bear or bears, having done their work, retreat. The life-threatening injuries get negligible screentime too, perhaps because we are encouraged to care about the human stories at the heart of the off-screen action. This is now intended as hard-hitting realism, and unfortunately it doesn’t work.
What else can we say, then, about Grizzly Night? Well, the location filming looks fantastic when we see it in daylight, the bear on-set is a magnificent reminder that these animals deserve respect and space, and writers Katrina Mathewson, Bo Bean and Tanner Bean stick closely to the bestselling book about the original incident, Night of the Grizzlies by Jack Olsen, a book which correctly criticised decision-making at Glacier National Park, picking up on the issues which made a bear attack much more likely until the inevitable happened. In today’s far more (or ostensibly far more) environmentally-conscious times, the film could serve as a reminder to respect the natural environment, particularly given that the number of fatal bear attacks in the US have escalated since 1967 – largely due to habitat clashes, and human stupidity of course. All of that is perfectly valid, but a compelling piece of narrative film? Sadly not.
Grizzly Night (2026) is available on VOD and digital from 30th January 2026 (US) and 2nd February 2026 (UK).
Whilst the genre of ‘found footage’ is more on a downward arc these days than it was, say, fifteen or twenty years ago – when every no-budget filmmaker was irresistibly drawn to its cheap, practical possibilities – it’s nonetheless so familiar by now that we can instantly recognise its trappings and conventions. As such, we only have to look at Nicholas Pineda’s debut feature to know that he knows them as well; before the cameras roll, he offers us a framing narrative in which some on-screen text reveals that, in March 2023, authorities responded to an ‘unknown disturbance call’ at the Wilshire Infirmary, where they located two deceased individuals. This being established, we’re told that the following film is assembled from recovered footage. And so we begin.
The Wilshire Infirmary is a deserted hospital; the film itself starts when we witness the arrival of a hospital security guard called Edward (Paul Syre) who, to judge by his tendency to get lost in the halls, is a rookie here. Indeed it’s his first shift, and he’s made none too welcome by old hand Lester (Mark Anthony Williams), who’d rather sleep in his office than get into the rigmarole of showing the new guy the ropes. The use of bodycams brings the film down to eye-level, contrasting with the surveillance cameras which are our first interface. This allows us, at least some of the time, to look our characters in the eye. We also learn that the building is due for imminent demolition – so, presumably, security is on-site to prevent break-ins or thefts, or perhaps even to prevent people trying to get in to make a found footage film of their own. It’s boring, but stable work for our two protagonists, each of whom seems to have left their previous employment under a cloud: Lester used to be a cop, and Ed was in the military.
There isn’t much to do. In this environment, every minor sound or shadow takes on a life of its own. Neither does the film go in for making any sudden, flashy moves: it spends most of its runtime showing us that nothing, in this surprisingly large and evocative space, is certain. Long silences pad out any more unexpected noises; seeing, or maybe-seeing things in the corridors almost never comes to any sort of fruition. We get more on the emerging, abrasive relationship between senior and junior employee, mitigated somewhat by the presence of an admin assistant, Ms. Downey (Danielle Kennedy), there to tidy up all the last paperwork which still needs doing in a moribund institution like this one. Gradually – everything here is gradual – we find out that the hospital was notorious for unorthodox experimental practices on its mentally-ill inmates. The film perhaps overplays its hand when it later tries to add further plot points and justifications for the strange ambience in this place, because there isn’t sufficient space for this new information to breathe: strange hospital, murky history is perfectly sufficient. And there are some highly effective scares here, even though you will need to wait until well past the hour mark to enjoy them.
As is traditional, the framing device suggested at the beginning of the film raises as many questions as it answers. This isn’t found footage per se; rather it’s found, edited and soundtracked footage, with an effective, discordant soundtrack which has no reason for being there, unless one of the investigating team is a frustrated filmmaker with a knack for seamless dialogue edits between different cameras and no retakes. But, hey, in other respects the film eschews one of the found footage genre’s most head-splitting features, as bodycams and static cameras never wheel and flounder. (No one ever asks, ‘why are you filming?’ either.) It’s overall a rather understated, often sinister piece of atmosphere building, making effective use of a setting which requires no great interventions to make it ominous, but feels doubly so thanks to the long, quiet ramblings through its floorspace. Ed, a character who seems to begin to break down the second he’s left anywhere on his own, often seems genuinely unnerved: this may be a little of Ed or a little of Paul Syre, but there’s no question that being in this space for a prolonged space of time would no doubt be unsettling, and it works for the film as a whole. There’s as much human drama in Infirmary as anything more overtly horror-related, but the two are definitely wedded together.
Assuredly, this is a film which will be too slow and subtle for all audiences. Go into it forewarned. Suggestion and uncertainty form the bedrock of Infirmary, and it prioritises atmosphere over running, squealing or grandstanding – in fact, all the things which turned me off the found footage genre are things it doesn’t do, and as a result the film is a subtle and often unsettling viewing experience. It’s a promising first feature-length project, one which makes an artform out of never spelling the whole truth out for its audience: that in itself takes nerve.
Infirmary (2026) received its world premiere at the Dances With Films Festival in NY on 16th January.
Lucio Fulci is one of those directors whose reputation has continued to blossom in the years since his death; this makes sense, as his films – perhaps particularly his horror films – are so beloved of genre fans, offering a great deal to both enjoy and to decode. It’s difficult to find someone who ‘quite likes’ Fulci; you’re either in or you’re out. As such, it’s no surprise that film writers continue to turn to Fulci for longer-form projects such as these. Hell, even I had a go a few years ago. Matt Rogerson’s most recent book focuses solely on Fulci’s cinema, whereas in his last book, The Vatican Versus Horror Movies, Fulci formed part, even if a significant part, of the book overall. However, even so, you could still sense that il dottore was perhaps a favourite. Here, Rogerson permits himself the time and space to really get to grips with his work, studying it, contextualising it and redefining it.
Starting by acknowledging the UK’s ‘moral panic’ over the Video Nasties debacle (something which shaped his early exposure to Fulci’s films), Rogerson – himself the son of a video pirate – starts with a measured approach to the topic of video piracy, including the thesis that Fulci (and others) may never have developed such loyal fans without the complicated pleasures of illicit access to these films: there was just something about having to work for them and the secretive culture which sprang up around them which really established them as formative. This being discussed, Rogerson works on establishing Fulci as a distinctly Catholic horror auteur, picking and and developing different aspects of Fulci’s faith (or apostasy) and tracing it through his most seminal cinema. This is something which can certainly bear additional commentary, such as is offered here: perhaps it’s the want of translated material, perhaps the minimal mentions made of Fulci’s faith in the more biographical-style writing already out there, or of course the fact that many of Fulci’s most ardent fans are not Italian themselves, and so aren’t immersed in Catholic culture to the same extent that Fulci was (even if they, too, like Rogerson, were raised as Catholics). As per The Vatican Versus Horror Movies, the sizeable influence of the Vatican itself on Italian cinema should never be underestimated. In considering this, Fulci’s Inferno also examines the works of other directors, who in their own films were undertaking comparable religious antagonism to Fulci. There are some quite surprising inclusions here – such as La Dolce Vita – but Rogerson makes a strong case for their influence on Fulci, as well as the risqué paths they took through an often volatile and judgemental film scene in this era.
The book devotes plenty of time to looking at the Gates of Hell films – arguably Fulci’s best-known films (alongside Zombi, which perhaps deserved more discussion in its own right). Beginning with The Beyond – a film containing “no logic” according to Fulci – we read more about a film so despairing and nihilistic that, like the other titles in this impromptu trilogy, defies narrative boundaries. This isn’t, though, just about Fulci’s more definably horror output, and a selection of his other, pre-horror work is also interrogated. Seeking a means to categorise and understand Fulci’s cinematography, Rogerson divides Fulci’s style into three key areas: Fulci the Surrealist, Fulci the Gore Maestro and Fulci the Apostate. To fully engage with Fulci’s mindset necessitates plenty of social and cultural context – such as where Rogerson forges a convincing link between Mussolini’s seizure of control over the creative industries, which rendered Italian cinema itself into a ‘soulless shadow’, turning film itself into the kind of nihilistic space we eventually see in The Beyond. There’s necessarily some recap here of Rogerson’s earlier book, as we look at the role of the Vatican in film censorship vis-à-vis the Vatican’s arguably collusive relationship with fascism.
We also get a timeline of Fulci’s work from the perspective of his steadily growing antagonistic tendencies, something which got him in trouble with the Holy See very early in his career (even when he was still working primarily in comedy). The book is helpfully organised by key Fulci projects, giving a sense of progression and discussing the director’s personal life where relevant. Much of the analysis is spirited and knowledgeable, with the section on Don’t Torture a Duckling forming one of the book’s real high points. The book also spends time on auteur theory, though to provide a broader understanding of the term, shifting emphasis more to other directors and projects. Also, there are some fascinating parallels drawn between some of Fulci’s best-known scenes and the work of Francisco de Goya: this isn’t something which had ever really occurred before, but given the anticlerical Goya’s own descent into disillusionment and despair, the two men make an interesting cross-study. The book also contains a chapter on Fulci’s later films – by no means all lionised – and a chapter on a selection of later titles influenced by Fulci, coming almost up to date with Skinamarink. Where Rogerson charts the presence of what he refers to as the ‘Uncontainable Evil’ – a set of features which he charts across numerous Fulci titles and Fulci-influenced titles – the chapters break off into a section of bullet points, which breaks the flow of the writing to an extent; discussing some of the features inline would be more in keeping with the style of the rest of the book, but this is a minor quibble, as the thesis itself is thoroughly engaging.
Fulci has already been considered at length by some critical big hitters such as Stephen Thrower, and given that, only someone with a genuine love for Fulci would ever take him on anew for an extended study of this kind – but that is clearly the case here. Rogerson cleverly blends fandom with more academic film criticism, and whilst this probably isn’t a book for the most casual Fulci fan, it is accessible and appealing for anyone with more than a passing interest in this complex and innovative director. There’s lots to love in Fulci’s Inferno: it’s nicely structured, with care and concern over how its key ideas have been explored and presented; it’s comprehensively researched, displaying a broader love of Italian cinema which helps to define and underpin the whole; it conveys often complex information very clearly. There’s a good balance between passion project and new, semiotic-style analysis, with Rogerson’s wealth of ideas and theses landing well across the whole study. You can really dig into this book, finding plenty to consider, developing a new understanding of Fulci’s processes and ideas whilst expanding your appreciation of his filmography. It’s eminently worthwhile and deserves a place on your shelves.
Fulci’s Inferno: Faith in the Films of a Horror and Giallo Auteur is available now from McFarland Books. You can order a copy here.
Relentless (aka Syphon) starts life as a home invasion movie, with all the requisite anxieties of that genre. However, it quickly moves beyond home invasion, hovering over other genres along the way, but holding hands with horror as its sustained, often grisly pursuit unfolds. It’s also the third film I’ve seen in almost as many films where someone is living out of their car: that’s a pretty damning indictment of the modern world all on its own, something which this film considers important, and in this case one of our key characters is a man called Teddy (Jeffrey Decker).
Teddy isn’t just down on his luck; he’s troubled, listening over old voicemails, presumably from his wife, in which he’s told that the ‘old’ Teddy is gone. Women only ever drift around on the periphery of this world. Elsewhere, soon after meeting Teddy, we bear witness to pure affluence. The trend now, if you’re hideously wealthy, seems to be to living in a concrete box with almost no possessions. That’s true of our currently-nameless second character (Shuhei Kinoshita), though he doesn’t look entirely at ease with his concrete box with its few possessions, and meditation doesn’t seem to help. He also seems to be having trouble logging into something on his laptop which, if we are to judge by the graphs and data streams we can see on his screen, is something important and lucrative. That’s all we need for now: we have witnessed two different sources of stress, and two men not saying a lot about what troubles them. A collision course is set, it seems.
It’d be an easy criticism if Relentless turned out not to be particularly relentless, but at least in its first third it is, and viscerally so. Director and writer Tom Botchii understands the mileage in presenting unanswered questions and mysteries, and whatever is driving the antipathy between these two men – enough so that Teddy is willing to find and attack the other – is a good source of pace, tension and forward impetus. Where it does start to slow down, however, it attempts to compensate for this by focusing more on ordeal – in fact, rather like a lot of the Noughties horror which was often largely static, with torture or torment taking place in a very small location. It’s always clear, until we get the exposition, that these men are each desperate to get hold of, or to retain a certain something: the film is at its best in this build-up. Actor Jeffrey Decker is a very important part of this tension, with much riding on his personal charisma as the script is minimal and simple, with barely anything said at all in the first act.
In fact, the more we know and the more we hear, the weaker the film becomes, ultimately offering up a fairly pedestrian and less than convincing – though no less personally galling – set of reasons for what’s going on. In this, it drops the mystery and justifies its deeds with a rationale on the part of each man which is tried-and-tested in one man’s case, and a little harder to entertain in the other man’s case. So the film loses something, though it hangs onto the motifs of shock and awe, overlaying many of its scenes with an often blaring soundtrack, using lots of handheld camera, fast edits and increasing levels of blood until the film is pretty much slick with it. Even when slower and even when less innovative, it’s a very violent and unflinching film, making the most of a limited budget and never feeling particularly low-budget.
If nothing else, it’s crystal clear that Relentless takes place in a deeply-fractured America, somewhere riven with the pain of being anonymous. Despite some issues connecting the dots, it’s a time capsule in its own right, born out of a time and place where division and inequality hold sway. In the background of one of the scenes, as a bloodied and prone Teddy sits back and contemplates his next move, there’s a piece of graffiti in the background which reads, ‘Squat the Air BNB’. In a way, this small detail is just as representative of the Relentless ethos as any other scene, even if not dripping with blood, barbed wire and broken noses.
Relentless (2025) is available on demand and digital now.
The Housemaid paints in very broad strokes. On occasion, its strokes are so broad and even a bit clumsy, that it seems like the paint will tear straight through the canvas. However, if you wait it out, it gets into a much more horror-adjacent, nasty phase which feels like a decent payoff for all the waiting around and second-guessing where it’s all going. If some of the plot twists are a little unlikely come this point, then you may still feel inclined to forgive them. There’s a lot of fun to be had here.
Millie (Sydney Sweeney) arrives for an interview for the post of housemaid at a luxurious home, where she’s not exactly grilled by hausfrau Nina (a brilliantly nervy Amanda Seyfried) about her credentials. It’s clear Nina needs help to keep the house looking pristine, help with meals, and for some occasional babysitting for her seven year old daughter CeCe (Indiana Elle). Husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) has one of those incomprehensibly high-paying jobs in IT where it’s never made completely clear what he does – it’s shorthand enough nowadays to just say ‘IT’ and audiences will sagely accept any embarrassment of riches, like this one. This couldn’t be more different than Millie’s background, which is fed to us slowly across the film’s runtime, but at the very beginning of the film we know that she’s sleeping in her car and in desperate need of both work and shelter. As luck would have it, the Winchester residence offers both: it’s a live-in position. Millie never expects to get it, but hey presto, she does. Nina shows her around, explains the role to her a bit more fully, and lets her get settled in. Great.
It’s not very long at all before Nina’s nervy energy breaks out into a flurry of temper tantrums. The first thing that sets her off is a missing PTA speech: she accuses Millie of throwing it away, and trashes the house as a result. Andrew has the manner of a man well-used to soothing his wife’s moods, but it’s enough to rattle Millie – who really can’t afford to lose her place here for reasons beyond simply not wanting to sleep in a car over winter, but she’s soon being asked to give up her Saturdays, do unnecessary errands, any number of things which seem designed just to torment her, or at least make her appear incompetent before anyone who might be watching. It gets harder and harder to decipher Nina’s agenda, as she does genuinely seem to need help to keep the home a happy one, but then acts like Millie is basically intruding there, and has no business speaking to her husband – oh, no. Whatever else is going on with Nina, she has at least correctly identified that Andy getting even a glimpse of Millie’s boobs constitutes an act of war. Depending on your perspective, you could see this as a film which started by storyboarding Sweeney’s bosom and worked back to a broader plot, or perhaps you might see the entire film as an indictment of American labour laws (get a contract!) and by extension, plenty of other laws too, labour-based or otherwise. One of those perspectives may be more motivational than the other, at a wild guess.
Faced with increasingly bizarre behaviour from Nina, Millie finds herself rather drawn to the long-suffering Andy, one of actually two men in the film who seem to hang around the Winchester residence, smouldering (there’s a groundsman called Enzo who is called upon to do little else). It seems that Nina has scored an own goal, if her intent was only to keep her husband and her help separate. However, there’s more to it; Millie slowly gleans that there is a lot more in Nina’s background. Nina is allegedly hiding a slew of secrets, many of which point to a very turbulent, dangerous past which threatens to spill out into the present. Thing is, the same could be said of Millie.
The Housemaid has a host of influences which are more or less straightforward to spot, but given its occasional use of voiceover, and its quite specific chapters (though without literally spelling that out for us, which is nice) it feels most like an alternative riff on Gone Girl – another film which examines feminine roles and secrets, looking at what happens when curated personae and planned futures crash into one another. It also feels, at least in the first half of the film, like some kind of an update on films which appeared in the Nineties – the likes of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle or Single White Female, films about happy homes or settled lives being upended by the arrival of some kind of feminine cuckoo monster. Some of these films haven’t aged all that well; The Housemaid clearly plays with some of the same ideas and holds onto some awareness of the pitfalls, but it takes a swift and different turn in the last act, moving away from the more expected (and more dated) ‘madwoman’ motif, and turning it into something more interesting.
This includes ideas about the great precariousness of lives in modern America, even if played up here, or given unlikely conclusions. Certain people in the film lead very unstable lives; the wealthy forget these people are there at all, or else they luxuriate in the cosy certainty that they call all the shots. At least, right up until they don’t. The film works exceedingly well as a kind of cathartic, even if cartoonish redress of this unfairness, particularly as it impacts upon women and women’s lives. If that means a rather implausible veneer of solidarity at key points, then you can deal with it because by this point the film has shifted gears, ending as something quite fantastical and even grisly. Which, by the way, sees Sweeney’s character growing in pace with the film, and it’s good to see her getting these fun, substantial roles. But I say once again, for anyone who might need to hear it: get a contract.
