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.
Hard as it is to believe, today marks ten whole years since the very first post from Warped Perspective!
By anyone’s reckoning, that’s a good stint: Warped Perspective was also a relaunch, following the closure of the earlier, US-based Brutal as Hell (which was founded by Marc Patterson back in 2009). So that’s a decade in this incarnation, but a steady fifteen year run as a film writer for me between BAH/WP, and as I was approved by Rotten Tomatoes as well as joining the OAFFC in the past few years, it’s fair to say that film writing has grown to be a big part of my life during this time.
This feels, despite the fact that a group venture has steadily whittled down to mainly being just …me over the course of the decade – though with some amazing contributing writers – like something to celebrate. In that time, thousands of reviews, articles and interviews have run, hundreds of films have been watched, and books after books of notes have been taken (I’m from the 20th Century, see, so I handwrite review notes before I type anything up). Perhaps it’s as a consequence of the shift from being Brutal as Hell to more of a broadly Warped Perspective, but there’s been a lot fewer, erm, heated responses from directors and filmmaking teams following critical reviews over the past few years; instead, the site now has a good relationship with a number of independent directors who are happy stay in touch, and Warped Perspective is also indebted to all the fantastic and accommodating publicity and distribution teams who work with the site.
Whilst the shift from BAH initially knocked the site traffic for six – as myself and the other co-founder suspected it would at the time – Warped Perspective has grown exponentially, particularly over the past two years. We now have in the region of 200,000 visitors per year – Fangoria it ain’t, but for a primarily one-woman operation keeping a fan site going around a full-time job and a tendency to run silly distances for pleasure (though I promise there’ll never be a running blog element here), that’s a really encouraging rate of visitors who visit and then – thankfully! – stay long enough to actually read things.
If that’s you – whether you pop in now and then, or whether you’re one of the site’s regular visitors – I cannot thank you enough. Thank you for coming along, thank you for engaging with the website, agreeing, disagreeing, sometimes sharing the posts, sometimes entering competitions, even the odd few hateclicks – all of it. The essential idea behind the site has never changed: it’s by fans, for fans – particularly horror fans, but anyone with an interest in the other, usually independent cinema which forms the bedrock of Warped Perspective. There are no plans to stop doing it, solo-ish or not, and as it seems as though people are still happy to visit as the site moves into 2026, it will continue to cover as many independent films, festivals and releases as possible, with a few special features and bigger budget film reviews, too. In that, it’ll be business as usual.
Something which has changed over the past few years – with the exception of the commemorative Brutal as Hell magazine which also released a decade ago – is the shift into creating more print media. Online writing is great, but I’ve always been interested in getting more writing into print. After a couple of co-writing projects, I got my Lucio Fulci book Opening The Cage completed a couple of years ago – there are just 13 left at the time of writing – and just before Halloween 2025, I published Celluloid Hex: the Witch in Horror and Genre Cinema, which is doing well so far. They’re all independent ventures, done for the love of physical books, and there are already a couple of ideas brewing for the future. And, hey, if you don’t fancy either of those, but like the site enough to want to contribute to its running costs, please click on the Buy Me a Coffee button on the bottom right hand of the site. Warped Perspective is free of advertising, but not free to run: any help with this is awesome.
A lot has changed over the past ten years, and not just in terms of film itself – which has been rocked by streaming platforms and Covid, to name just two seismic alterations to the landscape. As I’ve talked at length about new filmmaking trends and filmmaking traumas in my reviews, often totally tangentially, that’s not for here. Instead, a note or two on how it is to be an online critic these days…
Since WP first appeared, the world of online reviewing has changed seismically. The emergence of TikTok, YouTube and other video sharing platforms has meant a lot of younger potential readers would now prefer a quick video over a lengthy written feature. I forget where I saw it exactly, but someone online recently suggested that the real generational divide is between people who would eschew a written piece to watch a review, and those who would never willingly click on a video when they could read the article; most of you, at a guess, are in the latter camp, as of course am I. There are no current plans to start video reviews here, and I’m not particularly sold on the idea of podcasting even, but I am fairly open to suggestions, either in terms of new ideas for written features or something else. Something that isn’t related to video. An occasional podcast could be a goer, perhaps. Starting up a Discord is another potential idea, one which hopefully wouldn’t take a great deal of policing or time away from actually running the site…
Do let me know what you think. What do you want to see? I know that comments have remained switched off on the site and honestly, this is unlikely to change, largely because a live comments section seems to attract a large number of spam posts and hacking attempts; given that the demise of Brutal as Hell was partly down to a sustained run of DoS attacks, spam comment issues and even the entire site being cloned at one point, caution has won the day, though alongside some exasperation with some of the comments, at least as-were. But Warped Perspective isn’t a monolith! Feel free to email or DM on Instagram (the most lively social media platform at the moment): you will get a response.
And once again – marking a decade of horror, indie and cult cinema coverage is a very cool milestone, and everyone who takes the time to visit and read here is massively appreciated. Thank you for your support, and please keep watching for much more to come. Thank you!
There’s no doubt that the new Vince Gilligan series Pluribus – a kind of Invasion of the Body Snatchers for the wellness generation – has been an intriguing, if slow-burn entrant into the post-apocalyptic genre. Post-apocalyptic, that is, from the perspective of Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), one of the perishingly small number of humans (twelve at first) unaffected by a quick alteration to the rest of humanity as they each succumb (again, from Carol’s perspective) to something, hereafter referred to as the Joining.
If you haven’t yet seen the series (and I urge you to watch it, the better to avoid spoilers here), then the premise is as follows. After a small team of scientists decode a radio signal from a distant corner of space which turns out to provide information on how to engineer a segment of RNA, they have a go at making it. An accident spreads the sequence amongst humans, who quickly begin to act like a collective, rather than as individuals. Full exposure occurs soon afterwards when planes are used to disperse the virus, leading to a moment’s switchover which either unites individuals into the Joining – or kills them. It’s kind of an either/or, unless you’re Carol and the other remaining individuals, who are of instant interest to the Joined, who (or perhaps which) is unable at first to understand why some people seem to be immune. Most terrifyingly of all, the Joined behave in a distressingly friendly way. They love Carol; they don’t want to harm her. It’s enough to drive a woman a little mad, and true enough, when Carol loses her temper, millions of the Joined drop dead. Never has humanity taken mass casualty numbers so well. The Joined smile their way through it, of course. These new, happy, former individuals are deeply creepy in their in-built optimism.
It’s been clear throughout Season One that Breaking Bad guru Gilligan intends to be in this universe for the long haul, given the structure of the series and, to an extent, some stockpiling of the potentially more seismic plot points for the last episode of the season. This is the world we live in today and this is how TV gets done, though it’s fair to have high levels of confidence in Gilligan given his track record, even if Pluribus is, at moments, so slow as to feel a little laborious. This article, though, isn’t just about trust or distrust in the process or a straightforward piece of criticism either, but takes a different tack. Namely: I have some questions. Having these questions isn’t itself a criticism of Pluribus, but rather evidence that there is a wealth of material in there so far, which hopefully will yield fruit in seasons to come.
So here’s the first…
If the mice can be infected with the RNA sequence and they initially spread it to humans, why are animals seemingly exempt from any aspect of the Joining?
Okay, I understand that different species can be differently affected by viruses (oh boy, are we aware of that one) but it’s interesting that mice can simply – at least as far as we know – transmit the sequence, without any impact on them. Or is this the case? Elsewhere in the series, Carol’s chaperone Zosia explains that animals are unaffected by the Joining, but it’s via an individual creature that the virus escapes the lab in the first place. Was this just a bite from a lab animal, a coincidence which starts it all? That seems quite strange in itself, as these creatures tend to be very used to being handled, but it could be so. However, it also looked a lot like the mouse manipulated Patient Zero into removing her protective glove by playing dead. Another possibility, then, is that the creature on some level wanted to transmit the sequence, which would suggest a level of knowledge on its part. Knowing that the Joined are not above some clever wordplay or a certain, acceptable amount of obfuscation to protect knowledge which they aren’t keen on sharing, there could be more to this. But if a mere mouse can play dead and plan ahead to an extent, then it would suggest that even without brains as complex as humans, animals may play more of a role here than has been explored so far.
Sticking with animals…
Why don’t the Joined – really – extend their kindness to animals?
The Joined may be a hivemind of care and consideration, at least superficially and at least according to them, but it doesn’t seem like that superior mindset – the one they’re so keen on ensuring every human being shares with them – is able to understand that simply abandoning tame animals is a form of cruelty. I’ll readily admit I felt upset on behalf of a goat during E9, when newly-turned Kusimayu, whom as an individual clearly loved and cared for the animal, simply unties the goat’s enclosure and abandons it after her own Joining becomes possible. Earlier in the series, Zosia explains that the Joined have a completely hands-off approach to the animal kingdom, even sacrificing a few Joined individuals to the frankly barking mad task of letting all of the big predators out of their zoo enclosures. The Joined have also alluded to their own lack of food (see below), so perhaps that justifies not taking up resources to feed to the lions. But many of these animals will likely starve to death, as they lack the abilities to get food for themselves, and many of them may be reliant on their handlers. And that’s just zoo animals. What about all the pets?
We see one dog, unaffected by the virus, still determinedly sticking by its once-owner, and that animal is apparently well tolerated by the Joined. However, that’s just one individual animal. What about the others? Humans have a long, even arguably a co-evolutionary relationship with dogs in particular and there are around sixty-five million dogs in the US alone. Where are they? If we see wolves quickly growing confident enough to approach residential areas in order to dig up bodies (despite wolves being one of the species presumably the least affected by humanity’s sudden turnaround, actually), then it’s bizarre that the streets are not awash with cats and dogs, or that the dogs, in particular, are not distressed by the disappearance of their owners, many of whom will likely have died in the Great Switchover, even if they haven’t successfully Joined.
The Joined have a protocol, if you can call it that, of non-harm. They can’t even cultivate plants for the purposes of farming, and they certainly can’t slaughter animals for food. It’s hard to imagine they’d be averse to recycling animal protein if it happened to present itself, given they have done so with human remains – but in the meantime, how is neglect an acceptable option? How ‘kind’ is that? If this is a clue that the Joined will hide their real motives behind a gloss of benign concern, then it’s a galling one. I hope the fictional goat is okay, by the way.
So the dogs and cats are MIA; the zoo animals are probably going to starve to death; the Joined have concerns about food and supplies which cannot convince them to cultivate even a vegan diet. But perhaps they don’t need too many calories, because something else is currently unclear:
What do the Joined do all day?
So far, we have seen comparatively little of what a day-to-day routine looks like for one of the Joined. As they all commune with the rest of the hivemind all of the time, they only really need to use their verbal facilities when addressing Carol; with the exception of Manousos, who refuses any sustained contact from the Joined until the very last episode of the series, the other unJoined individuals are far more content to simply accept the new way of doing things, and don’t feel the need to debate in the way that Carol does. So these people, or ex-people, aren’t forming any debating societies anytime soon. They aren’t bidden by any political systems either, so they aren’t motivated by making money, elevating certain individuals above others, or castigating any of the groups which formerly comprised society. There’s a general collectivist approach, granted, but that doesn’t really solve the issue of what they’re going to do exactly with their finite resources or how they are using their time on earth.
Here’s what we do know: they are carefully trying to conserve food and energy. They sleep together in shared spaces to keep…warm, I guess, though this is presumably less of a concern in New Mexico than in other sites around the world. They are more than capable of organising an epic flounce when Carol’s behaviour is deemed too risky to tolerate at close quarters, so they can all head off somewhere totally different to do…something or other. And they are always able to get any sorts of resources to Carol almost instantaneously, so there must be enough of a physical presence at hand and enough resources nearby to fulfil Carol’s material needs. When it comes down to it, and as we’ve seen, they can also source things which have absolutely no purpose except to destroy: when Carol asks for a hand grenade, she gets one. When she asks for an atom bomb, that’s fine too. That’s interesting, actually: given that the Joined proposes a system of no harm, they would still provide a recalcitrant individual with the means to blow up either a small number of things, or all the things.
We also know, via a neat narrative gap, that the Joined now have one main priority: constructing a vast antenna, so that they can share the same signal which brought the Joining to earth. To do so will take pretty much all of the planet’s energy resources, but with the zeal of religious converts, they can’t see past this goal. It’s what they owe to the universe. To perform this feat will take probably thousands of people, but too many hands spoil the broth: what are the rest of the people on earth either doing, or about to do? It’s not a job for seven billion.
But still: given the Great Work, and the imminent famine, it seems likely that the Joined would need to limit (or at least to control) population numbers, but equally it seems like they will need a steady stream of new humans to at least work on the antenna, even if we don’t know what else is going on. The logistics of getting the population to a sustainable, useful level is an interesting issue and perhaps an aside too far, but it doesn’t really solve what is going on the rest of the time, once vital repair and maintenance work is done (and we do see this happening early on in the series). Apart from subsisting on cannibal rations, there’s a big question mark hanging over the day-to-day existence of the Joined – which still numbers in the billions – to date.
Can the Joined adapt their behaviour? Is that possible? How, exactly, have these rather pig-headed moral values been encoded in the first place? Could they change how they do some things in order to benefit the whole? I mean, I know humans are rather bad at this, but we have millennia of being idiots to set the precedent. In the meantime, the notion of all of these Joined people simply kicking around somewhere, waiting for Carol to come around to their way of doing things is, in its way, just as eerie as the more major events which take place during the season. There is also such a lot of space here for Carol to interrogate the Joined that this can’t help but become a key plot point in future series.
Because there’s one more adjacent issue here…
What’s it all for?
As above, human beings are idiots – but there’s a kind of pattern, or a series of patterns to how we use our time, developed over the centuries, which suggests that we at least appreciate that this time is limited; we feel certain things, we understand certain things (or feel that we do), and certain ideas are vitally important to us. Many of these priorities form into recognisable shapes. For example, some people decide to prioritise having families of their own. Other people – though not mutually exclusively – want to leave something to posterity. They, or we, want to build, invent, design. People perceive problems, then they want to channel their energies into solving those problems. On occasion – actually, far more often than occasionally – people’s entrenched prejudices mean that they want to kick lumps out of certain groups of people, and they will devote days, years or even generations to doing just that. Without getting too much further into the wretched but diverse state of humanity, what this shows is that humans feel, overall, that our lives should be spent doing something. Better still if they’re competing with those bastards over there as they do it.
So what motivates the Joined? What is their time for? If it’s all only about perpetuating a kind of hivemind across the galaxies, then that feels more like a step along the way to something else, not the final destination – but perhaps that’s my errant humanity talking. A whole universe full of lifeforms who want nothing but to make other lifeforms feel the way they do; that’s the main acknowledged goal for the Joined. Okay, but so what? Once this sense of shared belonging is everywhere, what happens? What do they want to build? Anything?
So far, the concept of a collective consciousness which is about nothing beyond itself feels just as terrifying as other, soulless dystopian dramas, and operates along the same lines – revulsion, rejection and a desire to protect individuality. Just because the Joined smile and wave rather than pointing and screaming, doesn’t seem to matter ultimately: their idealised state still feels like a nightmare. But there are already cracks in their armour, offering intriguing scope for exploration.
Thanks to a couple of things – Carol’s truth serum, and Manousos’s so-far rudimentary understanding of the relationship between the Joined and radio frequency – we already know that there remains the possibility for turning the Joined back into individuals. We also know that this possibility is a frightening prospect for the Joined, who will do what they can to protect themselves from this (and is it just me, or did Zosia’s heart attack feel like strangely lucky timing, given Carol’s line of questioning at that moment?) It’s really only because of Carol’s all too human inability to really appreciate that ‘Zosia’ does not exist that stops her in her tracks, and makes her actively resist Manousos on behalf of the Joined when he gets oh-so close to cracking the electromagnetic code, which seems to keep the Joined all operating on one frequency (no mean feat, by the way, for a man who has only just started reading in English). But we now know there are ways to get at the individuals who once were, and that the kindly Joined will do whatever they self-permit to stop the old order from resuming; on some level, they want to exist and they want to survive. That’s interesting, and so far underexplored.
Unless the Joined can come up with a reason for existing which goes beyond ‘feeling nice and happy’, then they could be in real trouble. As already discussed, ever underestimate the dogged insistence of humankind once it gets hold of an aim; the Joined may well not be a match for it, and it seems highly likely that Gilligan will play around with these frankly rather philosophical possibilities once we head into Season 2 of Pluribus – which is currently rumoured to appear in 2027. Oh, and there’s the small matter of Carol’s renewed anger over the Joined and how they have, after all, found a way to backwards-engineer a connection to the hivemind without her consent, badly misjudging Carol’s mood and forgetting just what drives human emotional connection, and how hard it is to set all of that aside. Mess with someone’s stem cells at your peril, and – it seems likely, at least – be ready to reap the whirlwind which will follow.
John (Adam Pally) and Kathy (Rosebud Baker) start off Hell of a Summer (2023) with a fireside guitar session, which as we all know is just asking for trouble. They’re the owners of a summer camp called Camp Pineway, but they live there permanently – their photos are all over the refrigerator. Anyway, we see them for just long enough to establish that this film is going to be a fairly humorous slasher homage, and it gets things going quite quickly in this respect as the inevitable masked killer stalks out of the trees and dispatches them both.
This is unknown to the new camp counsellors (weird title for that job, by the way) who are about to arrive for this year’s season, just ahead of the happy campers themselves. Returning staff member Jason (Fred Hechinger) is returning for yet another year – much to the chagrin of his mother, who feels that a grown man with a beard should be doing something other than leading camp activities for kids at $100 a week. But Jason has that whole ‘arrested development’ thing down to a fine art; he behaves like a far younger person, which doesn’t go unnoticed by the other counsellors, old and new. They each have their own issues, though. Hey, one has even brought a copy of his horror screenplay to camp with him (directors and writers Billy Bryk and Finn Wolfhard also number amongst the new staff intake).
Of course, Jason can’t find the camp owners because they’re already dead, but he sees this as part of a ‘test’ to see if he is ready to take on more responsibilities at Camp Pineway. That’s his take on it, anyway. The others settle in, getting to know one another, venting various teenage angst and so on: it’s here that the film starts to feel rather protracted, in a way which the much pacier opening scenes did not suggest was coming. What makes it worse is that there feels like a limited payoff; for all of the intrapersonal relationship stuff, it still feels tough to remember much about those relationships, or even most of the character names. This is an issue in a film which (wisely, mind you) will be rolling its credits by the ninety-minute mark. Knowing the type of film we will be getting, you do have to expect a bit of treading water before we get anywhere; however, thirty minutes of this allotted runtime turns out to be the ‘getting to know you’ part of the film, which reveals that there are big pacing issues here and potentially ahead.
But worse than that – in a slasher, you expect a fair amount of slashing. Scrimp on the slashing, and slasher fans (who adore a carefully-designed murder set piece) will turn against the film in their droves. Disappointingly, most of the kill scenes happen offscreen in Hell of a Summer, despite some skilled use of various slasher-friendly set-ups: the possible killer’s eye view; the false reveals; the cutaways. These are in there, and they’re all handled fairly well. It’s clear that the directors, both of whom were incredibly young when they pitched and then made this film, have skills, but they retreated – whether from budgeting issues or some other uncertainties – from going all out here, and the film feels lacklustre as a result. The script does a reasonable job at establishing Jason as the kind of hero of the piece, showing him to be mentally stuck at a point in time when he felt happiest and most secure. There are also some moments of deprecating humour which work quite well, usually at Jason’s expense, but Hechinger – who has had a really diverse acting career to date – is able to carry these. We just needed something more seismic to justify the set up.
The ‘summer camp’ thing isn’t really a feature of British life, so it always feels a little like playing cultural catch-up (and it’s probably significant that most British audiences know everything they know about summer camp from retro horror cinema). In any case, Hell of a Summer does do some work on updating the long-established trope of the camp under attack by introducing some more up-to-date attendees and having it all happen to them, in the here and now; you’ve probably guessed it, but there are a few influencer types and some spiritual, vegan types thrown into the mix. These kids hand over their phones way more easily than you would ever expect, but the film’s premise does feel like it’s been amended somewhat (even if some of the film’s thinnest jokes are at the expense of the film’s lone vegan character, which makes things feel dated all over again). The cast are okay, though, and do their best with what they are given; the production values here are solid, and despite filming on digital, the film is able to generate something reminiscent of the classics of the genre with some nicely atmospheric shots.
Perhaps the problem here is that Hell of a Summer is more of an homage to homages, than it is a fresh, bold slasher flick. It’s an intriguing choice altogether to go for this genre – one which feels like it was retro for a long time before the directors were born – but then to omit many of its most noteworthy aspects. After all, it’s entirely possible to plump for this kind of homage and still deliver something gritty, novel and nasty on a minimal budget (such as in Summer of ’84, to name but one). Still, for all the film’s issues, Bryk and Wolfhard potentially have a long career in filmmaking ahead if they want one and without doubt, they will have learned a lot from this experience, so if they decide to go for directing rather than purely acting, then who knows what’s in store? I would still be curious about their future projects. There’s something to build on here.
Hell of a Summer (2023) is available to stream at the usual platforms.
