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.
It’s time to look at my favourite short films of the year – and also time to feel sorry, as usual, that so few of these films are, currently, available for wider viewing. But who knows? Maybe in future, cinemas and online channels will diversify further; the beginnings of this are already in motion, with the likes of Arrow Video now picking up and screening a few shorts. And perhaps even the likes of Netflix could reflect on the success of a series like Love, Death & Robots and consider that there is an audience-in-waiting out there.
It’s no coincidence however, for now, that I got to see all but one of these short films at a specific film festival (Celluloid Screams in Sheffield, UK). Festivals still seem to be the most reliable way of interacting with shorts, and there are film festivals (such as Aesthetica) entirely dedicated to the medium, but I can’t help but think that mainstream cinema screenings are missing a trick here. The way that it’s done at Celluloid Screams is to screen one or two short films ahead of a feature, so that you get a little extra before the full-length film runs, and you also get to see films you would in all likelihood not otherwise see. Why couldn’t the likes of Picturehouse do something similar – surely, as a cinema chain which purports to screen the more lesser-known titles, this would fit in quite well with that remit? I’m sure there are similar cinema franchises in other parts of the world, too, and it would be great to know that talented filmmakers working on short films (sometimes for a long time before ever making a feature, for many reasons) could find an audience in addition to the often rather niche world of film festival screenings. For a long time, I’ve also toyed with the idea of setting up a short film channel to boost viewer numbers and exposure to short films, but given that filmmakers understandably want to retain control over their finished products – rather than handing things over to some optimistic but otherwise clueless bozo on the internet – it’s never happened. At least, yet.
In the meantime, and I heartily hope this year, as every year, that more people are able to see these films at some point – here is my pick of the bunch in 2025. Many thanks to all of the filmmakers who brought these stories to the screen.
The Occupant of the Room
Well, here’s at least one it’ll definitely be possible to see more widely, given that it forms part of a series titled The Haunted Season which is now available on Shudder, resurrecting the ‘ghost story for Christmas’ tradition. At around thirty minutes, it’s one of the longer short films on this list, but it utilises that runtime perfectly, striking a good balance between narrative detail and atmospherics, economy and pace. Based on a short story by Algernon Blackwood, it centres its tale on a remote hotel in the wintry Alps and a traveller at first barred from the safety of this environment; when gaining entrance, our traveller, Minturn (Don McKellar) is forced to take on an already-occupied room, albeit that the resident left for a hike the day previously and has not yet returned…
The stage is set for a disquieting, introspective experience as Minturn gets plagued by eerie phenomena; he picks over clues, objects which belonged – or belong to the room’s tenant, and he suffers through anguished dreams and visions which seem to belong equally to both occupants, present and present-absent. The result is a strange and existentialist piece of film in which director Kier-La Janisse uses interesting poetic license to bring to the fore ideas which, in the story, are more minimalist. The Occupant of the Room balances its period setting and literary basis with something which feels much more up-to-date, and the overall impact is very impressive. You can read my more detailed review of this film here.
The Fairy Moon
The Fairy Moon is another film which blends something modern with something folkloric, bringing its elements together in a subtle and never-quite-explained way, but making clear to the audience – via the intertitles and other clues – that here we have an occult force, and a very recognisable one at that, pushing its way into the everyday and taking advantage of one man’s ignorance of these forces. In this, it works in a similar way to many folk horror tales, where a visitor or an outsider fails to heed rules or avoid pitfalls because they lack the prior knowledge; it’s just that here, we have an ordinary bloke who simply gets swept up in something bizarre and tragicomic through no real fault of his own.
As he goes about his day, a man called Roger (a plausibly-harassed Johnny Vivash) encounters an oddball and dapper stranger who seems to take an interest in him, popping up in different places to present him with different possible scenarios or behaviours which all seem to point to trauma and risk. Being British, Roger has little defence beyond a sharp word and a futile call to the police, but what does this man (James Swanton) actually want? The film points to ideas about fate and sacrifice, but it does it all in an understated manner, making us want to laugh as much as to understand. You can have a look at my full Fantasia review here.
Skin
The only film which I saw via a requested review rather than at a festival, Skin is a short but impactful story about the toxicity of beauty norms, particularly as interpreted where ‘pale’ equals ‘beautiful’. Great, but what if you’re not white? In Skin, our protagonist, Kanika, decides to undergo a revolutionary new skin lightening treatment (riffing on real-life treatments which do this) despite her sister Ria’s protestations: there’s something off, something too good to be true, about this whole thing. The clinic itself looks modern and stylish, but it has a sense of the uncanny about it, and indeed as it turns out, they want more from their clients than just a little of their time. Clearly influenced by The Substance in terms of its visuals, Skin turns it around so that we’re not looking at hang-ups about ageing, but about white skin-centred values. I reviewed the film as part of the HollyShorts package and you can read about it here.
Obey!
On first pass there’s nothing serious about Obey! but actually, on consideration, it uses humour and exaggeration to point to the great hypocrisies of influencer-driven animal training programmes. Very popular today, button training can be used to train cats and dogs to ‘speak’ to their owners; it can be a very sweet and charming thing to witness, but as with any complex training model, it takes time, patience and humility – traits which many influencers may lack. The film introduces us to a pet influencer and her dog, Max: Max’s tragic death leaves his owner bereft, but weirder still, it seems like his vengeful spirit is back to communicate his feelings about what happened to him and how he was treated…
Skulk
Skulk is so, so simple and yet it does just enough to spin an effective yarn, making a brief but devastating suggestion and then seeing it through. Less is more here. The film starts by suggesting that foxes bark at night to raise the alarm that some sinister entity is near; that’s it, but that idea alone is a disconcerting enough titbit to generate an effective few minutes of horror when a woman awakes, hearing the barking of foxes outside, and realises something wants to be inside her home with her. What follows is a short but sweet masterclass in economical horror, pivoting around aural scares in particular (at least for this viewer) but doing more too. Bravo to director Max Ward, who has been building a solid career in the short film artform over the past eight years or so, and clearly understands the strengths and affordances of the genre.
Grandma is Thirsty
Feeling in some respects like a Seventies-era, Scarfolk-adjacent piece of world-building, Grandma is Thirsty forges something funny, bizarre and charming out of some familiar elements. Poor little George (Harris Kiiza) is getting picked on my bigger boys, and this timid kid doesn’t know what’s best to do: he just wishes he was bigger and could defend himself. Step forward, twins Benny and Bronte (Harrison Little and Jessie Johnson) who offer a solution: come with them to their place and meet Grandma. Grandma, they tell him, can help him to grow up big and strong. So, desperate, George goes off with his new friends to their house, where he is promptly locked in, because Grandma ‘only comes down at midnight’. Oh.
By turns sweet and sinister, Grandma is Thirsty has time enough to create a range of characters from plausible to peculiar, and it’s the interplay between them which drives a successful, nicely-paced story. George is a little champ, and you will find yourself sympathising with his predicament – and rooting for him as his bad day gets worse (and then a bit better, perhaps).
I didn’t intend to start this rundown of my favourite independent films of the year with a rant, but it feels like the most honest way to start my preamble.
Of course, I could start by saying what a diverse year it has been for a wide array of titles, genres and shooting styles, many of which ordinarily extend beyond the remit of this little site, but deserve love and attention from appreciative viewers – the right audience. This is true; 2025 has been a gift for all sorts of reasons, offering up some brilliant, inventive films across the course of the year. I could also semi-apologise for the fact that I know very well that, just like last year and for years before that, I’ve missed out on lots of titles which may have charmed and entertained me; time is always a factor, and the day job prevents me from doing a fraction of the reviews and articles I’d love to do. If you are a filmmaker and/or a promoter and you had hoped for a review here without receiving one, I can only apologise. So far, so familiar.
But the fact remains that, at this point in the year, we are being confronted by the ever-broadening remit of streaming giants, run by people who refer to film audiences as ‘consumers’ and believe that cinema – that is, the whole experience – is an outmoded artform. How people like this wheedle their way into positions of power and authority over the very mediums they apparently despise – or at least, fundamentally misunderstand – will be a question for the historians of the future. You can, certainly, be good at sums and not very good at lots of other things. But speaking as someone who, day job or not, devotes hundreds of hours to watching indie cinema every year, and always in the cinema if I can, this kind of dismissive wave of the hand is a real concern. This isn’t only true because handing over access to your entire film library to companies which can remove it based on their own, occasionally mystifying criteria seems like a colossal gamble; it’s also because a world in which only Netflix (et al) money is real is a very narrow kind of place, shaped by boardroom decisions and shot through with algorithmic criteria which more than occasionally get it wildly wrong.
Already, and for some years now, it’s become harder and harder to support film and filmmakers on their own terms, in a world run by and for the magnificently, shamefully wealthy people who’d prefer it if you just engaged with their products in your own homes, often paying for the privilege of access and then paying again, for a bit more access. And don’t get me wrong – there are lots of times that vast, moneyed corporations get it absolutely right, making the most of their money to bring alive worlds which require the kinds of SFX denied to even the most innovative independent directors. Disney did superb work on Alien: Earth; Netflix facilitated Guillermo del Toro building an entire ship to feature in a few minutes of screentime in Frankenstein. A stopped clock is right twice a day. But do we want to leave ourselves in a situation where we are entirely at the mercy of the heft of the mainstream? I’d caution against it. Keep your physical media movie libraries; go and see films; support independent film, new and old, by supporting some of the excellent film labels out there (such as 88 Films, 101 Films, Second Sight, Umbrella Entertainment, Mondo Macabro, Arrow Video); keep an eye on the likes of Alter; talk to one another, find out what’s good and spread the word; support film festivals, in person if you possibly can; take a chance on the ones you’ve never heard of. I’d never pretend to love every independent project that I see and I’ll never flatter a film I don’t like, but my god, I’d rather live in a world where people are making and writing and creating their own films than a world curated for me by people who don’t even understand what the cinema is for.
As such, I’m not mixing my favourite independent films in with the bigger budget titles this year. All of the films on this list are independently made; many of them were put together for next to nothing, but all of them hold their own against the big hitters of 2025. Keep an eye out for them: wherever possible, I’ll add viewing details below.
VULCANIZODORA
This film has a sense of crisis hanging over it throughout, as much as the conversation between main characters Derek and Martin seems affable enough, if a little fixated on a past now lost to them as they hike out into the woods for a special occasion, shall we say, in their friendship. But there’s more than nostalgia afflicting these two men in Joel Potrykus’s existentialist, occasionally hand-over-mouth funny, but more often unbearably moving tribute to a fucked-up friendship. One of the greatest tributes you can pay a no-budget film like this is to say that you keep returning to it, mulling it over and feeling that same investment in the characters that you felt at the time of viewing: that’s where I am with Vulcanizadora (2024). You can check out my full review here (with some viewing details here and details on purchasing a physical copy here).
HEAD LIKE A HOLE
It’s the simplest, even the most reductivist idea, but yet the beginning of Head Like a Hole (2025) feels oh-so familiar to anyone who’s ever had to swallow down their misgivings because they need to take the job, a job, any job. It’s only somewhat later that levels of weirdness overtake the general levels of weirdness inherent in any situation where you have to pretend to be as excited about some kind of corporate goal as the guy getting paid more than you seems to be. Asher (Steve Kasan) is down on his luck, reduced to applying for the kind of job which would advertise with those tear-off strips affixed to a ‘help wanted’ poster. He gets the job, but the job consists of watching a hole – sorry, an ‘anomaly’, in the wall of a residential basement, noting down its dimensions in exact detail and never letting his concentration drift. But why? What could possibly happen to a hole in a wall? Gradually, we glean that there may be something strange going on in the world outside, details of which were clearly lost on Asher at the start of this situation (sleeping in your car will do that to you) but which likely influence events inside the house – eventually.
Head Like a Hole is a low-key, clever and absorbing piece of…sci-fi? In some respects it’s a sci-fi, but in other respects it refuses to rest comfortably in any genre, focusing instead on Asher and his responses to the world he finds himself in. My full review is here. The film is not currently available for streaming or physical media purchase, but Warped Perspective will say so when it is.
SEW TORN
Seamstresses don’t figure hugely in independent cinema, or really cinema at all, much less in strange fusions of crime drama and horror-ish fantasy, but step forward Sew Torn (2024), an intricately-constructive tale of a girl who gets caught up in a situation far, far beyond her expectations. The very shy and wouldn’t-say-boo protagonist Barbara (Eve Connolly) is struggling to both live alone and maintain her late mother’s family seamstressing business, and a bad day turns into something far more threatening when, as she returns home from visiting a client, she stumbles upon a road accident, two injured (and armed) men and a mysterious briefcase. In a panic, Barbara picks it up and takes it, prompting a strange course of events which unfold in various, fourth-wall teasing ways. Sew Torn is economical, knows exactly how to get the best out of its plot, actors and runtime, and offers something ingenious: it’s all in the writing.
You can take a look at my review of the film here – and if you’d like to take a look at the film itself, there are some virtual viewing options here. I can’t find any legitimate physical media purchase options currently.
PEACOCK (AKA PFAU – BIN ICH ECHT?)
Peacock is definitely an outlier on this list, but in its tale of personal identity gone awry, modern alienation and the search for what matters in life, it belongs, even as a comedy of manners, because it deals with its plot points so very adroitly. Matthias (the intimidatingly handsome Albrecht Schuch) works for a company called My Companion, where he enacts whatever his clients want from him – dutiful son, doting dad, charming date. Yes folks, why wait for humanoid robots, when the real thing will do the same things and elevate your personal status just as well? There’s never anything sexual here (or in his own, real-life relationship for that matter) but it’s clear that Matthias is starting to struggle with the divide between real life and his wage-paying, fantasy world. It’s sober, smart and provocative without spilling a drop of blood, or even so much as really raising its charming protagonist’s eyebrow; Matthias unfolds events differently to that, as the film questions our love of keeping up appearances in its own, quaint style. I reviewed the film when it featured at this year’s WatchAUT festival, and whilst it doesn’t seem to be available in the UK at the moment, there are some viewing options.
MERMAID
Appearing at this year’s SXSW, Mermaid (2025) is a “love letter to Florida”, and yeah, even having never visited Florida, that feels like it fits. The likes of Disney have sanitised the mermaid in the same way as it’s Tinkerbelled the fairy; these supernatural beings actually have a long, provocative history of far more sinister folklore and that’s explored – obliquely, but it is – in Butt Boy director Tyler Cornack’s singular vision: boy (Doug) gets fired, boy enjoys smashing down handfuls of prescription medication, boy seeks failed vengeance on the heavies who are poised to ruin his life and boy finds…a real-life mermaid, and decides he’s going to put all of his kind, nurturing energies into looking after her – a bit like trying to look after a rare tropical plant as your own house and all your possessions burn around you. As I said in my original review, this isn’t Splash and the mermaid in question is in fact a fearsome creature, but that’s also not really the point. This is Doug’s story, and this is his bizarre, touching, Florida-weird redemption arc. This, to my mind, is indie cinema in all its bizarre, chance-taking glory. Sadly, at the time of writing I can’t find any viewing details: over to you, distributors.
A DESERT
It’s time for some Americana-tinged gloom and loss in the visually arresting film A Desert, with its magnetic, mysterious characters and its burgeoning sense of a hidden world out there in the back of beyond, waiting to swallow up the unwitting. Or not quite unwitting, perhaps; photographer Alex (Kai Lennox) has deliberately got himself lost in the boonies, relishing the chance to forget all about bills, family and obligations for a while as he photographs old, moribund buildings and remote spaces – his modus operandi, and once key to a successful project he called the ‘Death of the New West’. However, a chain of events draws him into the orbit of some hedonistic, rootless locals who initially ask him to take their portraits; a night together ensues, in which Alex feels like he’s amongst new friends. But as his memory and certainty begins to fragment, Alex finds himself lost and alone in a world he has only ever really experienced from the other side of the lens, and he’s in danger – never control – here. This is great work from first time director Joshua Erkman, with a screenplay which blends discourse around poverty and privilege into its heady world-building. Please check out my original review, and happily there are some opportunities to stream the film.
TERRESTRIAL
Another film on the list which belies its more-than-modest budget with clever writing, inventive edits and abundant ideas, Terrestrial (2025) was one of this year’s standout Fantasia titles, a story about a man, Allen (the fabulous Jermaine Fowler) who is doing rather well for himself. His old friends are astonished when they see what his writing career has bought: a stunning home in the Hollywood hills, a vintage car, all the obvious trappings of new wealth. So why is Allen acting so…off? Isn’t he happy? This was what he always wanted…
They find out the answers to these questions in a film which doesn’t miss a single beat. As I mentioned in my original review, the title Terrestrial suggests a sci-fi film, but although science fiction is contextually very significant here, this is far more a film about a young man whose aspirations – as a sci-fi author – launch him into an increasingly discomfiting and complex situation, one which he dare not share with his friends because that would shatter his hard won sense of self. It really is a brilliant piece of work, which deserves to be seen spoiler-free (which my review, promise, is). Sadly, at the moment I can’t see any viewing options but I hope that changes.
F*CKTOYS
A glorious, whole-hearted love letter to John Waters and all things camp, crazy and bold, director (and writer, and star) Annapurna Sriram has achieved something pretty wonderful here: it’s the story of a young woman who has been told she’s the victim of a curse, so off she goes, on her moped, into the strange underbelly of the city and the Deep South to raise cash (and guess how!) for a psychic to get rid of that pesky hex. It’s a candy-coloured, but never candy-coated bildungsroman where every moment is a revelation: sweet visual touches, believable character relationships and a barrage of ideas keep things just the right balance of tough and charming. It really is something else. Will that impertinent title get in its way? I certainly hope not, though it certainly does interesting things to an internet search and, for now, as I’ve just gleaned, it doesn’t look to be available to watch online. If there’s any justice, it should get a floral-print box set release.
THE EGO DEATH OF QUEEN CECILIA
You know what? The more I think about this modest, no-budget independent crime drama, the more I think it’s tantamount to a tragic play. Though the real tragedy would have been if I hadn’t have requested to review it; it landed in the site inbox when I happened to have more than usual spare time, and had I not, I may well have passed on a film which didn’t immediately suggest a great fit for Warped Perspective. It just makes you think of what you miss, if you get offered a film at the wrong time or have other reasons for declining to view.
But back to the tragic play reference: in The Ego Death of Queen Cecilia, we follow the fortunes of a woman one at the top of her game as an influencer with a successful YouTube channel and a devout following. There’s the hubris. But when we meet her, she’s a delivery driver, reduced to stealing parcels so she can give away their contents as prizes on her now-ailing channel – keeping up the appearance of fame and success. The Ego Death is already underway, then, but circumstances overtake Cecilia much more rapidly when she spots an old acquaintance of hers, now seemingly up to no good of his own and potentially – given her clear animosity towards this man – a means for her to regain her status and admiration, if she can only arrange things the right way. This spiralling, but always plausible and suitably humane story teases out lots of our modern predilections for online fame and fortune: what would an influencer do to regain old glories? Here’s a link to my review, and there’s an official website for the film, plus what looks like a streaming option, although from a platform I don’t know, so exercise caution.
THE SEVERED SUN
I’m not here to claim that British folk horror The Severed Sun (2024) sets out to utterly reinvent the genre to which it clearly belongs, but it does great work with its selection of plot points, visuals, performances and elements, toying with age-old ideas of religious mania, persecution, closed communities, sexuality and sin. Nor would it typically be for me to question the viewpoints of other reviewers, but where some critics have happened upon the inclusion of modern-day features (such as visible road markings) and made the assumption that this is some kind of mistake, for me this is one of the film’s best elements, and I don’t feel for a minute like director and writer Dean Puckett messed up by leaving them in. Instead, this provides a kind of rootless, timeless quality, detaching the film from a concrete timeline, but hinting that this may be some kind of dark, coming future, some unspecified point where what we would see as progress has been undone. Its story of the rebellious Magpie (Emma Appleton), recently-widowed daughter of a small community’s rod-of-iron pastor (Toby Stephens) allows a heady, close examination of a fracturing community, where visions of some dark Beast of the soil (James Swanton) begins to undermine an already-fraught existence. Filmed during a heatwave, The Severed Sun’s glorious sunlight belies its dark, unspoken nights. It’s a visual and atmosphere-laden treat and I really loved it: you can read more here and hallelujah, there are lots of online viewing options.
THE UNDERTONE
As a lifelong horror fan, I am always chasing the high of skin-crawling terror, and The Undertone certainly delivers that. Again, as above, this film doesn’t obviously seem to reinvent a genre, but it executes its storyline with such confidence and care that it works incredibly well. It feels modern, even a tad overfamiliar – a podcaster investigates a strange series of recordings – but it brings immense skill to how it unfolds its story, with director Ian Tuason knowing exactly how to elevate this aural nightmare into a scream-into-the-back-of-your-hand ordeal for audiences.
In the film, podcaster Evy (Nina Kiri) undertakes to investigate a series of recordings now belonging to her fellow podcaster Justin (whom we never see; this is a lonely ordeal of a film, centring upon a traumatised, isolated Evy). As they piece together a timeline of events for the subjects of the recordings, a young married couple called Jessa and Mike, phenomena begin to spill out of headphones and screens into Evy’s home. Why, and what does Evy have in common with Mike and Jessa? Answers come slowly, ratcheting up the sensory horrors and relying on the very human tendency to find faces in the darkness, words in the static and stories in chaos. My full review of this fantastic horror film is here and all being well, the film will receive a release in 2026.
Fantasy advertisement for celibacy Together (2025) starts with a search team in the woods, looking for two people – two names are being called, but two people go undiscovered. Almost immediately, we see what the search team does not, as the camera pans down below ground level, where some search dogs seem to have found something. Oddly, they don’t signal – but they drink some standing water while they’re down there, before returning to their handlers (somehow – good climbers?) with something newly odd about them. Later, from their enclosure, their terrified cries reveal that something worse than odd has happened, in a brief but punchy nod to a very well-known body horror from the Eighties which, were I to name it, would give a lot away, but the fact that I haven’t named it almost achieves exactly the same thing, because you’re very likely thinking about the right film, right now.
Let’s say just that there’s something weird out there in the woods, and we know this before we meet our protagonists, Nice but Mismatched Couple Millie (Alison Brie) and Tim (Dave Franco), who are about to set aside their misgivings to move to…the woods. More specifically, they are about to move to the country as Millie has a new teaching job. Tim is a struggling musician, something he can do anywhere and, as a struggling musician, he has hubris and self-reproach in good balance, all ready to transport to his new abode. We meet the couple at their leaving party, allowing time and scope for us to see some of their relationship issues and to know full well that they will be taking these issues with them, alongside all of their earthly goods.
Once settled in, Tim and Millie begin to familiarise themselves with the new area, heading off on a hike and in record time stumbling upon – or really, falling into – the same underground structure we’ve already seen, which is far bigger and even more ominous than we may have first gleaned. After spending the night there, heading off dehydration during their stay (uh-oh), they manage to clamber out and return to the house. But by now there’s something severely off between them, manifesting chiefly in terms of their bodily autonomy, now that its external boundary is getting mysteriously disrupted. This starts small; upon waking up underground, their skin seems strangely stuck together, but they separate without major issues. However, the new permeable layer between them extends to a new, symbiotic psychological bond which both would rather was not there, and it’s soon clear that the quick separation they managed the first time will not happen so easily again.
Whilst Together runs us through large chunks of its key plot points very quickly, it doesn’t feel like this detracts from the development of a similar thing taking place between its key players because we still take a reasonable, practical amount of time getting to know Tim and Millie – nice, mismatched, fallible, with a troubled relationship offering enough pre-existing complications to match the clearly signposted, incoming ones. Furthermore, the film has a number of interesting, compellingly unpleasant possibilities to offer – all conveyed via an easy-going, increasingly humorous and knowing script, which makes all the difference. It also shows a good sense of what’s behind modern relationship breakdown vs relationship expectations, turning the lexical field of relationships to bleakly funny effect – we get to think all about ideas like ‘splitting’, ‘completing each other’ and of course, how ‘two become one’. Sure, there are some less plausible decisions along the way, but we’re ready for things to get disgustingly literal. If this necessitates a couple of Chekov’s guns, then so be it: it’s more than forgivable. As an audience, it feels like being in on an awful incoming punchline, even before the joke has been fully unfolded. Nice incidental use of a rat king, by the way.
There are undoubtedly shades of other body horror films in Together, and writer/director Michael Shanks no doubt knows just what he’s doing with a few nods here and there, though some other, perhaps less-known titles spring to mind here too: there’s a dash of Honeymoon in the whole mental/physical relationship breakdown aspect, and a bit of Jug Face in the (largely unspoken) pseudo-religion plot point, which, by the way, holds onto a lot of its secrets, though at no great detriment to the character-focused whole. It isn’t as obviously serious as any of the titles already mentioned, however, and in fact becomes funnier and funnier as it goes along – which may or may not work for all viewers, as it feels to an extent like a tonal shift. If things feel gallingly defeatist in key aspects – the ultimate sunk cost fallacy – then regardless, Together‘s detail-heavy body horror does its best work when it focuses on the minutiae, moving deftly into a final act which, to put it bluntly, kicks up a gear. The film works well on symbolic as well as more outré terms, and it still feels like grimly good fun, too.
Osgood Perkins – to judge by the slew of promo emails which have continued to arrive at Warped Perspective this year – is a very busy bee. He’s put out three features in two years; no sooner had Longlegs (2024) garnered perhaps more than its fair share of gushing critical attention, than gleeful emails concerning The Monkey – a reimagining of the Stephen King short story – started to arrive. There’s a lot to be said for making use of any momentum you can gather in indie film, but whether Perkins’s prolific output stems from luck or judgement, slowing down a little wouldn’t have hurt. Like Longlegs, there are issues around coherence, only exacerbated here by a kind of additional, clumsy self-regard. The Monkey is far more pleased with itself than it has any business being.
We start at a pawnbrokers: one of the film’s odd peccadilloes, to mention one of them early, seems to be filling its shots with tat. Pawnshops, cluttered closets, yard sales – The Monkey is rammed full of knick-knacks, with a knick-knack at its very centre, as if Perkins is one-upping all of the other indie directors with a similar regard for old bits and pieces, though usually in their cases for reams of defunct analogue tech. Into the pawn shop walks a guy hoping to offload a creepy drumming monkey whose drumming signals ‘bad things’ are about to happen, which is a sizeable understatement, though understandable at this point. The guy, Petey (a cameo from Severance‘s Adam Scott) then offers us a framing device, as a flashback takes us to his own father’s childhood and the origins of a strange family curse.
The monkey has been in the family for a long time. Petey’s father Hal and his twin brother Bill (Christian Convery) had no father in their lives; all that was left of dad was a closet full of – you’ve guessed it – tat, though it takes the family a while to explore and find the drumming monkey, an item which is, to give it its dues, a pretty cool-looking object. All seems okay, briefly, but one evening as mom (Tatiana Maslany) heads off on a blind date as if dating were some kind of weird penance, the boys head to a restaurant with their babysitter – and the toy monkey. This commences a long line of what seem to be freak occurrences, though often focused on blameless women, it seems. Once they realise its power, the brothers try to get rid of the monkey, making sure by dismembering it and hurling it down a well, and it seems as though they’ve solved their problem. But twenty-five years later…
The story here is simple enough – cursed item plagues family – and there’s really not enough in the short story alone to pad out a feature-length film, so Perkins has made a series of decisions on how to get things over the feature-length line. It seems like a few things held sway during this process: make it gory; make it funny; extend the backstory of the monkey, so that it has a more complex presence in the story overall. Perhaps the feeling of satisfaction with these changes overshadowed the actual success at delivering them. It certainly feels that way. It’s not outré enough to be a genuine horror comedy; it’s more of a slacker comedy if it’s a comedy at all, but its theme of absent or awful parents is an odd fit and too high in the mix to really allow audiences to laugh. The script is garbled too, coining words (‘willish’?) or throwing in the odd, needless Stephen King reference, but it’s glib for too long to really land any emotional impact when it maybe wants to do that later in its runtime. Similarly, once it decides to turn into a version of The Ring, the impact is still negligible. It hasn’t convinced up until this point.
But to judge by the wealth of promotional materials inviting us to pore over the film’s goriest sequences, the gore was always intended to be this film’s biggest calling card. What a shame, then, that it’s so dreadfully handled. Sandwiched in amongst the film’s thin family plot elements, there’s a smattering – and only a smattering, really – of flimsy, obvious CGI which is so cheap-looking that it takes you out of the family plot with all of its additional characters altogether. The film seems determined to build up to set pieces which are utterly disappointing in execution, even if there’s some novel thinking behind them somewhere. The whole thing feels murky and inconsistent, ambitious without due diligence, which at best is down to the quick turnover necessary to get this film out this year, and at worst, is simply the after-effects of hype. Perkins clearly has love and regard for genre film, but the sincere hope is that when his next film appears – in 2026 – there’s more evident care and attention for the basics in the end product, and a lot more depth overall.
