Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

Sitges 2026: Heat of Madness

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

For many film fans, director Karim Ouelhaj probably established his style and vision with the staggering, stark Megalomaniac (2022) – and Heat of Madness (2026) is his first feature since that break-out title, which perhaps invites a certain level of comparison. The first thing to note is – despite some similarities in aesthetics and a similar unflinching approach to violence – these two films are very different beasts. Megalomaniac, despite the comforting rarity of its narrative elements, felt undeniably grounded in something real; Heat of Madness does not follow this same arc, preferring instead to unfold a bizarre, if very dark fantasy. It starts with recognisable roots, but elects to go somewhere very different indeed. The effectiveness of this choice is in the eye of the beholder, but its singular sense of ambition is beyond question.

We start with a taster of the film’s very deliberate placement of images and ideas and the camera’s slo-mo approach to these, with a series of as-yet mysterious images: a man visits a huge, deserted industrial structure; a man digs; a man passes what we may assume is a grave marker; something else looks like an assemblage of characters from a far earlier point in time, wearing medieval armour. What this means is not yet for us to understand – but we have a recognisable face, now appearing in what’s clearly a modern timeline – at an airport in Belgium. Scola (Olivier Picard) seems to be carrying only one piece of luggage, a briefcase, and whatever’s inside gets past customs with no real issues, so he’s permitted to go on his way. The briefcase is clearly valuable, so little wonder that people seem desperate to get their hands on it. A group of masked men (are they accomplices?) intercept Scola and his new companion; we can infer that the whereabouts of the briefcase will hereafter be an issue, and so it turns out to be.

We change pace here, picking up with Scola in a decidedly different, domestic setting (with time spare for a bit of the almost-casual observational misogyny which Ouelhaj elects to thread through this feature for our consideration, though less fixedly than in Megalomaniac). His wife is pregnant and wants to plan a proper future with him; this means no more criminal enterprises, but it turns out that the lost item is actually a number of valuable diamonds and what’s more, he has his doubts about his old partner Pedro (Claudio Dos Santos), who has his own domestic issues, and a similarly aggrieved wife. With items as costly as missing diamonds, however, it’s just not that easy to decide to detach oneself from that world. Scola feels he must go and attempt to fix this now dangerous situation – the diamonds were intended for sale to another criminal group, who very much still want them – and to find the stones, before the threats of the murder of his wife and other threats of retribution come true.

However, it’s at around this point that the film detaches its moorings from this symbolism-laden, but ostensibly ‘real’ narrative frame, heading into altogether more experimental terrain. Scola sets off to look for his diamonds, but begins to travel through peculiarly-remote places, a kind of Dante’s Inferno for a diamond crook, where the places he visits and the people he meets take on a supernatural significance. Ouelhaj’s recognisable, washed-out colour palette and its sharp, sharp contrasts accompany us once more through a long and at-times perplexing series of locations; Scola also picks up with a mysterious female companion (Julie Carroll) who declares her interest in ‘helping’ him, and as such, she becomes more and more necessary to him – this man who occasionally still seems to dip in and out of his old life, sometimes via flashbacks or black and white dreamlike interludes and sometimes by finding his way back to the places or people who matter most. Ouelhaj also intersperses all of this with some somewhat jarring moments of ‘should I laugh?’ or ‘do I really want to laugh?’ comedy, though maybe hanging onto some symbolic content all the same. Yes, I’m talking about the apples, that most symbolic of fruits, entering the frame here in a unique way, to say the least.

So what are we to make of all this? Heat of Madness is a metaphysical thriller, not a horror – albeit still punctuated by moments of intense violence, moments which immediately bleed into the film’s supporting world of flashback and dream. It’s bizarre, to put it mildly, to the point of potentially alienating fans of more conventional horror, many of whom were likely won over by Megalomaniac. Heat of Madness also potentially tests its audience by the way in which it dispenses with some of the initial forward impetus established by the opening scenes and set-up. It’s a risky business, and it lost this reviewer in places, despite Olivier Picard’s intense and consistent watchability throughout the film.

However, there is much to commend: the cinematography is superb, with a common sense of people being utterly dwarfed by their surroundings, as if to say that we are so much smaller than the world, and its great manmade edifices will be here long after our brief dramas are over. A kind of death knell for the Anthropocene, maybe, if we can extrapolate that far. There are some intriguing Jungian ideas here too, even if these are really allowed to percolate without explanation. But then, arguably, the film does wind up offering a more familiar-feeling explanation for its events: does this bring us back gratefully to our lead character/s and plot, or does it invalidate some of the strangeness which eventually gets us there? Again, it’s likely to be a divisive one, and overall it’s not really a film which lends itself well to a conventional review, either. Nonetheless, Ouelhaj has crafted something singular and – in the truest sense of the word – debatable here, even if it lacks the singular gut-punch he landed with Megalomaniac.

Heat of Madness (2026) received its world premiere at the Sitges Film Festival.

New book! Periphery…

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Allow me to introduce the most recent book on the Warped Perspective print roster!

Periphery is a collection of supernatural fiction, themed around the profound impact which landscape and place can have on us. Whilst this ostensibly reads like ‘folk horror’, and indeed many of the stories could be classed as part of that estimable genre, the stories chosen for inclusion frequently play with those elements, using the familiar to do something altogether unfamiliar. We visit places real and imagined, look at staple features of the environment through new perspectives and examine mental landscapes, and how these, in turn, interact with the outside world.

I’ve produced a couple of books of my own over the past few years; as much as I enjoy the immediacy of a website, and the elasticity of its readership (don’t ask me why a five-year-old review will suddenly get read 2,000 times in a given day, because I don’t bloody know), I am always going to be an avid supporter of print media. There’s just something amazing about seeing your work in print. Rather than doing another solo project, at the beginning of this year I decided I’d like to do something different: moving away from non-fiction to fiction, and (not to sound too lofty about this) perhaps giving people whose work hadn’t yet appeared in print the chance to get their own work out there.

The response to the call for submissions was really encouraging; in fact, it was a bit daunting, but genuinely awesome to see so many people interested in the project. The process was soon underway, as much as it’s a difficult thing to have to turn away some of the fine work submitted (a feeling I’m familiar with myself – in one particular week, I was receiving rejections for my own non-fiction projects at the same time that I was issuing them for some of the stories). There was a bit of an unexpected turn when a major surgery I thought would be happening over there, somewhere in the future, got brought abruptly forward – but we ended up getting everything done and printed to the original plan, which is very much down to the hard work and commitment of all the authors, who have been brilliant to work with, and it’s been really positive seeing them receive their contributor copies this week!

I am very proud of our book, and if you have an interest in supernatural short stories – some written by more experienced writers, some by first-time writers – then please do consider picking up a copy. These are currently available from the Warped Perspective store (we can ship globally) and are always sent out promptly.

The book contains a foreword, eleven stories and author biographies.

Authors:

David Shakes

Julian Gyll

P Wooldridge

C.A. Ellis

Jez Conolly

Frazer Lee

Michelle C-E Keeley

W. B. Randall

Richard Riley Burke

Simon Addison

and Lara Hurley.

She Listens Alone (2026)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

She Listens Alone opens with online counsellor Sabrina (Alivia Levie) appearing in the bottom right-hand corner of a laptop screen, mutely listening as a gamut of strangers talk her through their life issues – kids, divorce, loneliness, anxiety. Then we zoom in on one session in particular, which stands out because it’s a woman fantasising about her own murder, but she feels that the fantasy is down to her own absolute anonymity; she feels so far removed from any sort of recognition or attention, that no one would miss her. That’s pretty bleak, and in many respects sets our tone.

From quite early on, the film feels like a kind of ‘who examines the doctors?’ set-up. Off duty, we see that Sabrina is currently staying in her parents’ old house, feels rather defeated by the formulaic nature of her wholly online day job, and has some doubts over her relationship with thrift store owner Mike (Forest Quaglia), who, by the by, is first introduced to us wearing a Hawaiian shirt; Mike is punching up. It’s clear. But life goes on, and Sabrina takes on a new client: Andrew (Wyatt Tithof), a college drop-out who has many issues, but tellingly, seems to give voice to a lot of the doubts also being felt by Sabrina. Perhaps this lowers her guard, but at least short term, Sabrina’s efforts to give Andrew a lift seem to help her, too. She’s briefly brighter, more hopeful and more confident, allowing herself plenty of space and self care for always-unspecified issues of her own. She even seems to relent on Mike – for a while at least.

Oh well. One day, whilst shop-sitting for Mike, Sabrina notices a black vehicle parked outside; in fact, she’s seen it before. Is she being followed? Her optimistic life phase soon seems to be over, though whether this is as a result of Sabrina’s new paranoia about the vehicle or the inevitability of Mike’s blatantly wandering eye is down to your own judgement. For whatever reason, Sabrina begins to forge ever closer ties to Andrew; again, who examines the doctors? And is it Andrew who is following her?

There’s a big tangle of fallibility and human error at the core of She Listens Alone, and there has to be: furthermore, you have to just accept it, particularly as it’s the bedrock of the second half of the film. I’ve mentioned previously that safeguarding practices seem to be in short order in a lot of films – necessarily in some cases – but it can be teeth-clenching when it occurs, and there are a few decisions here which grate, even though it’s Sabrina’s own desperation which has her leave herself open in the way she does. The film also serves as a bigger complaint about modern society, with its study of the limitations to personal freedoms and the seemingly small-fry struggles which keep people forever fretful and searching for a way forward. These concerns initially come together most fluently in the character of Andrew, via some insightful dialogue shared during his early sessions. Elsewhere, it comes together more slowly, but always making the point that modern life can be incredibly isolating. Sabrina is so often alone, or negotiates her reality via a screen: even in a hyperconnected world, people remain alienated. The film is also set in a world where self-help has been commodified, and also one in which lines can easily blur. If a paid job relies on the semblance of a relationship, then how easy is it to switch this off when the session ends? It’s playing with fire, as it turns out for Sabrina (Alivia Levie, by the way, is on screen on her own for a large share of the film, but does a very good job sustaining the tension and engagement).

She Listens Alone (2026) is a good suspense story with some integrated horror elements; whilst there are a couple too many dream sequences perhaps – and a big ask in terms of the central premise – this is nonetheless an increasingly tense and well-wrought ninety minutes. It leaves more than a few questions unanswered, but in a smart, controlled way which, even if the film elects for a neater, cleaner ending than I was perhaps expecting, sustains the film’s overall themes of modern disaffection and detachment. There’s a great score too, and throughout, the film looks incredibly slick and well-made.

She Listens Alone (2026) will be released in Thanksgiving Week (US).

Heresy (2024)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Heresy (2024) begins – in a non-specified, but very much rural, pre-industrial setting – with a young woman, Frieda (Anneke Sluiters) dismayed by the arrival of her period. Although her husband seems, at least initially, kind, it’s clear that her continued lack of a pregnancy is a big problem in this harsh, impoverished community, one where Christianity means a heavy and pervasive, patriarchal system of justice, rather than hope and genuine comfort. Prayer also blends with folk magic, as it always has, and it shows us this young woman trying any means to fix her infertility. In a few deft moves, the film shows us that where God seems curiously absent as a source of relief and succour, his representatives try harder and harder to exercise control, and aren’t above bending the rules somewhat, in certain cases. Take for example local man Gelo (Léon van Waas) who, despite himself having recently been subject to some community justice, thinks nothing of ‘offering’ to try to impregnate Frieda shortly after his punishment concludes. Very kind of him. But when he moves beyond simply making the offer and pursues a terrified Frieda into the ominous woodland on the village’s outskirts, a feminine entity intervenes on Frieda’s behalf.

This no doubt saves her life – Gelo is quite clear that his deal is either rape, or murder – but when she returns to the village, her very survival is treated as a source of anxiety. No woman, we are told, has ever re-emerged from those woods. When Gelo’s hideously-rearranged body is later found by the men of the village who enter the woods to search for him (a rapist, maybe, but the town needs a competent butcher) , Frieda’s barren and stubbornly alive condition, versus Gelo’s oh-god-surely-he’s-dead condition, means that her community adjudge her to be in league with the Devil. She becomes a social pariah, but yet, something keeps drawing her back to those woods…

Perfectly acted and surprisingly economical – Heresy (aka Witte Wieven) lasts just sixty minutes – this is a very well-realised historical horror, though director Didier Konings, in this, his first-ever feature, anticipates some of the more expected comments – that his film strongly resembles The Witch (2015). It’s abundantly clear, and yes, Heresy is very Eggers in many respects, if perhaps even less rooted in a specific point in time (though looking pretty damn close to the 17th century setting of the 2015 film). The clothing, the practical realities of living a remote, agrarian existence, the prospect of a dark entity just past the village bounds – and of course, the harried female protagonist, and the rising hope that she can transcend her sullen life of thankless, bloody toil. But though it moots the idea of a ‘duivel’, this is more to do with the villagers’ limited vocabulary for whatever is out there: here, Konings departs from the Old World-meets-New World diabolical horrors of The Witch. There’s more at play here, though left to filter through to us, rather than being overwritten into the script. That would kill off all of the wonderful subtlety, which comes wedded to some wonderful aesthetics. Yes, again, that natural light is Eggersy, but it looks strongly Rembrandt in many places, and much more clearly dreamlike and supernatural in others (with a few scenes which look very much like scenes from Häxan, come to think of it). It’s its own film. If it has a fault, it’s that stark depiction of the sheer, unabashed unfairness of life for women in this historical past, especially when this comes to us via a few moments which feel sadly, horribly modern. We enlightened 21st century women have to have discussions about sexual choking, after all – something which arguably takes place during Heresy – except we don’t have any timely supernatural respite to offset it, only lawyers arguing about whether or not someone just got ‘carried away’, when women turn up dead.

That rather galling comparison aside, it’ll be clear from this review that Heresy is rife with familiar folk horror elements; as-written, they may indeed seem more formulaic still. So why see Heresy, if you’re already well-versed in the classics of the genre?

Well, this is such a solid, careful piece of storytelling. A film of contrasts, it establishes a world which scourges and trades in female flesh, but transfigures the same world, offering us a range of beautiful extended sequences, a sense of a supernatural source of redress and escape. It has a hard-edged feminist subtext which glimmers in a very dark world; it’s also strangely uplifting in ways which, arguably, only horror cinema can really muster: its horrors are not simply Christian horrors, and nor, perhaps, are they horrors at all, in the end. It’s a sharp, vivid vision.

Heresy (2024) is on UK digital now from GrimmVision.

Where Darkness Dwells (2025)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

A lone hiker (Tara Perry) is distracted by her phone and gets ambushed by a knife-wielding stranger in the woods – that’s it, that’s the chosen opening to Where Darkness Falls (2025), but it seems Trish, the hiker, survives her ordeal, racking up a slew of therapy appointments and meditation recordings in the year which follows. She fits these around her career as a journalist: she works for a magazine-type, listicle-loving website and really wants to break away from all this into what could be more broadly considered ‘news’. As such, she’s encouraged, and then immediately repulsed by a new commission, a kind of ‘creepy disappeared hiker’ piece and yes, they really offered this to her. I’ve said it many times, but I’m always amazed by the want of safeguarding in certain films, and this film has just found itself a place on that list. Maybe there’s a listicle coming.

Anyway, keen to prove she’s ‘over it’, Trish begins researching one of the missing women in particular: Stephanie (Kara Schaaf), last seen posting a video where she advised her followers to ‘get lost on purpose’, which was clearly sage advice. These final videos, by the by, are more exasperating than eerie – a kind of ‘are white women okay?’ vibe rather than The Blair Witch Project. Any crossover between inspiration-type content creation and blind terror is tougher to navigate than simply ‘found footage’ ever was. But it matters not, because it turns out that this is just one small cog in a very, very cog-rich machine.

In the spirit of journalism, Trish manages to find Stephanie’s last-known location on a map, so she decides to retrace her steps (!) by driving to the area and exploring. A number of awful nightmares don’t dissuade her from this plan, and nor does a chance discovery: a remote mental institution called Wentworth, which is situated very close to where Stephanie went missing. Trish heads straight there, walks straight in (clearly a very progressive institute, this) and despite being asked nicely to depart by some of the staff, sneaks back in to look around, finding a number of mysterious but tantalising clues which seem to support Trish’s hunch: that Stephanie is here as an unwitting patient.

But we’re not done adding different elements; oh, no. In fact, there’s a roster of things yet to fit into the ninety minutes allotted: please look away here, if you want to avoid spoilers. Okay, so we have: escaped madmen? Maniacal medical staff? Masked slasher-type characters? A woodland cult? And, my Jesus my, something which might be a sasquatch, or some other kind of big, hairy creature, with a folk horror chaser. This all follows, remember, the initial set-up of a traumatised woman and a number of missing women. Where Darkness Dwells, a lot of other things apparently dwell as well.

The film cannot be accused, then, of lacking ideas, even if it does lack a rationale for what to keep and what to throw out. Some rather convenient, plot-expedient inclusions make proceedings even shakier, honestly, and can occur in short order, which feels extra careless: the unlocked mental institution strewn with relevant paperwork; absurd lapses in security; the guy who throws Trish out seemingly happy to talk policy with her in the grounds, moments later. It makes the necessary suspensions of disbelief more tricky, especially when it does the unforgiveable – seemingly suggesting, in some places, that this could be ‘all a dream’: that’s a lot to ask of horror fans, even though we’re generally very forgiving people (and even if the film retreats from this suggestion).

There’s a nagging suspicion here that director and co-writer Michael May may be partly channelling Barbarian, a film which starts from a lowly Airbnb and very successfully accommodates a number of seemingly disparate elements, but it goes to show how tricky that kind of shift is to execute. And it’s a shame, actually, as Where Darkness Dwells has some great technical aspects: some fantastic camerawork, a decent soundtrack and some skilled edits. It’s just that all of this great technical work happens to be framing a rather confusing melee.

Mother of Flies (2025)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

With a slick, highly colourised start, Mother of Flies (2025) initially uses a voiceover to introduce us to some of its key ideas. Ruminating on the permeability of life and death may be a horror-friendly beginning, but of course from the perspective of the everyday, it’s an impossibility: that division works really well to capture the film’s core themes, which are in that clash between the real and the impossible, redemption and a far more punishing reality.

There’s a family here, a father and daughter (played by real-life father and daughter John and Zelda Adams) who have had to deal with hard-edged facts. Mickey has cancer; her dad is picking her up from college to take her to meet a ‘woman in the woods’ called Solveig (mother Toby Poser). Dad of course has doubts about this mysterious arrangement, and so decides to stick around – something not accounted for by Solveig, but she tolerates his presence and invites them both to stay with her at her remote house, deep in the woods.

Mickey wanted to come here because she’s putting her faith – faith being key – in a more permanent cure, as she has lost her belief in the efficacy of modern medicine, having had to come to terms with the likelihood of her cancer returning to claim her. Solveig offers her a three-day process which will purportedly cure her, but this is no health retreat: whatever Mickey had in mind, this is a far more intricate, intimate and often bitterly unpleasant sequence of treatments. It’s a service which Solveig has provided, she explains, to many others who – in their own desperation – had come to eschew another belief system: an impassive, remote Christianity which failed to provide comfort. But it transpires that Solveig herself has needs and expectations from this process – a kind of transaction.

There is so much to commend in Mother of Flies: it’s by far and away my favourite Adams Family project to date. Having written a book on witchcraft in cinema, it makes me wish that I’d see and included this film; it does so much, in such an intriguing way. The warmth between the family members here is a fascinating addition, but it’s no uncomplicated ‘extra’ to proceedings. It’s a family playing with what it means to be a family, to have a family and potentially to lose a family. We have a motherless girl, ‘barren’ through her treatment and facing death, playing alongside her real mother, here appearing as Solveig – a woman offering a chance to push back against these crushing certainties, but haunted by trauma and loss of her own. The presence of John Adams mustn’t be overlooked, either: it’s not to detract from his skill as an actor to suggest that his evident love for Zelda Adams adds a different dimension to his role here, as a man both interested in the possibilities being offered to his defiant, harried little girl and also cynical about them; he hangs on in there for the longest time as a representative of that conventional world still back over there somewhere, beyond the forest boundaries – but this, too, has to give eventually. The complexities of all this, for a team of actors and directors, cannot fail to add something vivid and weighty, lending the desperation of the sick an extra layer of emotional depth.

Sustaining all of this: extraordinary camerawork, an array of beautiful and impactful forest tableaux and, in other places, a kind of grotesque, painterly feel when the scenes turn to the more gruesome. For me, there’s some Von Trier in some of those scenes which linger over natural imagery and also on the key objects, significant items (or totems) which punctuate the film. Contrasting all of this almost totally is a fading, remote world of Americana: the diner, the flag painted on its wall, the motel, and (as an outsider) a private health insurance system where “nothing is for free – ever”. Surrounding this mercenary world of definites is the woodland, an America which has been there for what feels like forever – its flora, its fauna, offering solace and shelter to the alienated and desperate.

The voiceover motif, whilst it hasn’t worked so well for me in previous films, works well here: it makes a kind of sense, given that Solveig herself is a witch figure, and so her recitation of spells and rituals feels organically part of a witch’s retinue, as well as forging links to the oral histories and folklore which underpin the figure of Solveig and her actions, so it plays an undoubted and enriching role. It works. Then there’s a wealth of contextual knowledge, often expressed in archaic vocabulary which builds a bridge between past and present.

Stark, beautiful and perplexing, Mother of Flies feels like a rite in its own right. Sure, it’s narratively minimal, more of a mood piece – but spell-like, with savage and haunting imagery (and a stand-out performance from Toby Poser, ably supported by John and Zelda Adams). I tried and missed seeing this film at several points on the festival circuit last year, but I feel so glad I’ve finally got there. Mother of Flies is full of love, lore and terror, and it’s a brilliant modern witchcraft film.

Mother of Flies (2025) is available on Shudder.

Dead Northern 2026: Game Over

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

The love affair with analogue tech is alive and well in Game Over (2026); add to that a few clear nods to a fair few pre-existing films (Ring and Evilspeak in particular), and you’ll get a sense of what to expect here. Is it groundbreaking? No it isn’t. Is it affectionate? Yes it is.

We start with an online streamer called Emma (Samantha Acuña) with a gaming channel, who introduces us to Kaniva Games, a company founded way back in 1980 which could have been world famous, but mysterious calamity beset the studio and everything ground to a halt, even before they could get their first game released. Half of the programmers disappeared; the other half got off worse, as they all mysteriously died. The rest is urban legend: that game they were working on together, titled Goggi the Guest, is now rumoured to be ‘cursed’. But the game itself never made it to the shelves – or did it?

Emma’s only gone and got hold of a copy of Goggi the Guest from another streamer, so she intends to play it and then review it online. She has the vintage console of course (left nameless here for obvious reasons) and so the game goes in – a few moments go by – and then with little waiting around, creepy things start to happen: the lights glitch, the game begins to act in a eerily sentient way and then Goggi himself (itself?) is able to appear. He’s a monstrous menace, possibly has a cousin called Pumpkinhead, and he’s here only to maim and kill, which unfortunately he then does to Emma.

Next, it’s over to Emma’s formerly estranged sister Re (Costanza Andrade), now left grieving and, as it happens, full of all the wrong sort of curiosity about how her sister died. Rumours that she died because of this so-called cursed game have already reached her; alongside cousin Rebeca, she makes the executive decision to also play the game, letting the newly-busy Goggi loose once more…

I mean no great insult here when I say that any genre film fans could probably more or less write the rest of the screenplay themselves. Go on. If you were to do so, you’d likely identify: a group of young people, each with connections to the game, who now need to work together to solve its mystery before Goggi tracks them down too. Right? And so it goes: this isn’t, then, by any means a deeply complex film, and nor is it a visionary, genre-defying film, either. If it’s doing anything unusual, or at least less usual, then it’s in how director and co-writer Carlos Marin builds a bridge between different eras of gaming and gamer fandom here, bringing together his own vision of 8-bit gameplay (decently creepy, as it happens) with the far more recent phenomenon of streaming, online channels and online rumour mills, which does show an awareness of the now longstanding nature of gaming culture, something which is still shifting and changing as time goes on. But it’s not a philosophical work and it doesn’t dig into more contemporary anxieties, beyond that initial set-up; there are even some puzzling lags in pace in places, which feels surprising, given the film’s less-than-ninety-minute runtime. Despite some on-paper connections to Ring and even – given the stalking nature of the monster – It Follows, Game Over lacks that sense of existential dread.

But what does it do well? The young actors do a decent job with what they’re given, and the film knows well enough to add in some effective practical FX scenes (whilst sticking to sympathetic, briefly-there CGI effects). Yeah, there’s another dash of It Follows in the appearance of some of the death scenes, but they’re realised quite nicely in their own right. Whether you find Game Over way more derivative than an affectionate homage to pre-existing titles – I’m wavering, but largely find myself in the latter camp – then at least you can safely say that the film has come from a place of earnest love for horror cinema, with presumably no real wish to strike out somewhere unchartered with all of this. It’s clear to see why Dead Northern picked it for a festival audience, especially for a late-night slot – this kind of straightforward, but affectionate and at times bloody, grisly fare will probably do the job, even if it’s unlikely that anyone will have their world changed by the experience.

Game Over (2026) appeared at this year’s Dead Northern Film Festival in York, UK.

Dead Northern 2026: Wrath of the Gods

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

In a remote Shetland cottage – one where you’d think there’d be a vested interest in repairing gaping holes to the wilds outside – a couple in bed are being spied on through said gaping hole by a blue-eyed Peeping Tom, something which gives way to a montage of pagan-ish nightmares and images before we reconvene years later with the same couple – only now at the funeral of the man, who was a fisherman called Ingram, being buried out in the wilds on the island of Hel. For his final journey, he’s attended by his wife Anna (Christiane Schaldemose) and her daughter Gudrun (Martha Robertson), alongside a handful of other islanders.

Some post-funeral awkwardness ensures: Anna being present in Ingram’s old community isn’t popular, and staying with her in-laws, the gruff Tulloch (Francis Magee) and wife Maeve (Lynsey Rendall), isn’t exactly a hoot, either. More pertinently, Anna is blamed when a little girl from the island goes missing; add in a few notional links to Norse mythology, as-characterised by a couple of inclusions from the Up Helly Aa festival and a few exhibits in the island’s museum, and it seems like we’re being guided towards a Norse folk horror. However, this turns out to largely begin and end with a note Anna later discovers, left by Ingram, seemingly written in runes (actually spiky English, and despite the film’s avowal that it’s scripted in an indigenous language, the ‘language of the North Sea’, this does – a few dialect words aside – turn out to be English, too. Here’s one of the film’s first big issues: it promises much, perhaps a little grandly, before abandoning the promise). But the note says that there is an ‘ill man’, or an evil man, in their midst. Is that who has taken the little girl? And is that the same ‘ill man’ who then also takes Anna’s daughter?

From this point forwards, Wrath of the Gods (2026) divides its time between drizzly crime drama and some sudden, unexpected plot lurches forward, where suddenly, and without warning, a course of action is suddenly decided to be best, so things head off in that particular direction. There’s a strangely broken feel to all this: a somewhat jerky pace, a not-quite-right amount of time spent with every scenario, difficulties in assessing what exactly links people to each other, or to place, with an overweening soundtrack, and dialogue which cuts through everything else so sharply that it feels uncomfortable. Speaking of plot lurches forward: the film relies incredibly heavily on partial or repressed memories, things which come flooding back right at the point where it would help the film move on for people to suddenly remember things. Coming back, just as fast, to Norse mythology before the film comes to an end just can’t cut it. It’s a shame, but the film’s greatest moments of potential come too little, too late to give compelling shape to these proceedings. Yes, it’s great to see some of the film’s location shots, and the late Justin Hardy has captured something of the wild Northern Scottish landscapes, as well as effectively flipping the script on The Wicker Man in at least one way, by making this film all about repressed, sickly or otherwise covert sex/sexuality; in this, at least, it feels decidedly different from a film which emblazoned its sexuality across every frame, to the chagrin of Sergeant Howie, that film’s own choice of outsider.

So why keep mentioning The Wicker Man? If you have any pre-knowledge about the Hardy legacy and the family connection to The Wicker Man – which goes far beyond the late Robin Hardy being the film’s director – then you can almost lay your hands on the places where this project goes on the rocks. Based on a script found by his sons after their father’s death, this was never a complete deal, instead credited here as being ‘based on a concept by’ Robin Hardy. Robin Hardy was haunted by The Wicker Man in his own way, as were his sons – something which was made starkly clear in their recent documentary Children of The Wicker Man (2024) The less said, the better about Robin Hardy’s sequel, The Wicker Tree, an odd hodgepodge of elements which, in the 1973 film, were assembled in an order and with a skill which made them brilliant – which makes its success feel all the more precarious, somehow, as with a few different decisions and inclusions it could have all gone badly wrong.

But there’s more to it than that: Wrath of the Gods is dedicated to the memory of Caroline Hardy, the wife abandoned by Robin Hardy, though after she sank all of her own money into his film. We know, from watching Children of The Wicker Man, how contested Justin and Dominic Hardy felt about all this – but it didn’t get rid of that seemingly irresistible pull towards this post-Wicker Man project. One more throw of the dice, perhaps, or at attempt at reclamation. The fact of Justin Hardy’s recent demise only makes it feel more and more like The Wicker Man has one again expanded on the great misery it caused to the people closest to it; it doesn’t just overshadow every folk horror made in its wake, but it continues to cast its shadow over the people who spent their lives, in some cases their whole lives, living with its impact. Then, finally, The Wicker Man both makes this final film possible, whilst amplifying all of the errors or issues in its coming to fruition. Any advice to simply put it out of your head whilst watching Wrath of the Gods seems doomed to failure. You can’t.

Despite the presence of some great performers – Francis Magee is one of the best character actors working today – Wrath of the Gods is a drab and enervated piece of storytelling, only ever able to hint at better ideas and directions. And then, ultimately, it retreats into the shadow of The Wicker Man, emulating it one final time – something which feels genuinely very sad now. Children of the Wicker Man remains a much more fitting, nuanced tribute to Justin Hardy.

Wrath of the Gods (2026) appeared at this year’s Dead Northern Film Festival.

Dead Northern 2026: Evil Thread

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Evil Thread (2026) tries to do a great deal during its ninety-minute runtime, so we begin a little bit meta – with a couple, Alice and Archie, both appearing in a horror film and watching a horror film, in an opening scene replete with silliness, like Archie cowering from the screen behind a blanket; this does, however, set the tone, even if these two people are about to disappear from the narrative. The film-watching is disturbed by a knock at the door: there’s an anonymously-delivered and unwrapped sweater on the front step, which Alice duly brings inside. Talk immediately turns to whether a sweater can be possessed or haunted, given that any kind of object can, apparently, be haunted. That’s our preparation for the jumper to kill someone, just before the opening title appears on-screen.

Ten years later: prospective fashion student Mindy Lou Kazoo (wacky enough name for you?) receives the very same sweater as a gift from her boyfriend. An origins story interrupts us just briefly here to establish, if needs be, that the sweater has a demon attached to it. Anyway, boyfriend Fred asks Mindy to wear the sweater to dinner with his parents. At the table, a weird dream ensues, and then over the coming days, Mindy accidentally discovers that the sweater has a long history of involvement in various murders. Meanwhile, it’s popping up to kill a few people, but it seems it would really like to kill Mindy, for reasons of hellish prophecy, the need for a sacrifice and so on.

Okay. Whilst it pains me to hammer an independent film – any independent film – indie cinema, whatever its budget, still needs to tell a good story, or an interesting story, or just do something worthy of examination, or at least make us laugh. Indie films manage this hundreds of times a year, every year: Evil Thread is not, sadly, in that camp. Here’s why I think so, though I am conscious of the fact that I am just one reviewer, and that hopefully, in a festival setting, the film will be buoyed up by that very particular kind of audience which will happily rally around a low-budget film like this.

There are no additional layers to this story – something which the script comes close to acknowledging, and which the director and team no doubt know, what with that short and sweet origins segment and the occasional reference to horror tropes and so on. But some depth could certainly have been added; this isn’t that much of a ridiculous premise, even; a couple of recent-ish films have also used jinxed garments as the source of their horror, such as Slaxx and In Fabric – two drastically different films, sure, but each centring an interesting set of ideas around their own haunted, or otherwise noteworthy piece of clothing. Here, however, there’s no such broader point and no overarching style. Evil Thread both tries too hard and not hard enough, filling its runtime with deliberately zany performances; you know the self-conscious style of humour I mean, and you’ll probably either love it or hate it. The actors here gurn, overact, laugh raucously and find ample time to natter, at length, sometimes about a list of contentious issues: nationality, gender, race and so on, which even if it’s often being put into the mouths of characters we’re not intended to like, still feels like lowest common denominator stuff. Almost certainly, the script read-through felt much funnier.

So Evil Thread is busy, but busy with notional things. The film also veers into (more than one) voiceover at certain points, with the demonic garment given its own voice (and credit) – of course it sounds like every demon ever sounds, with that sort of distorted, gruff thing going on, though either of the voiceovers are only used at certain points and so get a little lost in the melange of everything else. All of the characters are too old for the roles they’re playing – again, if part of a gag, it’s a weak gag – and to top it off, the dialogue often gets drowned out by the overbearing soundtrack or mic issues, which mean that the speech sometimes becomes muffled. To put it briefly, it feels very much that the team making this film has done so to have a good time amongst themselves and for themselves, which is fine – to a point, but put it in front of an audience, and that all changes. Getting any feature film completed in this day and age – sure, it’s tough. But this would have been a hell of a lot better as a fake trailer, or a short film at most. Indie or otherwise, this is jarringly amateurish stuff, and trying to make that amateurishness part of the appeal seems very risky.

But let’s look at some of the positives! It is nice to see Newcastle on screen, as it’s a great city, even if only a few of the actors or the fairly numerous extras sound local. It also seems highly likely that the director and his team decided very early to prioritise practical SFX, which yield several crowd-pleasing moments, and get fairly grisly in places – that is a plus, for sure, and lots of viewers will forgive a great deal to enjoy the splatter. I hope Evil Thread finds its tribe, I really do, and if it’s to do that anywhere, then it’ll be at a horror film festival, but unfortunately, this did nothing for me.

Evil Thread (2026) received its world premiere at the Dead Northern Film Festival.

Dead Northern 2026: Free Buffet

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

A camera whirls through an unkempt indoor food market in Madrid; it’s soon equally swirling with racist stereotypes about the Chinese vendors working here which – at least briefly, in the world of Buffet Libre (2025) – turn out to be true. The Chinese, represented here by wife Xian (Yan Huang) really are catching and killing street pigeons – but times are hard. Xian, and Japanese husband Ikki (Carlos Wu) are illegally living at their restaurant, their accommodation is cramped and squalid, their hygiene is questionable and, probably as a consequence, their customers are few. Ikki is more interested in young waitress Bo (Jiaying Li) anyway, and the younger woman isn’t even pretending not to openly fleece the daft old goat out of presents and money he doesn’t have, but at least someone’s being upfront here.

The couple is in serious debt to the smarmy market owner and his henchman, and things get quickly worse when their sole customer on a given day falls ill after eating some sushi (if you ever wondered what would happen to you if you accidentally ended up with the window display food). So, what to do? Ikki is all strained passivity; Xian is all misguided activity (well they do say opposites attract) – but as they struggle to run their restaurant whilst being continually waylaid by creditors, customers and rivals, the solutions open to them become ever more desperate and murderous. The sushi-eater doesn’t recover. A plan is formed.

It feels like – and it is – an established horror trope by now: when the going gets tough in the food business, start eating people – and reap the whirlwind. Thing is, that really isn’t how it happens in Buffet Libre. It’s a story with an element of nasty fantasy rumbling away, but often largely in the background, once it’s established; the film is far more about desperation and poverty – things rendered inescapable, in Xian’s case, by her love for her husband. The film is perhaps surprisingly low on blood and gore, and stands out all the more for that; there are just a few brief scenes and frames which show anything remotely grisly, and the film leaves far more to the imagination than it shows to us, because it turns out that the flesh and blood ain’t the point. We soon shift our gaze to the human relationships at the core of the narrative, and with a few shock moments of exception, we stay there.

This is nicely, even sensitively done, given the premise, this rare blend of human drama and grim, unspeakable slivers of reality (it reminds me somewhat of a Thai film called Meat Grinder (2009), which had a similar feeling and similarly unusual balance). Other aspects of the film occasionally come to the surface, each often very surprising in their own way. The racist stereotypes which get almost casually dropped in at the start feel surprising (it’d be very unlikely to see or hear such things in many films, unless the racists were being straightforwardly set up as villains). Here, it’s just woven into the narrative, though more engaging perhaps are the attitudes of a Japanese husband towards his Chinese wife and to an extent vice versa, each of whom bring their own baggage to proceedings, each stereotyping the other. The equally casual premise of endemic corruption in Spanish society, albeit amplified by the aforementioned racist tropes, can also feel surprising. But perhaps most plausibly, and most carefully done, is the presentation of a marriage where people have just settled into a familiar, terse apathy. It’s tested in unorthodox ways here, but the malingering pipe dreams of a man out of his depth, who keeps blethering about getting rich through ‘crypto’, using today’s shorthand for ‘not going to happen mate’, tells us all. Xian is by far the film’s best-rounded, closest-studied and most sympathetic character, a woman who seems to strangely bloom under tremendous pressure. All of the lead roles are well acted here, but Yan Huang really is exceptional, and kinda hard not to love, whatever else goes on…

Buffet Libre is a good-looking film, too, usually looking appropriately and despicably grimy; even when the going gets briefly good, behind the scenes is the same squalor. The film’s use of fantasy and dream sequences feel genuinely well-integrated here, too, working successfully within the film as a whole and bringing some ingenious plot touches along with them. If Buffet Libre has one sin, it’s that it loses some of its grand forward momentum just after the hour mark; it could have easily been fifteen minutes shorter and really lost nothing. But this is overall a bold and well-devised film, spinning off from the expected in a range of engaging, inspired ways. There’s even a Macarena Gómez cameo, which always makes the heart sing.

Free Buffet (2025) featured at this year’s Dead Northern Film Festival in York, UK.

Spirit of Independence 2026: Wake In Fright

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Feeling trapped in his job as a teacher in the small outback community of Tiboonda, John Grant (Gary Bond) is glad to get to the end of term, so that he can travel to Sydney to spend the festive period with his girlfriend. In order to catch a flight onwards, he must first take the train to a mining town called Bundanyabba, where he intends to stay overnight. However, John is caught up in the boozy, blokey social scene of the place and sees a chance to pay off his employment bond by means of a straightforward – not to mention illegal – gambling game called two-up, thus freeing him from his obligations as an educator. However, his initial luck deserts him and he’s left without any money in The Yabba, stuck in the middle of nowhere with no means of travelling further and at the mercy of its aggressively hospitable townsfolk…

Opening with a stunning three hundred and sixty degree tracking shot of a scorched, vast expanse of pretty much nothing other than a railway track and a schoolhouse, Wake In Fright (1971) introduces the perfect, desolate setting to be alone with one’s intrusive thoughts. Those thoughts have certainly been plaguing John, who’s counting down the minutes just as much as his pupils. He can’t get out of his work environment quickly enough, stopping only to down a beer with John Meillon a decade and a half away from Crocodile Dundee, before he’s headed to what he identifies with as civilisation, only for his plans to be upended in an unfamiliar landscape full of, to his eyes at least, unconstructed fellas who, despite John’s more cultured background, take him under his wing because he’s a “good bloke”.

Coming under some criticism for having Ted Kotcheff – A Canadian! Strewth! – direct a movie about a typically Aussie backwater, it’s that sense of detachment and curiosity which pinpoints all of rural Australia’s quirks. Having been to some of the less populated parts of that country a couple of decades ago, it’s exactly what you’d find as a stranger in a strange land. The people there are all too willing to buy you a beer and expect nothing in return but the unrelenting, almost sinister friendliness could seem suffocating to some. Coupled with the terrifying isolation of being in a place that’s surrounded by nothing for miles and miles, you’d be a better person than me to never have that nagging thought that, given a twist of fate, you might be there forever.

One of the taglines for Wake In Fright was “Have a drink, mate” and there are very few frames of this which do not feature the amber nectar being quaffed. In places such as Bundanyabba, that’s what you do. You drink. If someone offers to get you a drink, you accept it graciously and don’t even think of ducking out after just one beer. You are in for the duration and John’s initially sneering view of The Yabba’s populace is undone by middle class etiquette, his politeness initially forcing him to down several ales in rapid succession and from then on he’s on a rapid, uncontrolled voyage down a slippery slope.

Kotcheff’s view of Outback purgatory is superbly realised, as various folks from The Yabba try to help John get back on his feet financially and invite him to participate in their social activities. John’s journey from bookworm to brute reaches its zenith as he participates in a kangaroo hunt which culminates in a physical altercation with one of the beasts. It’s this extended sequence which finds Wake In Fright at its most confrontational and controversial, featuring actual footage of ‘roos being shot.

Apparently, Kotcheff cut this footage down to almost nothing, because most of what he captured was too horrific to be screened. Even though the violence is glimpsed here only briefly, the sheer barbarism is overwhelming and the amplified sound of gunfire on the soundtrack only serves to make those few minutes even more difficult to watch. Interestingly, both the Australian and the UK censors chose to leave this stretch of the proceedings intact as they felt it would highlight the cruelty on display and act as a potential rallying call for preservation of the country’s wildlife.

Although Wake In Fright defies instant categorisation, straddling the boundaries between drama, thriller and psychodrama, I would not hesitate in adding it to the horror genre, although the horror on display comes from the uncompromising way in which it shines a light on human behaviour and how our individual moral code will come into play when judging that behaviour. For those viewers unfamiliar with the booze-fuelled machismo of the Ocker, this world will feel alien and unchecked and yet, as the story progresses, the men of The Yabba are shown to have their own code, no matter how warped it may seem. They’re unfailingly helpful to John, even though that assistance mostly consists of supplying him with more than enough alcohol to drink himself into a stupor. Even the most educated of residents, Doc Crawford (Donald Pleasance), reveals himself to be a drunk who wouldn’t be able to practice in the big cities.

Pleasance is, as you’d expect, terrific here, delivering a performance which, like his character, lurks in the background and then explodes with unpredictability, sometimes humorous, sometimes menacing. Crawford lives in squalor, goes along with the aforementioned slaughter of kangaroos and revels in the near lawlessness of his surroundings. He sees something of a kindred spirit in the well-read John, but that pans out in an inevitably dark way and serves as the catalyst for our main protagonist’s ultimate, desperate attempt to cut himself loose.

After something of a bumpy ride on its initial release, well regarded by European and American critics but largely ignored by audiences, Wake In Fright’s cause wasn’t helped by a complicated relationship with the country it portrayed and many Australians may have thought it downright insulting. Jack Thompson, who plays Dick, attended an early showing of the movie in Australia and when a man shouted, “That’s not us!” at the screen, Thompson responded with “Sit down, mate, it is us.” That’s a measure of just how uncomfortable Kotcheff’s vision is, forcing the Aussie male – a beacon of masculinity at that time – to confront themselves.

Unsettling like few other movies out there, Wake In Fright is deserving of its reputation as one of the best Australian movies ever made. Perfectly paced, surreal and intelligent, it’s hardly a cheery experience but, like John, you’ll be swept up by The Yabba, its suffocating air of masculinity and its roster of grimly fascinating inhabitants. In the lead, Gary Bond may feel like he’s constantly about to fade into the background, but that’s also the point as the mining town looks to consume another innocent. It all ends with an enigmatic final line as we come full circle – both in terms of plotting and a return to that visual sweep – and that’s when you’ll start thinking about this towering achievement in cinema.

Wake in Fright (1971) screened as part of this year’s Spirit of Independence Festival in Sheffield, UK.