2073, despite initial appearances, is not a narrative film. It certainly enjoys playing up to that appearance, though, with its big, dystopian-style movie poster, its big star (Samantha Morton) and its opening scenes, which tease that it is set in 2073 – 37 years after ‘the event’. Don’t be fooled, however. There’s no key ‘event’ revealed, because that would require the kind of clarity and vision bereft this film. A few, thin minutes of this future-set storytelling aside, we’re thrust into an agitated, unfocused documentary about how current world events – pretty much all of them, it feels like – will one day lead us to such a future. It’s a hectoring, unworthy mess without nuance, clarity or focus.
Anyway, let’s gloss over the narrative frame in much the same way that director and writer Asif Kapadia does – which is strange, all told, as when on his game, he’s amazing. He can tell a story; his short film Laika is one of the best I’ve seen in years. Here, however, we meet Morton’s character, living in a sepia-tinged hellscape (actually what’s left of a shopping mall). She’s mute, but this just means she has opportunity, via a voiceover, to speak to us in platitudes. Trips outside are rare – we are shown people in a vast CCTV hub monitoring people for discussing ‘democracy’. Hmm. A little clunky, that. As for Morton’s character, she ekes out an existence by dumpster-diving, which is actually very encouraging: even in a dystopian hellscape, even in a place where we are told there are strict curfews and street militias, people are still putting things in bins. The people of the mall trade in what they can find in said bins, though what they can possibly find to actually do with things like analogue telephones is a puzzler. We’re also briefly told that one of the mall people is ‘AI’, which seems unrelated to anything whatsoever, as he – like most of the extras – is not written as a character, just someone whose eyes briefly glow red.
So far, so predictable. But I would sooner face an eternity traipsing around in the obligatory dust with Morton and her mates in this lackadaisical dystopia than what follows: now, via the simple line, “How did we get here?” we’re apparently about to be told. Well, we’re about to be told a great deal, but you won’t come away with a satisfying answer to the question. The film morphs into a fast-rolling montage of recent world events, with real journalists’ names flashing up on screen as they each take a turn at explaining why everything is wrong and bad. Some of the conflations here are absolutely dizzying. Whilst people in the UK and Europe may well still be angry over the outcome of the Brexit vote, perishingly few of those people would lump it in with Rodrigo Duterte’s desire to execute three million of his own people, but here in the film, they’re handled in the same breath. Remarkable.
Of course, the lion’s share of footage shown belongs to right-wing protests, and not to make light of these whatsoever, but it’s a tried-and-tested, even dangerously partial picture. The point has been made elsewhere that this kind of blinkered approach can be harmful in its own right, but why attempt to bring reason to this bonkers, simplistic collage? Just at the point that fatigue kicks in, we’re whizzed back into the future and back into the narrative bit, which by now is positioned as the likely outcome of the many, varied issues which will be placed before us before the credits roll.
So we’ve had Brexit; we also get through facial recognition software, the impact of the War on Terror, Mark Zuckerberg and his techbros, algorithms, Hindu atrocities against Muslims, social media, climate change, Palestine, health data ownership…these bad things will lead to people sleeping in malls, maybe, or definitely, it’s not clear. The date on-screen flings to and fro from 2073 to other, past-tense dates, hopping from past to future to past, flashing up an incessant array of dates, places, names, events, voices, maps. There is no debate. There are only monologues from people Kapadia rather likes. Even when sharing many of the concerns being aired, you will still feel demeaned by this scattergun, querulous ordeal. Add to all of this moments which, breaking through the rickety tension, will have you hollering with laughter (the Malcolm X autobiography in the bin; lines like “The news disappeared – just like grandma”) and it’s fair to say that 2073 has rather missed its mark.
There’s a lot to get angry about in this world, and well-pitched documentaries are a phenomenal tool in expressing this righteous anger; this ain’t it. Perhaps 2073 was just too big a project for Kapadia, or certainly the wrong project, given this is someone whose best-received work has tended to be on individual public figures, rather than the end of the world as we know it. Here, with only the haziest ‘it might not be too late’ sentiment to counter all the footage from the past which otherwise suggests that it is, in fact, too late, the end result only provides a dash of confusion to add to the frustration. This is thin gruel, too random to be a polemic, and too piecemeal to really feel like a successful piece of film, let alone a serviceable dystopia. This is a warning, indeed.
Starting with a lone, bloodied man tormented enough to start pulling his own fingernails out, Itch! (2024) could go in a number of ways, albeit none of them very pleasant. It seems as though the film – with its stark opening titles and heavy cinematic grain – is calling on the nastiest, grisliest of its predecessors. Actually, that turns out to only be true up to a point: this is no simple gore fest, there are no hordes of extras, no gallons upon gallons of blood. Instead, this is a surprisingly intimate horror story which relies as much on inference and clue as it does on overt violence. It’s an interesting, and successful approach.
Back to the man with the fingernail issue – this is Jay (played by director and writer Bari Kang) and even prior to his lowest ebb, life has not been kind to him lately. Bereaved of his wife, lately he divides his time between worrying about his mute, traumatised daughter Olivia and worrying about their evidently rough financial situation. The little girl is having a bad time in school too, it seems, because children’s worst impulses can rival anything the horror genre can come up with. Jay works for his father at the family business in a down-at-heel part of New York, and as much as he values his father’s help and support, he is clearly deeply damaged by life’s recent turns, too. Kang plays Jay very much as a man for whom news of a strange ‘scabies outbreak’ in the city is just another damn weight on his shoulders, and it works well that way. But the issue finds him much more forcefully when a crazed, skin-shredding woman walks into his store; the authorities are called, and they confirm to Jay that this is happening all over town. Something serious is clearly happening, albeit obscured by rumours and hearsay; people have moved straight to wondering who’s responsible instead of pausing to panic over what is actually happening. By the time Jay has been out to collect Olivia from school, things have taken a further turn. Not only is there some strange infection spreading, but the store is being threatened with robbery too; a mismatched group of people soon end up forced to hunker down and wait out whatever hell is breaking loose outside.
No film is faultless and there are a few odd, or less plausible pauses during the more high-action sequences, including around the time it takes to get infected/to reanimate, but that’s often been a bit of a puzzler for films of this kind (and hopefully, given the film’s poster, it’s no great spoiler to discuss these particular plot points). But it’s a minor quibble about a film that is, in most respects, very good indeed. Assuming that some of its elements are intended as homage, it manages a decent balance of homage and creativity, particularly in how it opts for a more psychological approach overall. With a small cast and a small location, the film feels nicely oppressive with the convenience store in a city street operating as a kind of echo of the infamous mall out in suburbia – technically it’s a good place to get trapped in terms of material needs, but you’re trapped nonetheless, and this puts all sorts of pressure on already fraught, frightened people. Likewise, people begin to rely more and more on the modern equivalent of the radio, only now refracted through a mobile phone and topped up with other, newer tech, like CCTV – used sparingly but effectively here, and of course a store in a rough neighborhood would have a camera trained on its front shutters.
Itch! has a less-is-more approach, which works sensibly with its small budget, but also allows the more gruesome moments to really land – because they’re never so frequent that they turn things into a simple us vs. them affair, another ordeal to survive. As such, every encounter with people suffering from ‘the itch’ has extra weight in the narrative, and the fallout from this is well acted by all of the cast. Something else of note here: the sound design is absolutely key in generating the sort of unease which runs throughout the film, giving an impression of all sorts of horrors and other stories unfolding largely unseen outside. It all adds to the paranoia, as does the sense of rising heat and humidity which might make your skin a little itchy at the best of times. You start to watch the characters rather hawkishly…
Itch! offers a sickly, slow burn approach to its subject matter, along the way offering a glimpse of an America which is clearly troubled, but never treated simplistically. Sure, there’s some gorier payoff in here, but really where the film excels is in how its humanity eventually leads to an unbearable and poignant conclusion. It’s a discomfiting, artfully depressing watch with much to recommend it.
Itch! (2024) received its world premiere on Saturday, 7th December 2024.
The horrors of Hollywood keep on giving: last year, this year, no doubt next year, and so on. Skincare (2024) is another film which bases its storyline in the beauty industry, and all in all, it’s an engaging horror-adjacent tale, even if on some levels it struggles to settle on a genre.
We start at almost-the-end, as many films do, taking a gamble on how successfully they can fill in the intervening plot points. A woman, Hope Goldman (Elizabeth Banks) is adjusting her make-up at a mirror as the sound of sirens wails outside; we get the distinct impression they might be there for her. Scoot back two weeks, and we meet her again, about to be interviewed on TV about her brand new beauty range. Hope Goldman Skincare is clearly a labour of love for its founder, after a long and ostensibly successful career as a beautician (she still can’t, or won’t pay her rent). But it’s time to take the next step, and things are looking good – that is, until a competitor opens shop directly opposite Hope’s salon.
Hope goes to investigate Shimmer, which belongs to a man called Angel (Luis Gerardo Méndez), but it’s a passive aggressive introduction which leads to Hope taking back the gift she initially hands over to her new neighbour. She’s rattled, and this could not have come at a worse time for her. The more we get to know about Hope, the more we see that she’s a rather mercenary woman, even if we can forgive her this in such a highly competitive business and location, one which would readily chew her up and spit her out given an opportunity. So when someone starts to try to intimidate Hope with a campaign of brand-wrecking online abuse, it’s genuinely alarming and infuriating, especially as it’s so unimaginatively all about her gender. Of course whoever-it-is is going after her by trying to paint her as a horny, frustrated woman, but doing this by creating false dating profiles for her, deepfaking her and setting her up for some frightening encounters. The obvious suspect is Angel; the timing is just so sketchy. However, honestly, lots of the people around her seem just as sketchy, and surprisingly keen to reveal new, appalling layers to their characters when she comes to them for help. Everything is transactional here.
Hope is tough and wants to fight for her brand and her good name – but she’s still open to help, looking to those around her to fight her corner. As, by this point, you will find yourself doubting everyone in her orbit, this makes the film an often uncomfortable watch, one which has paranoia written right through it. Banks is great throughout, moving from a hard-won sense of superiority to increasingly, and understandably, unhinged behaviour. Her competitive streak wants to blame Angel; there are other potential aggressors, and we see it before she does. Men are getting an intensely bad rap in cinema of late and this film is, on the whole, no different, although its men are not just simplistic monsters (even if some have pretty monstrous traits). Interestingly, the nicer and more reasonable the guy, the worse his treatment. This is, at its core, a rather dark and nasty film, albeit one which feels it can step away from its summative nastiness for a few moments of light relief. There is a dark sense of humour at play here, which not only feels like a big contrast from such a colourful film, but can also jar slightly, given some of the developments we witness. Some of the laughs are uncomfortable. However, there’s no languishing in either the horror or the comedy long enough to really begin to flounder, as the film knows well enough to march things on at a decent and suitable pace, centring Hope, but introducing a solid array of both likeable and unlikeable characters.
Skincare always feels strangely horror-adjacent, which is odd, as there’s no fantasy or supernatural elements here: perhaps part of this is because Banks last collaborated with co-star Nathan Fillion on Slither in 2006, which is much more clearly a horror movie, or perhaps it’s the unflinching close-ups, the glistening red face masks, or the 80s-neo colours. Or – much more likely – it’s because The Substance is casting such a long shadow this year, so that Skincare‘s own use of candy colours, macros and dark-edged femininity feel very familiar, especially given the focus on beauty and celebrity – in the same city, no less. Hope Goldman and Elisabeth Sparkle could be neighbours, and could each do without calling the number on business cards they find in their possession. But Skincare decides against fantasy to instead play out a much nastier, more realistic story of sexual threat and conspiracy.
Given its vivid, almost breezy forward motion at times, its more traumatic content raises some questions. Is this an ordeal? Or a satire on LA life? The net result is a sickly, disconcerting feeling, from a film which does a lot and attempts a lot before we get there, and it may feel too strained for some audiences. It’s brutal. However, for me, it ultimately does what it sets out to do with its backdrop of a weird, aspirational, cutthroat world and a great array of committed performances. There’s more than enough there to like.
The Fix (2024) starts with an advert: there’s apparently a product available which will enable people to ‘breathe the air again’. Uh-oh; so it sounds as though director Kelsey Egan’s interest in environmental sci-fi and horror is still intact, if being given a different level of reach here than in previous films, such as Glasshouse. This air remedy is being marketed by a vast global corporation (there’s always a vast, global corporation) called Aethera, and they can be assured of a market because – in the version of the planet imagined here – 86% of people now live in a ‘red zone’ where the air quality is at its worst, since being polluted by an array of toxins which make people very sick. But it comes at a price. If anyone ever saw the phenomenal short film The 3rd Letter, then the initial world-building here’s very similar, save for the fact that when Grzegorz Jonkajtys made his film, Covid and compulsory mask-wearing was a distant dream. In the world according to The Fix, mask-wearing, filters and prospective cures are the only way to go, if you can’t afford Aethera’s wares.
The girl who was selected for the advert is called Ella, and whilst she enjoys some privileges as a fairly moneyed, sheltered young woman, she’s not totally immune from day to day concerns. Not only is her social circle very limited, but her boyfriend and her best friend are more interested in each other than in her, and what’s more – they have got themselves into a dangerous situation, taking an interest in an underground drugs industry which just might have a panacea for the world’s predicament. Posing as a buyer, boyfriend Troy pockets an experimental serum and makes away with it. This is all evidence that the general population is getting tired of Aethera’s monopoly on wellness, seeking to take matters into their own hands. But as with any untrialled medicine, there are risks, so when an embittered Ella decides to glug down the entire stolen phial when she takes it from her two-timing boyfriend after a confrontation, she unwittingly becomes the test subject. This immediately seems to propel her to keep shedding her clothes, but that’s by the by.
Ella begins to undergo mutations – superhero-style mutations, mutations which strangely don’t do too much to make her look unappealing (an ear falls off, though thankfully under her hairline) but give her a fairly broad spread of new abilities: she develops super strength, can climb up walls and can spit venom (!) Perhaps most pertinently to the planet’s main problem, she also seems able to breathe the air without being reduced to a snivelling, bleeding husk like her fellow citizens, so there’s that. Hey, perhaps this new drug could equip humanity with what it needs to survive – and much more? This possibility is of course anathema to Aethera, who have little truck with the mutations per se, but more of an issue with anyone who might break their monopoly by choosing to distribute the drug for free. Suddenly, everyone wants a piece of Ella.
This isn’t a dreadful idea by any means, but The Fix struggles on several fronts. The first is the big muddle of deja-vu you experience as you watch: it feels simultaneously so similar to a raft of existing titles, but probably works less successfully than most of those, for reasons which we’ll return to. There’s Rabid(either version);MadS; The Titan; New Life; Bite; any film where a key character undergoes isolating, traumatic and barely-understood bodily changes, be these viral or structural, would fit the bill. Being derivative isn’t necessarily the end of a new film, but feeling like a scant retelling of elements which are more consistently fleshed-out in pre-existing films…kinda is.
There are a lot of issues here, but in the main this comes down to Egan’s poorer handling of bigger-picture world-building, with a larger cast, the need for different levels of exposition and issues around the scientific and technological plot points all showing the strain. In the first few minutes of the film alone, it is so crammed with exposition that it tumbles out too quickly; because so much is discussed so fast, it feels like the bigger ideas here are only ever given lip service. Once briefly addressed, these things fall by the wayside. It feels as though it wants to dispense with the clearly limited cast of Glasshouse, but does this by sending out an array of minor characters who are never established enough to matter. Or, in an attempt to give them deeper profundity/to try once again to explore those big concerns, they are given reams of dialogue which feels unconvincing. Sad to say, Aethera head honcho Eric O’Connors (Daniel Sharman) suffers the most at the hands of the script, being positioned as the mouthpiece for, essentially, a nightmare version of Big Pharma, which means parroting sinister opinions and lofty concerns about the planet’s state of play. It’s inconsistent; The Fix has underwritten characters and overwritten ones, issues with pace which sees the film go from full throttle to torpor, and then – it doesn’t know what to do, really, except to follow an increasingly fairy-like Ella around, to see what’s going to happen.
What happens is that the film is clearly gunning for a sequel, even a franchise, which seems, on balance, unlikely. I keep coming back to Glasshouse, as that played more to Egan’s strengths as a director and writer, with its defiantly slow-burn approach, a small cast to get to know, and a drip-drip-drip approach to tension. Microcosm, not macrocosm, seems to be where it’s at for her. But for all that, it’s hard not to warm to Egan’s commitment to her key theme of interest, and that includes the different approaches she’s taken so far, even where some of these are more successful than others. The Fix may be an unlikely candidate for an environmental superhero franchise, all things considered, but Egan is still an interesting and engaging director whose greatest film is probably still ahead of her.
When we think about vampires, our expectations have inevitably been shaped by popular literature, which has in turn – for the last century – also found expression in cinema. In the nineteenth century, popular reading habits created a set of cultural expectations about vampires. The birth of horror fiction, which stemmed in turn from the Gothic novels of the preceding century, came to reflect a taste for a certain, new kind of monster. The likes of Varney the Vampire (~1847), Carmilla (1872) and of course, Dracula (1897) were very popular. These stories often present vampires as effete aristocrats, occupying the highest ranks of society, and using their means and status to literally, maybe eternally, get away with murder. These archetypes also started to appear in film at the turn of the twentieth century, where they have bounced along ever since, often – if not always – displaying similar, recognisable traits.
Given that there is a wholly different branch of tale telling and folklore in Europe which relates to vampirism, the association of ‘vampire’ with ‘nobility’ is quite a rehabilitation. It says a lot, particularly about Western readers in the 1800s, that they were so happy to affiliate class, wealth and power with literal blood-draining, as the titled antagonists of these popular penny dreadfuls and railway novels survive death only to perpetuate the exploitation of the living from beyond the grave. However, this is only a partial picture of the bloodsucker. Other authors working from Eastern European, Greek or Slavic traditions were telling very different stories about what we would class as vampires, although these tales, too, had a nineteenth century print heyday – albeit taking influence from a far older set of oral traditions.
It was A. K. Tolstoy and Alexander Pushkin, two popular Russian authors, who first helped to popularise the idea of the ‘Vourdalak’. Pushkin printed a collection of poetry titled Songs of the Western Slavs in 1835: it contained a poem about a vourdalak. Tolstoy’s novella, The Family of the Vourdalak, was published shortly afterwards in 1839. The folklore behind these was however much older, with folk beliefs about these particular kinds of revenants – often blended together with other ideas of witchcraft and lycanthropy – stemming back centuries.
Vourdalak myths have little in common with our newer notions of suave, moneyed vampires. Instead, vourdalaks are complex symbols of death anxieties, as often felt by the poorest and most powerless. Beliefs about vourdalaks have also been shaped by a host of religious and social ideas, often representing some fearful kind of breakdown in social order. It is in times of struggle that these kinds of myths manifest themselves the most keenly, particularly where disease, famine and war disrupt an ordered response to death, prompting panic and grief. Mass burials, unexpected numbers of deaths and burials on unconsecrated ground all link to ideas about a ‘good death’ and a ‘bad death’, and what could happen when a good death is impossible. To die unconfessed, in Christian tradition, is historically seen as a risk to one’s mortal soul; to be tipped into the ground, any old ground, beyond the good graces of God is a calamity normally reserved only for outlaws and outcasts. What happens to someone if this fate befalls them? This fear has given rise to tales and traditions of vampires and ghouls, condemned to wander, coming back to afflict the living.
Vourdalak myths also reflect a fascinated misunderstanding of the natural decomposition process, which often equates the appearance of things like ‘growing’ nails and teeth, the secretion of bodily fluids from the mouth and the ruddy appearance caused by bloating and lividity as evidence of a recent blood – or flesh – meal. In short, naturally occurring phenomena are recast as supernatural, then given as evidence that the dead are leaving their graves, menacing the living. Extreme circumstances demand extreme solutions: the only efficient way, historically, to deal with a suspected vourdalak is through corpse defilement. Archaeology has been turning up decapitated, pinioned, mutilated bodies for as many centuries as the deeds have been done.
These measures are, to most modern sensibilities, horrific: however, for those people, often from the lowest ranks of society, dealing with shock, bereavement and fear in extraordinary circumstances, it constitutes both a response to the breakdown of order and a reasonably structured means of resetting that order. The repellent idea of a loved one returning from a bad death to spread more harm was enough to drive these practices even into the twentieth century, such as in Greece during the Great Famine of the 1940s – when families took age-old, grisly steps to prevent their unfortunate loved ones from ever returning as vourdalaks, or in Greek, vorvolakas (1).
This brings us to The Vourdalak (2023), a horror film based on the Tolstoy story mentioned above. However, the screenplay – co-written by Hadrien Bouvier and director Adrien Beau – expands on the source text, both reinforcing its singular horrors and granting them a broader, more pessimistic remit. In the film, based during the eighteenth century, an emissary of the French court, Marquis d’Urfé, finds himself stranded deep in Eastern Europe after being robbed, losing his horse. He is taken in by the family of a local man called Gorcha, but the patriarch himself is absent – gone to pursue the pillaging Turks who recently raided the village. Gorcha has however left his family strict instructions: should he return after six days, not to receive him back over the threshold. If he reappears after that time, then it will be as a vourdalak. But when the family finds the old man collapsed close to the house, weak and ailing, they can’t help themselves, although six days have – just – passed by. These dutiful relatives bring him home and try to care for him. As a result, this revenant begins to drink the blood of his family members, spreading vampirism amongst them – all whilst d’Urfé, who has fallen in love with the daughter of the family, Sdenka, tries to find them an escape.
They say that love is blind and it certainly is here. The Vourdalak has many strengths, and amongst these is the strange pleasure of seeing vampirism represented on screen in such a genuinely hideous way. Mario Bava filmed the same story as part of his 1963 film Black Sabbath, though stops short of presenting Boris Karloff in quite the same way as in the 2023 version. The Vourdalak reinvigorates the notion of the vampire as an unnatural parasite, a repellent creature which slithers out of its grave or rises after its death to inflict misery and harm. Gorcha is represented through puppetry in the film, too, which helps to entrench the uncanny impact his scenes have: gaunt, ghastly and fearsome, chewing noisily on his shroud, he’s quite the poster boy for disruption and disease. Little wonder that, alongside war, times of epidemic and plague have often prompted renewed beliefs in vampirism: they share the same ideas of symptoms and transmission. Although Gorcha more closely resembles Count Orlok from Nosferatu (1922) than he does other on-screen bloodsuckers, there’s no pan-European travel, no lording it in high castles and certainly no property acquisition. Gorcha returns to his own village, his own lowly house, and his own family: they are his chosen victims, and it is to them that he passes his infection. Even when they begin to understand that he is a vourdalak, they are afraid or unwilling to disfigure him with a stake through the heart.
Similarly, because his family is so poor, insular and isolated, they are very vulnerable. This allows the revolting creature to get close to each family member, though he starts with the weakest of them all – Vlad, his little grandson, whose ensuing symptoms are immediately described – of course – as an illness. Gorcha is a spiritual, physical, moral and most of all a domestic threat. But what of d’Urfé, an outsider, come from the genteel and modern French court – where he still hopes to return?
D’Urfé is in his own way a victim of his own cultural beliefs and practices. His chivalric impulse to court Sdenka – a young, unmarried, if ‘fallen’ woman – almost condemns him to death in the earliest part of the film, when the woman first tricks him into approaching a cliff edge as he tries to woo her. However, his romantic attraction towards her is at least partly why he remains. The trickster Gorcha certainly understands the visitor’s love for Sdenka, using it ultimately to try to bring d’Urfé into the fold by taking part in the horror cinema tradition of presenting us with a young, beautiful woman – who is in fact anything but. From the very beginning, d’Urfé must go through the uncomfortable process of unlearning some of his cultural attitudes – his rational ideals, his education, his belief in law and order – to fully understand what is happening to the family. This begins very early: when he first encounters the undead Gorcha, he must swallow his revulsion, following the lead of his hosts. Later, when he begins to realise what must be done, he has to grapple with the anger of the family. He is constantly reminded of his outsider status, right up until it is too late, and he cannot resume his old life.
But The Vourdalak does its best work in how it extends the remit of this strange story, moving it beyond the confines of one remote homestead in Eastern Europe. In effect, the usual vampire story arc goes into reverse: the film leaves us with the knowledge that here, it is the peasantry which exploits the gentry. Using what she learns from d’Urfé, Sdenka is able to travel to France, ingratiating herself with a duchess who takes pity on her, writing of her great interest in this vulnerable foreigner. To go back to the run of popular vampire stories which were being written and read in the nineteenth century, this is an interesting idea for how vampirism could first infiltrate a higher social class: rich, leisured, sheltered people would have plenty of opportunity to pass this condition on amongst themselves, once it arrived amongst them. As such, the film provides an intriguing bridging point, as well as offering us an especially gloomy, unredemptive ending. It’s also a link between the folklore and tale-telling of the East and West; to come back to Nosferatu (1922), this film was reportedly based on the experiences of producer Albin Grau, who served in Serbia during the Great War, and once met a local farmer who told him his own father had returned from the dead…
This makes The Vourdalak an engaging update of a long-established, queasy, uneasy death folklore, where revenants emerge from unhallowed ground or hastily-dug trenches to terrorize those once closest to them. It also brings us a strange clash between Western empiricism and Eastern folklore, but one where Eastern folklore breaks out and finally infiltrates an unsuspecting West. And, most of all, it is remarkable in its depiction of a blood-drinking, shroud-slurping, pallid and ungodly living corpse, a cipher for all the plagues and wars which have beset mankind through the centuries, as well as a grim reminder of the hideous aftermath as Gorcha, the vourdalak, spreads his undeath to both family and strangers.
1: Mazower, Mark (1995). Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44. Yale University Press. p. 41
Glue Trap (2023) opens in medias res, focusing on a sparring couple – Dan (Isaac Jay) and KJ (Brittany Bradford). At first, it seems like they’re in a therapy session; actually, it’s worse. They’re at a dinner party, and the host couple seems very happy, which only underlines their own issues. But some good comes of all the awkwardness – in a film, by the by, which specialises in awkwardness. One of the hosts, Jenn (Caroline Hertz) suggests that Dan and KJ could get away from it all by taking a break at her family’s holiday cabin in the Virginia woods. Presumably not having The Evil Dead or indeed, The Cabin in the Woods as an immediate cultural reference, they agree to give it a try. Next weekend, then: it’s a date.
Vacation, or intervention? It’s hard to say at this early point, but first impressions of the cabin itself are good, even if all the space and natural light aren’t an instant fix. There’s a minor problem – the cabin has mice – and there are glue traps dotted around to try to deal with them, which puts a dent in the atmosphere. What’s the best way to dispatch a trapped animal, after all? Hey, you may also spot a certain kind of symbolism here, too, given the film’s title. The audience can ponder this as they watch two people struggling with the pressure of simply being together, with none of the usual, welcome distractions. But we’re soon ready for something else, a further complicating factor.
We get one. Someone turns up at the cabin: a girl called Eliza (Gloria Bangiola), Jenn’s sister, who had no idea that the family place was in use and has plans to stay there herself. Well, Dan and KJ can’t exactly throw her out, given that the cabin belongs to her family; she stays around, turning the cabin retreat into a distinctly uncomfortable situation, acting a good part as an exuberant stranger very much taking the reins.
Can it get worse than this? Weirder than this? Oh, yes.
There’s a switch is style and tone during Glue Trap which momentarily feels rather abrupt, particularly after the sustained and very sensitive focus on Dan and KJ up to this point, but in hindsight, the shift-around is a brave decision. Nothing detracts from the excellent performances here, in a film with a very small cast which never feels reductive or tried-and-tested. Dan comes off as an earnest, but overgrown kid; KJ, whilst more dynamic than Dan, is way more hung up on their accumulating issues. And then there’s Eliza, a woman so overexcited that it could clearly spill into something more threatening at some point. There’s lots of gentle observational humour here, pithy in places, offering an often uneasy, well-realised look at a relationship in quiet crisis. The film is well-written, and never overwritten. These are all notable positives, particularly where indie film often seems to struggle with well-rounded and soundly-edited scripts.
Glue Trapcould have used something more dynamic to conclude its story, sure, and no doubt many viewers may feel the same way, but in concluding things with the same irreverent narrative approach taken throughout its runtime, the film does maintain its focus on simply being…stuck. By the time the end credits roll, you also realise that there’s lots in here about the modern inability to disconnect, or to live without all the preoccupations which come down to us via social media. The desire for things like belonging have been superseded, to a large extent, by the desire for fame. The likes of TikTok have created a generation of people who only ever see the finished product – the high point at the end of a long process, not the hard graft it takes to get anywhere worth being. Gotta get that mini dopamine hit by any means; gotta be someone worth noticing, and that desire affects the characters here in a range of ways. There are touches of horror here, some of them brutal, but the film is at its strongest when focusing on its personal stories, and it enjoys its greatest successes during the second act, where things could go in a number of different ways. Overall, this film was a pleasant surprise, a well-written and engaging first feature which does many things very well, and has deserved confidence in its selected approach. Nice work.
Glue Trap (2023) hits digital and VOD (US) on December 17th.
Recently remade for English-speaking audiences, we should remember that the original Danish Speak No Evil (2022) – one of my favourite horror films in the year it came out – was and is good enough and ground-breaking enough to even merit a second version. Directed by Christian Tafdrup, he escalates themes which have appeared in his other work – idealism, fantasy, family relations, masked identities – allowing them to reach unparalleled heights of horror in Speak No Evil by taking an ordinary, if somewhat fragile Danish family and inflicting a death by a thousand cuts. The film examines what happens when manners and socialisation prevent people from defending themselves, much less absenting themselves from escalating, tense situations.
With the 2024 remake recently thrilling and chilling in UK cinemas, Acorn Media International is pleased to announce that the release of the original is set for its Blu-ray, DVD and digital release on 2 December. And, Warped Perspective has a copy of the Blu-ray to give away, so if you want to be in with a chance, simply email the site with an email titled ‘Speak No Evil’. Your data will be stored until the competition is drawn on November 29th at 5:30PM GMT (UK readers only, sorry) and the lucky winner will be emailed shortly after the competition closes.
And in the meantime, if you ever fall in with a gregarious couple abroad, give them a false number.
Just One Drink may have been made in 2015, but it feels like a film from 2005, not least because its star – Barbara Nedeljakova – is the star of one of the biggest horrors of 2005, namely Hostel. She’s back to her old tricks in filmmaker Andrew de Burgh’s debut short film, which is – depending on your perspective – either a boon, or a shame. If you liked life in 2005 a hell of a lot, then this short film is a love letter to the more ordeal-orientated horror which was breaking out all over the place at that time. If you want more of a nuanced conclusion, or if you feel that the whole ‘tied to things’ motif has had its day, and had probably had its day a decade ago, then this may well affect how feel about this one. In any case, feel free to check it out: it’s available to view on YouTube.
The premise is that a pair of affable stoners called Eric and Steve like to while away the hours discussing strains of cannabis and pondering the evolution of mankind. Steve, however, gets a message from a mysterious and beautiful woman (Nedeljakova) who invites him to a New Year’s Party round at hers. He shares this news with his pal, and they both decide to head over there on the big night because, despite the fact that Steve has no idea who this woman actually is, she’s hot, and that makes the whole idea worth a punt.
When they get there, they’re all alone and, having parked their common sense at the door, they glug down a glass of alcohol each which is spiked with something that causes them to instantaneously lose consciousness. Upon waking – strapped to what looks like a surgical trolley and a chair apiece – it looks like Nedeljakova has plans to dispatch them both in a series of unpleasant ways. Bit of a pity for Eric, who is, sadly, mainly collateral damage; it’s Steve Tamara knows, and Steve she wants to get. But why?
The exposition given is a bit of a big ask as (look away now) it seems that our mild-mannered stoner Steve has been a bit of a brute in the past. His reasons (and look away now if you want to see for yourselves) are that the man in question – the man which links both of our main characters – was a collaborator with Stalin, which – even if we accept that we’re going back ten years at the time of writing – is a bit of a puzzler for the timeline, and the film itself can’t possibly be set any further back, surely – the use of tech points to an early 21st Century timeframe. But the film does at least try for an abrupt volte face and tries to reframe its lead character in an interesting way, and its notion of tit for tat has some potential, even if the pieces in play are a little surprising. There are no especially complex layers here, which is to be expected in a film with a very modest seventeen minute runtime, so it just does what it does, but it’s clear to see the beginnings of a more ambitious writing approach. Really, Just One Drink is an experiment and a calling card, as so many short films are, so see for yourself what you think and, hopefully, appreciate the effort made to recast a lead character in a more ambiguous light.
That’s that, then. That’s religion. It had a good run. Except, of course, if you happen to be religious, and will brush away any such declarations with the power of your faith.
In a nutshell, that’s the premise behind, and the dispute within Heretic (2024) – a film which comes off as a kind of theological Barbarian (2022), which is appropriate, because ‘barbarian’ has long been a handy epithet for a person outside the fold of Christian faith. Its horror derives from its antagonist’s determination to test that faith, recategorising religiosity as just another element of culture – probably derivative and ultimately, even trite. The two girls selected for this test are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints – Mormons, to give them their usual moniker, named Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East, who funnily enough looks a bit like Sara Paxton). They never refer to one another by their first names; their bond is their sense of belonging to the Church, and their hope that today’s the day they will convert someone, baptising them into the Church and fulfilling their religious duty to evangelise. They have been raised to believe all of this, so in their defence, this is very important to them. But, based on listening to the girls’ early conversation, you get the distinct sense that they are each far from worldly – particularly Sister Paxton, whose naivety is probably written through and through her, like a stick of Brighton rock. Sister Barnes is perhaps a little more cynical, but it’s a low bar overall.
Their day’s work takes them to a pre-arranged meeting with a layman called Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant). Again, no first names, but this is a planned visit, rather than a surprise call. Mr. Reed has expressed an interest in hearing more about their religion, and they didn’t wait to be asked twice: they arrive, full of hope, carrying a Book of Mormon apiece, and ready to proselytise. Their subject is an affable-seeming gentleman of middle years, a little flustered maybe (it’s Hugh Grant after all) but agreeable; he invites them in, allaying their fears about propriety and safety by telling them his wife is also home. Here’s the first test: do they go in, despite not seeing any evidence of their agreed mark of safety? No woman, no go? Of course not; in they pop, literature at the ready. They start to converse with Mr. Reed, who explains to them that he has spent a sizable chunk of his life studying theology – looking for evidence of the one true faith, the alpha and omega of religious belief. Showing them a heavily-annotated and indexed Book of Mormon of his own, he explains that he has unfortunately come up against more barriers to religious experience than genuine possibilities. Now, in this, he is not particularly unusual, either within the film’s narrative or, in a broader sense, as a representative of modern man, but his conclusions – and the ways in which he decides to advance his knowledge – are a little more unorthodox.
The girls soon come to the (testable) assertion that they have been locked in a house which is part residence and part sophisticated trap. To stand any chance of getting to safety, they have to pass Mr. Reed’s theological tests – which both demand uncomfortable self-analysis and more practical problem-solving, which as mentioned above, turn out to be challenging for two very young girls fresh out of a very sheltered and absolutely certain moral space and place. It’s been impossible to avoid the discussion of Hugh Grant’s performance in this film, so far does it deviate from his usual, tousled, charming and awkward persona, but really he maintains that tousled, charming and awkward persona for the biggest share of the film. Sure, he gets more overtly cruel as the film rolls into its last act, but the real horror is in how this perfectly agreeable-seeming man is forcing a situation which threatens spiritual crisis, as much as it threatens physical harm, and he does this by raising some always-uncomfortable posers about religion – the ‘Big Three’ monotheistic belief systems in particular. Placing faith on a level with the worst aspects of consumerism – regarding them all as different species of ‘iteration’ – he tries to unpick the girls’ built-in systems of belief, promising them that he can show them the real essence of faith – if they can solve his puzzles. It would be a lot weaker if he did all of this by glowering with menace and trying for the sort of transformation you get with, say, Robin Williams in One Hour Photo (2002) – where an actor with a very distinct style does plump for a different mode altogether, but it fits that film very well. In Heretic, Hugh Grant remaining Hugh Grant does the job just fine.
The sets used here are astonishingly good, and the clever, snappy script, a script which is often as funny as it is dark, adds a new veneer to every otherwise familiar-feeling room or space. The gloomy corridors, statues with glittering eyes, lights which snap on and off on timers – as if the whole house is part of a board game – and of course the damp basement, are all recast as playing a part in an as-yet mystifying whole, where only one person holds the key, physically and metaphorically. But as the game goes on, the girls grow in confidence to try and reinterpret what’s in front of them. Sophie Thatcher does a great job as a young woman who clearly harbours something other than the seemingly twee received wisdom of her Church Sister; her oscillating defence of the Church’s old (and officially banned) policy of polygamy makes for a very powerful scene. However, Chloe East rises very successfully to the challenges placed before her. These are quite physical roles, too, with brief flashes of bloodshed which remain more about suggestion than splatter.
The film’s rising weirdness as the different levels of the house reveal new and appalling things (hence the Barbarian reference earlier) may take it closer and closer to fantasy, but again, its central premise is regularly and consistently steered back to the millennia of dreadful things done due to religion. It’s like a tap on the shoulder to make sure you’re still paying attention; there’s plenty weirder or worse than we’re being asked to consider, the film seems to say. And there’s no hard and fast lesson at the end either, just a solid balance of the ambiguity and the careful parcelling of details which keeps Heretic on track throughout. Sure, there are a couple of Chekhov’s Guns along the way, but always reintegrated into the narrative with skill. Heretic is a damn good job, and directors/writers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods have clearly and successfully brought their wealth of writing and production experience to the table here.
Who’d be in a rock band these days? Not only do you have to contend with the sheer impossibility of making a living whilst you balance your social media profile against diminishing Spotify returns, but you may even find yourself in a horror film. Consider the surfeit of recent cinematic evidence – some good, some bad. Which brings us to Director’s Cut (2014), a feature about shooting a music video directed by a guy – Don Capria – who has made a couple of music videos himself. Sadly, that insider knowledge doesn’t bring anything transformative or particularly successful to this project, in which an emo-ish band called The Suicide Disease has disappeared, after posting one last Instagram photo (which is a fate which will surely happen to a lot of people; one’s always gonna be the last). We backfill a little, finding out that the band is broke and in crisis after a controversial fan death both crippled their passion for the project and mired them in controversy. Money’s tight: they have to decide whether to write more material, play live again, or go make a music video with the mysterious unknown who is offering to direct it for free, via their DMs.
Jay (Tyler Ivey), who has a lot of tattoos and so is clearly the frontman, has the final say – and we already know what he’ll choose. They seal the deal with a video call with the director, or ‘Mr. Director’ to give him his full name (Louis Lombardi). Mr. Director – who looks like he’s about to offer them a side quest in GTA – explains that he has short-term access to a cool abandoned mansion, but they have to be quick if they want the shoot. The band therefore heads to rural Pennsylvania to meet him, taking a couple of girlfriends with them. The girls, by the by, seem petulant and bored, which is a great moment of verisimilitude in an otherwise unlikely set-up.
As they make their way to their destination, they pass a few possible sources of horror: there’s the rolling, deserted road; the pick-up truck which stops, menacingly; a mysterious churchyard; some potentially dangerous locals, signposted by their cut-off shirtsleeves. Then, when they get to the mansion itself – remote, but filled with state-of-the-art surveillance cameras with an off-limits basement, things could yet go in a few different directions. It could be a home invasion of sorts, or a supernatural horror. Or, it could be a kind of ordeal horror, but that would mean that Mr. Director is as straightforwardly dubious as he seems to be, alongside his assistant, Babs (porn star Lucy Hart, whose penis is, for some mystifying reason, on screen a lot of the time).
The chosen answer, when it comes, is by far the least surprising and imaginative, as well as the one which stretches the film’s limited budget the most in terms of lighting, framing and SFX. Yep, Capria has selected the ordeal horror/slasher-ish route, and as such the same plot point unfolds for each band member in an almost interminable sequence – repetitive, and an odd fit for the time we’re still spending with Jay – Jay, with his practiced emo angst, an angst so strong that it even repels a BJ, albeit one from his angry new girlfriend, Jen (Haley Cassidy), whom we’ve already seen needlessly hammering a horn. Risk is everywhere.
Until its close – though the film’s runtime is at least modest at eighty-five minutes or thereabouts – Director’s Cut struggles with forward momentum. Things look up briefly when there purports to be a twist, but it’s not substantial enough to reinvigorate proceedings, nor to add greater depth to what we’ve witnessed up until this point. This is all compounded, unfortunately, with other snags and errors. The use of caricatures and the issues with pace, however, derive chiefly from the script, which desperately needed a re-read; whenever characters start talking about social media, there’s a risk it’ll sound peculiar and unrealistic, and that is an issue here – alongside some laboured metaphors and verb choices (surely no one ‘co-signs’ things as much as we hear about here). As such, there are a lot of issues. However, the locations are great, look good on camera, and are used well. Part of the horror, too, stems from the stresses and strains of trying to make a living from music, which to some degree excuses why the band doesn’t just leave when things start to go sour: people are desperate, maybe even desperate enough for this.
Slasher or slasher-ish fans who enjoy the set pieces and are happy enough with a loose framing device may have enough fun with this one to have a good time, and I hope so – it feels like a shame that this one doesn’t work for me, and a bit of a missed opportunity, but this may not be the case for all audiences. If you love truly independent cinema enough to overlook the issues, take a look: it’s out on VOD now following its Halloween release.
As MadS (2024) opens, the camera pans back from what turns out to be an image of a woman’s agonised face; you could call it foreshadowing, or perhaps it’s just an incidental feature, an arty poster on the wall of an apartment being used for a drug deal, as a young man called Romain (Milton Riche) does more than a few lines before heading out into the cold light of day. He rapidly enters a state of Peak Bravado before hopping into his dad’s vintage Mustang and heading off to join his sometime girlfriend and their other friends for an evening soiree. The evening already has ‘interesting’ written all over it. He’s off his tits. What could go wrong?
The film’s first shock is when, as Romain pulls up to inspect the car’s leatherwork after he drops his cigarette, a young woman comes out of nowhere and approaches his vehicle. She can’t speak, but she’s clearly distressed and he, for obvious reasons, doesn’t really want the police involved. He decides he’s going to take her to the nearest hospital, but she grows ever more agitated, clearly fearful of being followed, and handily for the plot, she’s also clutching a tape recorder which relays some very concerning information about where she’s been and what’s been done to her (which goes straight over Romain’s head at first, it seems, but at least we can listen). Bereft of sane ideas, he changes tack and drives the woman back to his place and, well, if he was worried about his seat leather before, then it’s safe to say things get rapidly worse. We’re faced with a young man used to a life of ease and comfort, high on drugs, and trying to balance all of the mundane details which continue to unfold around him with a bizarre situation he would clearly rather forget.
Like the very best of the New French Extremity titles – one of which, Ils (2006), was directed by the director of MadS, David Moreau – this film makes a hell of an entrance, all whilst whisking us along with its slick production values and carefully curated sensory overload; the film is a visual and aural feat. It also aims to run as one long, unflinching take and invests a lot of time and care into this sustaining this idea, which really helps to capture something of the strangeness of the unfolding situation, and the plight of each protagonist in turn. Starting with Romain, it’s clear that he and his friends are careless people, blasé, a little antagonistic and patently unsuited to any kind of crisis. These are party people, and it turns out that partying is far from the ideal environment for what is about to happen. But off Romain goes: is his behaviour due to a bad trip, or something else? Oh, and just to add insult to injury, it’s his birthday, too.
It’s hard not to take on some of Romain’s headspace as the film unfolds, so much time do we first spend with this character, and it’s also worth saying that many films have done more than enough with the whole bad trip idea to make a decent film, without the addition of any other plot points: the bad trip here is particularly immersive. However, MadS continues to broaden in scope, in ambitious and brutal ways. LikeMartyrs(2008) – probably the last true line in the sand for New French Extremity titles – there’s the same sense of a bigger picture, an ‘intellectually curious’ organisation with a vested interest in experimentation.
But unlike Martyrs,MadS doesn’t decide to narrow its focus onto one individual and their plight, and instead scans around, picking up the same story through the experiences of others. The fact that you can pick up on a few sets of influences doesn’t mean that this film feels samey or particularly derivative, either: it feels fresh and exciting. Things tick along quickly, and the film never fully dehumanises its key characters, so that you are always left wondering how much of them is still there. Full exposition isn’t the film’s thing, but that’s because of its unerring focus on its people, who have to ask the same questions as we do. MadS is another great calling card for Shudder, a streaming service with a growing and impressive roster of original titles, and an entertaining, bold, well-made film.
