Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

28 Years Later (2025)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

I have limited preamble for this review of 28 Years Later; let’s call it shock. Like many other film fans, I really liked 28 Days Later, despite sharing in the laugh at the end of Shaun of the Dead about its key plot point, because it had enough energy, initiative and charm to carry it through. Then I saw 28 Weeks Later, and forgot most of it instantly. Well, so, it seems, did director Danny Boyle, who has reused the start point of the first film whilst pretending the second film, with its insinuations of asymptomatic carriers and infection across Europe, never existed. The resulting new film is an awkward and painfully unaware montage of some of the good bits from 28 Days Later, unconvincingly strung together with a silly, half-realised story unworthy of the excellent actors who signed up to be in it.

This review contains mild spoilers.

In 28 Years Later, the virus which obliterated the mainland UK (and Ireland too, it’s suggested here?) isn’t quite as we may remember it. Sure, it does the same job, instantly turning people into vomiting, spasmodic rage vessels, but apparently the Infected don’t starve to death in this universe. Happily for the small No Blade of Grass-style community now installed on Holy Island in Northumberland, the Infected’s instinct to eat and drink never seems to extend to them wading through the water (or popping along at low tide) to attack this possibly last real bastion of the living. On the island, we are introduced to twelve year old Spike (Alfie Williams), ahead of a big bonding day with his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). They’re off to the mainland together for the first time, for reasons which quickly turn out to be questionable; not for them, bagging one of the hundreds of wild deer now roaming freely; instead they’re there to take potshots at the remnant Infected who still wander/slither through the woods, eating very calorific worms. This obviously goes terribly wrong, not least because the geography of Britain has started to act up: Jamie points out to Spike that they’ve attracted the attention of an Alpha, an Infected male who enjoys dominance over the others (for reasons you may want to hazard a guess at). This is symbolised by the way he stands by a tree, looking menacingly at them, and that he can continue to be seen standing by the same tree, even when the man and the boy have run away and holed themselves up in a farmhouse attic somewhere else.

Other things can be seen from this magic attic window. One of those things is a fire; Jamie claims to know nothing about this fire or whose it might be, but when they finally get safely back to the island, Spike asks around, finding out from family friend Sam that this is probably one Dr Kelson, a local madman everyone avoids because of his corpse-collecting proclivities. But he’s a doctor; some of them are a bit funny, and at home, Spike’s mother Isla (a criminally underused Jodie Comer) is ill and confused, dreaming of a lost world of Nurofen and the sound of internet dial-up (the film’s use of nostalgia is always jarring). Spike, unimpressed by the spin which his father is by now putting on their daring deeds on the mainland, decides that he’s going to take his mother to see this doctor in the hopes of a cure.

In case you aren’t familiar with British geography, the fire seen by Spike and Jamie is now, incomprehensibly, a round trip of 70 miles south from Holy Island to the Sycamore Gap, and then another day’s walk east to the Angel of the North near Newcastle. Oh, I know, it’s churlish to get absorbed by such details, but why bother to get anything right if you can’t be bothered to get a central plank of the storyline in any way hammered into a plausible shape? Forget the landmarks and consider the relative distance being travelled: can we really suspend our disbelief on all counts – including time and space? The idea of a rage virus is enough of a suspension of disbelief, surely; why else did Boyle and Garland go to so much trouble in 28DL to build verisimilitude around a deserted London? It’s a lot to ask, particularly in a film which puts the Tellytubbies in twice for good measure and selects for its end sequence an homage to an infamous sex offender, because, oh I have no idea why, maybe because ‘we didn’t know then’, but we bloody know now, it’s a bafflingly bad joke and regardless, we did know where things were on a map even in the Noughties. Anyway, Isla is ill and really not up to 110 miles on foot, the Infected have morphed into a blend of the cave dwellers in The Descent and the hive from I Am Legend, and the journey is beset by incredible risk. Well, that’s what it’s like trying to see a doctor in this country.

Come to think of it, where are all these Infected coming from? Is the insinuation that there are still lots of people becoming infected after nearly three decades, or have some of these people been born into it? Is there rudimentary childrearing taking place? They’re all stark naked, by the way, save for one woman who really didn’t need the signifier of a tattered flowery dress, given her condition. This irate nudist colony are still a big enough threat to pursue mother and son through the countryside: will Spike be able to get Isla the help she needs? Can they possibly survive?

Along the way, it’s not fully clear whether the inclusion of scenes from the first film are there as Easter eggs (a particularly noxious form of fan service which often breaks up an already shattered narrative) or if they suggest a lack of confidence in the new storyline, but neither scenario really suggests much that’s good about the writing process here. Rats, crows and soldiers all pop in for a cameo, but little about any of these matters to the grand scheme of things. At least, though, there’s something palpable here, and it moves things away from the film’s early montage style sequences – braying music, fast edits, cuts to black and white footage and a Kipling recitation; things which would have looked dated even 28 years ago. The film gestures towards philosophising in places, but never quite gets there: it’s off doing something else, flinging spinal columns around or lingering lovingly on Tango ads. It even paints its doctor orange.

I think that’s actually the problem here, though: we just have a gamut of bits and pieces, not a narrative rise and resolution. It’s just a grab-bag of ideas, edited together. That’ll do them. Parts of the film very clearly marked out as being emotive are handled with due gravitas by a trio of actors more than equal to the scene, regardless of how little writing they’ve had until that point (Comer is able to carve something meaningful from her role, despite being prostrate in bed for the first hour), but hot on its heels is something so bizarre in tone that it threatens to wash away the more meaningful pause which came before it. Sure, the emotionality feels a little contrived anyway, but it’s sandwiched between great slabs of silliness, and if it’s too much to say that feels insulting, then it certainly feels magnificently wrongheaded. Two more films in this franchise to come, you say? Two more, like this?

28 Years Later (2025) is in cinemas now.

Raindance 2025: Row

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

You never really know which way it’s going to go in a survival story based at sea. What will the main issue be? – will it be the elements (The Perfect Storm)? Will it be the failings of the vessel, or human error (Open Water; Dead Calm; Adrift)? Or will there be something potentially supernatural going on (The Block Island Sound, The Isle)?

Row (2025, or 2018?) has – no spoilers intended – a hint of all of those, with an abundant runtime of around two hours and clear ambition to make the very best out of the setting and central ideas. However, it’s a strange blend of enthusiasm and a rather diffuse style of storytelling (see: two hour runtime) which can’t quite ring true, despite some skilled shooting and visuals. It looks great; there are, however, issues with both pace and plot.

The film starts with a bloodied rowing vessel; there’s a traumatised, lone woman on board waving a knife around. This feels like a film choosing to start at around three-quarters of the way through its complete narrative, which is a popular narrative choice; our task will be to unpick what brought Megan (Bella Dayne) to this point, and see what unfolds next: chiefly, is Megan guilty of murder? Footage of the time aboard the boat is interspliced with footage of Megan recovering in what turns out to be a guesthouse on a remote Scottish island, under the auspices of an interested local policeman. First, though, we go right back to before the vessel left Newfoundland, as part of a world record attempt to cross the Atlantic to Ireland. More on this anon.

There are instant issues, issues some might say are a good reason not to do the crossing at all: firstly, Megan does not seem the sort of person who’s likely to thrive cheek by jowl with three other rowers, two of them strangers to her, for weeks at a time in dangerous conditions. She’s very closed off, even a little numb to what she’s about to undertake, mustering only an assurance to her mother that she’ll be ‘fine’. She’s accompanied by old friend Lexie (Sophie Skelton), and two blokes – Daniel (Akshay Khanna) and Mike (Nick Skaugen). The vessel launches with no fanfare, given it’s a record attempt: true enough, thanks to the audience perspective, we also already know it wasn’t exactly successful, and that during her recovery, Megan is being questioned as to the whereabouts of her crewmates (though to be fair, it’s almost bound to be ‘the sea’, isn’t it?) The flashback/flash forward device is an interesting approach; depending on your outlook, you could see it as an intriguing way of adding depth and complexity to the film, or as a means of losing its building tension, given that it jumps away from events on the voyage to the aftermath at regular intervals. Regardless of where you stand, it does at least demonstrate ambition for the framing narrative, and a way of layering different elements to build structure.

There are great elements here, and director Matthew Losasso has made much of his opportunity to film at sea – filming off the coast of Scotland, but effectively weaving the illusion that this is hundreds of miles from anywhere. The use of drone shots to pan down towards the vessel are great for this, and shots of rough weather genuinely create an impression of the great powerlessness of human beings in such an environment (with sympathetic, convincing and best of all, brief moments of CGI). Even before the record attempt gets underway, shots of the boat make it seem quite clear that it’s fragile, even if in peak condition. In contrast, the sea is consistently vast and cold, with sequences filmed at sea capturing the isolation and desperation of the characters. It’s great that these things are in place; despite issues with the overarching plot, there’s lots to enjoy here in terms of the aesthetics and broader atmosphere of the film, at least in its strongest moments.

It’s just hard to call in other respects; that’s the issue here. It’s not quite clear whether this was meant to be an ominous dreamscape or a realistic look at the perils of the Atlantic. There’s both a lot going on – not always followed through – and little going on. This duality starts early: the premise is just off somehow, this ‘world record’ attempt that no one seems to know about, undertaken by a group of people who don’t seem particularly fit, or prepared, with no rapport, no working relationships and a tendency to make mad decisions. Of course people can be idiots and these idiots can get in rowing vessels, if they so wish; it just feels unreal here when it really needed to feel substantial, the basis upon which everything else rests. Other things then come along and interfere with the central premise. Such as, the two women do no rowing for the first half an hour of the film; they seem to enjoy sitting around and talking instead. The men do some rowing, but a lot of macho yelling too – and they’ve dumped the heater and the desalinator, because of course they have. Perhaps the point here is that these people should never have come, but it’s a vague sort of point, and it takes until past the first hour before human lunacy really takes hold as the Central Issue.

Row picks up a few things and puts them down again: personal drama; identity crises; guilt; even what looks for a while like a supernatural plot shift. It never really settles on one mode of storytelling and it never offers us fully-fledged characterisation, so if nothing else, the journey feels about as long for us as it does for the hapless adventurers. Megan, in particular, is very tough to read, going from inertia to mania and back again. Whether this is Megan as-written or as-acted, it’s another issue in a film which needed at least a few more, excuse the expression, watertight elements.

The key problem here, beyond the determination to throw every kind of obstacle at the boat, is that runtime. Losasso is most experienced as a short film director (though with a few TV movies also under his belt) but that leap from a few minutes to 118 of them has posed problems. It nearly always does. Add in a maximum cast of four, a very limited set and a three-quarters-through start point and there’s several reasons why generating clarity and tension is going to be difficult. Row is a technically very proficient film, but perhaps a victim of the urge to do everything. Less is more.

Row (2025) received its world premiere at the Raindance Film Festival on 21st June 2025.

Raindance 2025: The Invisible Half

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

A teenager awakes in hospital; by the time we acknowledge this and what’s going on, she’s already hiding behind her mobile phone and headphones, which establishes a key motif in The Invisible Half (2024): the use of mobile phone technology to either facilitate, or block out, the outside world. We also see that the mobile phone isn’t exactly helpful to her: in a group chat, Elena (Lisa Siera) witnesses her classmates discussing her, the ‘gaijin’ (probably best translated as ‘foreigner’) who has just dropped out of school.

Japanese culture isn’t particularly accommodating to gaijin teenagers, so it seems. Upon recovery, Elena starts a new school but the teacher – even if well-meaning – introduces her to the rest of the students as ‘half Japanese’, entrenching that sense of stigma from the very start. Adults are…well, a bit useless in this film, if well-meaning. There is at least some support from a friendly classmate called Akari, and – as mercenary as it seems – the emphasis is pretty immediately taken away from her by the late arrival of another social outcast, nicknamed ‘Nyan’ by the others. Nyan hides behind a screen, too: accordingly, when one of the other girls hides her device, she reacts angrily, running from class. The others watch her outside, where she acts as if she is being pursued by someone, or something.

Little does Elena know – yet – that the girls planted Nyan’s phone in her bag. She finds it later that night, accidentally cutting her hand on its cracked screen. It’s too late, sadly, to avert the disaster which is unfolding for Nyan, even if Elena wanted to return her phone. And whatever was afflicting her begins to afflict Elena. Nyan had briefly suggested that her phone offered her ‘protection’ – but from what? Whatever it is, it’s linked to the mobile phone somehow, and (for reasons never fully explained) only Elena’s mobile phone can warn her when a mysterious presence gets close. Using whatever knowledge she can glean, Elena has to solve the mystery of the supernatural stalker, before she ends up like Nyan.

Director of The Invisible Half, Masaki Nishiyama, debuted with a fantastic short film called Smahorror in 2019 which made it as one of Warped Perspective’s favourite shorts of the year. This is his first feature-length offering, and it retains lots of similar tech horror elements. There are lots of similar strengths here too, though making the leap from just a few minutes to 100+ minutes has brought some issues, largely around pace and narrative. However, and skip straight to the next paragraph if you fear a mild spoiler: one of its key difficulties is in its clear similarities to a certain film called It Follows. We have a pursuing, malevolent being which can only be seen by its next victim; we have the loneliness of the ordeal; we have the sense that it passes from person to person according to some rule. Some of the scenes are arguably straight up lifted from the earlier, admittedly very influential movie. However, if you can get past that and enjoy the film on its terms, then there’s enough here to prove that it’s not just a do-over.

The main way The Invisible Half stands apart is through its clever use of the mobile phone, not just as an incidental part of the plot, but an integral one. Masaki Nishiyama is still only twenty-five years old; his relationship to this kind of technology is very different from a lot of older filmmakers, given that he has grown up entirely with mobile devices rather than coming to them later in life and then making sense of them. We see things like group chats unfolding in a plausible and meaningful way, and we see the use of phones as a convenient barrier between real life and virtual life; the audio used to indicate that characters are blocking things out with headphones is simply but effectively done. The alternative use of phones – as a kind of safety device – is another interesting idea. Being plugged in and online is imperative here, for one reason or another, and it’s done very organically.

There are other strengths, too. J-horror has always played a blinder when it comes to making light, airy, modern spaces very unsettling, and The Invisible Half is no different, with a lot of the horror unfolding at Elena’s light, airy, modern school. (It’s also charming that when two characters head off to explore a much darker, scarier place that they still take off their shoes to do it.) There is good variety in the camerawork, and the SFX – though it holds off to unleash its biggest, most impressive sequences, is nicely done by Cao Moji, who also worked on Godzilla Minus One. It’s also a rare pleasure to see an ingenious use of intertitles, used here as part of the story, communicating something integral and intriguing.

However, devoid of the simple but clear rationale behind It Follows, The Invisible Half’s central premise does run into a few snags. These are no doubt magnified by the runtime, as audiences are typically less forgiving of elements in a feature – a fairly long feature – that they might happily ignore in a short film. Questions arise concerning the creature’s behaviour, attacking indiscriminately in some cases, disappearing for long periods, with its conduct surprisingly well-understood by Elena from very early on, despite there being gaps around both her timeline and Nyan’s timeline. Given that there’s quite a long settling-in period for Elena’s character (which does include lots of rare, engaging discussion about the treatment of mixed heritage people in Japan), there was plenty of time to expound the premise of the film more. Similarly with Elena and Akari’s close friendship: this comes out of nowhere, maybe a chat or two, but then jumps straight to being integral to the plot. The script is underwritten in several places and runs aground in others, which has a cost to the film’s overall sense of pace.

So, there are some teething issues, and a few instances of the difficulties of scaling up, but on balance, there’s still stacks of evidence of promise and skill here. The fact that The Invisible Half took six years to make perhaps at least partly accounts for some of its more disjointed qualities, but Nishiyama’s raft of ideas for tech horror hold fast. As such – look out for his next feature, Influencer Ghost, appearing later this year via the legendary TOHO.

The Invisible Half (2024) screens at the Raindance Film Festival 2025 on June 20th.

Raindance 2025: Our Happy Place

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

A woman awakes, alone, in a woodland clearing. She notices she has some injuries on her bare feet, suggesting she was walking for a while; however, she clearly can’t remember how she got there. Limping to the nearest main road, she is able to get her bearings, following the route back to what appears to be home.

She cleans herself up, her mind wandering back to easier times – the time before her husband Paul (director Paul Bickert) became ill. He’s at home too, and he needs his wife’s care: he’s on oxygen, and seems to be too unwell to speak or otherwise to communicate. She – Raya (Raya Miles) really wants to discuss the small matter of waking up in the woods – but he’s unable. If Paul can hear her, he doesn’t really act like it. Raya can talk to her best friend Amy (Tracie Thoms), but only on FaceTime, and Amy’s a little distracted by her own life. It feels an awful lot like Raya’s inability to talk this situation through is going to lead it to recur – which it duly does. But is there something more going on here than just sleepwalking? Raya is also plagued by nightmares (a moment of potential peril for any filmmaker, but my god, these nightmares really are unpleasant). Given these dreams, it feels entirely fitting that, the next time Raya wakes up outside, there’s a shovel wedged into the ground beside her. And the next time, she’s lying in a partly-dug grave.

Our Happy Place (2024) was written and directed by Paul Bickert, who also co-stars: it’s his first feature. Raya Miles appears here in her first role, let alone her first starring role. Shot during the Covid pandemic, there are a lot of ways this film could have gone off the rails: inexperience, quarantine, restrictions, budget, ideas. Happily, if the word ‘happily’ can in any way be attached to this brilliantly claustrophobic Slough of Despond, this doesn’t feel like a film made in spite of Covid; plenty of those have come out, and plenty more may yet be out there. Our Happy Place is unusual because it uses Covid in a meaningful way. It’s a plausible reason for Raya’s isolation; it’s why Amy – the occasionally distracted voice of reason – can’t just rock up at Raya’s place. It’s why Raya can’t take Paul, in his condition, to a hotel when she wants to leave their home. It makes sense, and in fact it’s one of the few tangible realistic elements in the film when everything else slowly spirals: at least the pandemic, we know, is real. It also helps to shape Raya’s pervading loneliness – a carer with no local friends, no other family or support network. Under this sort of pressure, this cabin in the woods and the woods themselves could have become dark enough places. But, to come back to the earlier question: there’s more at play here.

If by the midway point of the film you may have an inkling of what’s happening, this doesn’t detract from the storytelling, nor from the central ideas. This film makes you hyper-vigilant: there seems to be a mystery to uncover, so you begin to look for clues, symbols. The hatchet. The shovel. Characters’ facial expressions – or is that paranoia, spreading from film to viewer? Something dreadful certainly feels as though it’s lurking on the periphery of the everyday and Bickert has a keen instinct for what makes a thrilling horror sequence, with several scenes proving that point. These are not doled out liberally, but when they occur, they’re very effective, and the use of edits is also integral to the ways in which this film comes together, past meeting present, particularly in the final act. Miles’s performance is also key to the film’s success: it’s an intense, demanding role, building vulnerability and sympathy without recourse to simplistic ‘damsel in distress’ tropes. Raya is a woman fighting for her old happiness but being presented with impossible, terrifying obstacles.

Whilst in places Our Happy Place calls to mind an earlier film, The Pact (2012), it’s still refreshingly done, an unsettling meld of psychological and supernatural horror. With an 85-min runtime, it has the right amount of time and space to create a highly effective study of trauma, shifting its perspectives amongst different characters to do so – and all without overstaying its welcome. Maybe there’s a little fracturing of the storyline right at the end, but it’s absolutely not enough to do real harm to this well made, well edited and thoughtful introspective horror.

Our Happy Place (2024) features at this year’s Raindance Film Festival: look out for it on 20th June.

The Dreadful Place (2025)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Independent cinema needs to do a lot with a little, and this has to be one of the reasons it now so often dodges linear narratives, preferring imagined spaces or fractured timelines in order to explore its key themes, particularly if they are large or significant themes. Horror is primed for this by its nature: give us a dreamscape, say; make the monsters symbolic rather than literal, and a lot of the work is done.

This is the basic premise of The Dreadful Place (2025) in a nutshell: Willow (Keaton McLachlan) is about to mark the anniversary of her father’s traumatic death and this triggers a series of unpleasant nightmares. She has to negotiate her way through these nightmares in order to resume real life again. In terms of a plotline – that’s it. We see her first zoning out of an admittedly slightly tedious, but functional everyday life, then going far further, pitching headlong into a world of dreams peopled variously by her deceased father, her creepy neighbour and her ex, so it’s clear that all of these men, to some extent, have been troubling her unconscious mind. There are some other key players too – mostly friends and co-workers, transformed into challenging or disagreeable versions of themselves as a means of drawing key truths from Willow so she can ultimately wake up and get back to her regular life, free at last of the unspoken, unexplored emotional baggage she’s been carrying around for these past six years.

It’s never made abundantly clear to the audience where the dividing line between waking world and dreamscape falls, though there is actually very little beyond the opening credits which isn’t at least partly a dream. For viewers, having gleaned the basic premise of residual trauma, a lot of the experience of watching this film is sorting ‘real’ idea from nightmare, picking out the bare bones of the background story. This is certainly experimental in its way, and given that director and writer Cole Daniel Hills, as a new and a young filmmaker, has chosen this potentially contentious approach, there’s has to be some credit due for making his film his own way.

However, it’ll likely be divisive when it gets out into the wider arena. For this reviewer, it’s not quite my bag, for reasons I’ll explain. For me, the sheer number of films whose stories operate in some never-never, ungoverned by anything coherent or complex feel – on the whole – like something of a cop-out. Rendering most of a feature-length film down to a long run of uncertain, obfuscating dreams divests the film of any narrative weight, clarity or cogency, meaning that the film feels meandering and unsteady, even across a relatively economical ninety-minute runtime. Ninety minutes of dreams, there to reveal a fairly self-evident array of truths? It feels repetitive, and it also requires an amount of patience which has ebbed over the past few years. There’s a similar feel here to a lot of the ‘quantum horror’, if we can call it that, which has popped up post-Covid, when everyone lost track of time, place and reality and made films about that: characters operate in maze-like, unreal scenarios, deliberating about themselves to get the kinds of answers you might seek in therapy. The Dreadful Place feels, in many respects, like another film doing this, and unfortunately it suffers, for me, by the comparison.

However, to give it its dues: it does pitch itself at an interesting point in Willow’s life, coming as it does not immediately after her loss, but six years later: she has, in that time, been keeping her head above water perhaps, but not dealing openly with the ideas troubling her and this has left her vulnerable to this kind of temporary breakdown. The Dreadful Place does capture something of the escalating unpleasantness of nightmares, and of how they co-opt people and places, quickly moving from normal to uneasy to frightening; there are some nicely set up scenes and there are inclusions here which are genuinely eerie. All of this is underpinned by Keaton McLachlan’s strong performance as Willow; Willow is played with sympathy throughout and given that McLachlan is on screen for nearly every moment of the film’s runtime, it’s so important that she’s able to do so much with this role. Essentially, there are lots of good elements here and every reason to suppose that future projects will go from strength to strength, even if the central premise of The Dreadful Place isn’t to my particular tastes.

The Dreadful Place (2025) will be released digitally later this year.

Future Date (2024)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Bear with me, but here’s a question: how do you connect to other humans when you live in a harsh dystopian future where everyone shelters from the outside world in isolated pods with only apps for company? Phew. It gets answered in a light-touch, quirky kind of way in Future Date (2024), a film which is perfectly well aware of what it can do well and what it can’t, or won’t, do in its runtime and budget.

We start with a check-box rundown of the dystopia future we’re in: there’s some on-screen text describing the various reasons people can’t go outside anymore. We then meet a man called Ry (also director and co-writer Stanley Wong) who devotes a lot of time to a dating app called CNKTR, and it says a lot about our timeline that I’m sure you all just read that as it’s intended to be read. Ry wants to meet ‘the one’, but his eagerness for connection leads him to interface with the dating app like it’s a job in its own right. If you want to improve your chances of meeting ‘the one’, the of course, statistically, the best thing to do is to match with everyone. He’s less clear on the reasons why this isn’t necessarily the best approach. Next up, we meet a young woman called Ria (Shuang Hu) and she couldn’t be more different. She isn’t interested in dating, or connections; she wants a promotion, and she wants to earn enough to buy a house. Isolated shelter pod, no more. But she just can’t catch a break, and it seems like she’s going to be stuck misting her plants for all eternity, fielding critical emails from her parents as she does.

Things look up when CNKTR, under the guidance of the boss’s son Dallas (Johnny Pemberton), runs a competition: meet a person and share a connection, and CNKTR just might award the lucky couple – a house! They have to live in it together, but it’s a house, and a house is a hell of a prize. Real estate turns out to be quite an important consideration in this film; it’s important enough that Ria is willing to shelve her aversion to dating in order to be in with a chance to win; no matter that she has only just signed up for the app in order to enter the contest. Ry is no less keen on the whole soulmate thing as he too takes part in the process, but a house would be great. They get selected, which means a crash course in how to behave towards other people in person, but – it’s not a disaster. They actually get along fairly well. This is great for their personal connection score, which could help them to win that house, but what about each other? Is there more to this than just a score?

This is a film about a hundred times tonally lighter than most of the projects which find a home on this site, but Future Date is charming, engaging and nicely written, to the extent that it could carry just about anyone along with it. The filmmaker knows what we know – that nothing being presented here is ground-breaking in terms of its ideas or themes, but it’s all confidently handled with neat characterisation, a good script and a deft pace which works perfectly. There’s a sprinkling of ideas rather than a deluge, but little additions, like the morning wake-up announcement which blandly intones, ‘Here’s what can kill you today’, add something appealing and humorous. It’s a visually appealing film, too, surprisingly colourful despite the claustrophobia of a world without real windows, with some fun ‘it is what it is’ SFX. The use of split-screen is good, too, creating the illusion of more space when it might all feel a little oppressive.

As non-moralising as Future Date remains, there are some take-home messages here, all put across with characteristic calm charm. In a world where personal interaction is almost completely bound up in the virtual, it’s hard to distinguish what’s real and unreal; everything is perfunctory because it’s all about algorithms, points and feedback, and for Ria and Ry, this makes their character arcs occasionally quite tricky for them to navigate. People can be at cross-purposes, for instance, but are still being evaluated as data. All the tech in the world can’t fix this disconnect, mainly because people build apps – cutting-edge technology is hardwired to emulate (then consolidate) human awkwardness, because we make apps in our image. This is captured nicely by the character of Dallas, always at hand to generate some more comic relief.

Future Date is the previously unthinkable: a vibrant, dystopian meet cute which has heart and humour. It pokes fun at us – gently – by using a futuristic perspective to do it, and although there have to be some bleaker moments woven into the whole, given the setting and timeframe, the film gets the balance of light and dark just right. It also eschews a straightforward ‘happily ever after’ structure, giving us a little more than the expected, too. As a first feature by short movie maven Stanley Wong, there’s a lot to love here.

Restless (2024)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Restless (2024) is a domestic drama which, in places, edges close to the horror genre – with a few scenes and ideas which even suggest some ambitious horror genre-splicing. However, for the most part, it retreats into domestic drama, layering this with a psychological case study of a woman (described in the synopsis as an ’empty nester’) already on the edge, and pushed further and further by a sudden change in circumstances. There are some issues with Restless, but its lead actress is never in doubt, and one of its key strengths lies in showing just how quickly a lack of sleep can erode your sanity.

We begin at what seems clearly signposted as ‘four fifths of the way along’, a fairly popular structural feature in independent film of late which then leaves itself the rather tough job of linking up with the high tension moments of the opening scenes. We meet Nicky (Lyndsey Marshal), driving to the middle of nowhere in her PJs to dig a hole in the woods…then things move back by a week.

Just a week? Well, a week’s a long time in these situations. At this point, we find out more about Nicky: she’s a geriatric nurse; she has a lovely tabby cat (oh God, no); her son has recently headed off to university; and, as she watches a van arrive one morning, she’s a little perturbed to see new neighbours moving in next door, to the house recently owned by her parents. After her shift, she’s reminded of these new people by their blaring music and a party which goes on into the night. So she goes to speak to them.

There are some shades of Eden Lake here, in that the rather stereotypical neck tattoo, pitbull and love for all things hard techno might all combine in neighbour Deano (Aston McAuley), but he does seem amenable – at first. Obviously, these films would be rather short if one reasonable conversation sorted things out. The nightly noise continues, and Nicky gets less and less rational. Clues amass that, nightmare neighbours or not, she’s extra reactive just lately, and that we could be seeing someone losing their grasp. It’s so hard not to shout advice about earplugs (though she does get some headphones a bit later, and for reasons I’m not super clear on, takes them back off again, better to engage with the din.)

The week progresses. Nicky grows steadily more unhinged, and something’s gotta give…

Well, to a point. We’ve discussed how the film edges close to horror but doesn’t fully commit itself to horror; as such, there’s no sudden escalation into ultraviolence or some massive, culminating plot point, despite lots of signposting that things could well get there – which could feel somewhat deflating. In its determination to grant Nicky some peace, quiet and closure, the script steers clear of anything too damning. Perhaps it’s more keen to grant harassed neighbours some kind of wish fulfilment situation where things get resolved much more easily than they typically do, though the denouement feels rather bolted on – and could just as easily be the start of a new wave of escalation, frankly. This is one of the film’s issues, and another case where the 4/5 start point causes director/writer Jed Hart some difficulty.

The other issue is the film’s use of humour, particularly in the first half, which makes Restless feel like a tough call tonally. Having invested in the escalation of tension, the rather sudden-seeming diversion into moments of comedy is both surprising, and something which works against the atmosphere developed up to that point. It happens later, too, though it’s usually confined to the script by then, but the effect’s comparable. That said, Restless lands a few points about modern British life which will feel relatable: the whole ‘making ends meet’ thing, the issue of workplace understaffing, bureaucracy and buck-passing and of course, the paper-thin walls in a lot of terraced housing. It’s a familiar-feeling world.

Lyndsey Marshal is on screen for almost all of the film’s (modest and appropriate) ninety-minute runtime, and she does a very good job of carrying audience interest, particularly given that, for a lot of this time, she’s not actually speaking to anyone. Given that her mental state is already fraught at the beginning of the film, the tendency to film her sitting in almost total darkness also encourages a strong, often physical performance from her to convey that anguish laced with irritation which is so necessary to the part. There’s a certain amount of stereotyping along the way – of course an ’empty nester’ (coded as female, naturally) would have little to do except cleaning and frenetic cake-baking in her son’s absence – which does suggest a somewhat limited notion of what women do, think and feel. There are some aspects of characterisation which never quite feel fully-formed in this film, and this goes for Deano too, whom we properly need to believe is a dangerous wanker, but comes across mostly as a jovial wanker, right up until he turns out to be worse – although, we don’t get to know him in much depth, and the script has to be held responsible for that.

Despite these issues, though, it’s clear that Jed Hart has directorial nous for moving the action through a range of settings – domestic and exterior – and for allowing the space and time for a good cast to show just how well they can perform. It’s also appreciated that he’s told his story in a sensible, reasonable timeframe: were this film diluted down to two hours, the review would be a lot harsher. Restless shows us a recognisable and unpalatable slice of modern British life with plenty of visual flair, and whilst it loses its way in some aspects, for a first feature, it has key strengths to recommend it.

Quiver Distribution’s psychological thriller Restless was released digitally on Friday, May 23rd.

Birdeater (2023)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Don’t take medication which isn’t intended for you. Think twice about taking medication which is intended for you. These are the takeaway lessons of Birdeater (2023) – a film which relies heavily on altered states for both its linear and experimental plot points. This is as much of a moral standpoint as anything you get on its feted themes of gender and power, and unfortunately this is just one of the film’s many issues.

Sickly, soon-to-be-married couple Irene (Shabana Azeez) and Louie (Mackenzie Fearnley) do everything together, and yet Irene has not accepted that her fiancé may just be a malignant misogynist. This may be the intended point of Birdeater – and many films of its ilk which present this kind of thing in varying degrees of clarity (usually attended by varying degrees of menace, subtext and violence). Here, things are given the oblique treatment right up until they aren’t. For now, we learn that – to make up for a minor spat over wedding planning – Louie has invited Irene to accompany him on his stag do (bucks party, bachelor party – delete as applicable). Frankly, this seems a strange decision: the girl is so fragile, it immediately feels that she will be a hard sell as a vindicated woman, let alone a final girl (hey, the film blurb promises a ‘feral nightmare’; that sounds like horror to me, so a final girl element isn’t out of the question at the start). We see her variously asleep, weeping, or taking pills – drinking glasses of water she hasn’t fetched for herself. Already, the odds of her having a good time feel slender.

The party is taking place – where else would it take place? – at a cabin in the middle of nowhere. The partygoers assemble, and it turns out actually that Irene isn’t the only woman present after all, making this feel a little less like a bucks party and more like a weekend away. People get settled in – there’s lots of bottles of beer opening, a few scenes of people chasing one another/throwing bits of wood, and plenty of time afforded to showing us various pills and substances which are quite, quite clearly going to get consumed shortly. This includes Irene, whose own pills are also presented as a likely later plot point. Essentially the stage is set for the party to get very messy. But how? And why?

And – for a while – if? The protracted feel to the film, in terms of how long we hang around at the shoulders of these people as they do precisely nothing, provides a sense that we may never get anywhere, and honestly, that is exactly what comes to pass. There are long interludes, a very jagged, unsustained sense of growing tension and a burgeoning sense that this isn’t going to be anywhere close to a horror, but more of an experimental wander around the vaunted topics. There are some tighter moments – who doesn’t love an awkward dinner speech about someone else? – but the film as a whole feels clunky. Ideas about the weaponisation of anxiety, about aspects of control – these are given far less development time than plenty of aimless, trippy filler, meaning less interesting or engaging content generally.

All of these issues are compounded by the film’s self-indulgent runtime. It’s nearly two hours long, meaning poor pacing, odd decisions and – most gallingly of all – a failure to really establish engaging characters and dynamics, despite more than ample opportunities to do so. All of the usual markers of meaning cede to long, rambling experimental sequences which bring nothing to the film. Then things peter out, unresolved and unchallenged. Given that this film purports to be about toxic masculinity, it largely ignores women themselves. Oh, it finds time for a random naked female dancer in a merkin – we never find out why, or who she is – but do we get under the skin of the female characters in Birdeater? A charitable reading would be to accept a meta-analysis, positing that the absence of female characterisation is intentional and points to socially-accepted norms, etc. But I can’t. It just feels like more evidence of clumsy oversight and muddled intentions. This may well be the film which directors and writers Jack Clark and Jim Weir intended to make; the press release may do it something of a disservice by placing it in a horror context, but then IMDb does that too. But even if horror is furthest from your mind, this film’s tangential, eccentric decision-making will prove a hard, hard sell for many audiences.

Birdeater is in UK cinemas 9 May and digital platforms 26 May from Blue Finch Film Releasing.

Vulcanizadora (2024)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

There’s a scene in Vulcanizadora where, in the darkness of the woods, one of the main characters unpacks a Discman and some analogue speakers he’s brought along to entertain his friend on their camping trip. Nothing works; the cable isn’t connected to the speakers at first, but they hiss anyway; the Discman skips and stutters, as they had a habit of doing. He finally gets it going, but ‘the show’ feels like a let-down by this point – just part of the toxic nostalgia which threads through the film and ensnares its characters. It’s a little funny and a little farcical, but it speaks to something deeper and more significant going on, a weird compulsion to cram as many disappointing but familiar experiences into this brief trip into the woods as possible.

We begin with the two men earlier that day, hiking deep into the Michigan woods. They chat affably enough, though it’s Derek (director/writer Joel Potrykus) who holds the floor, talking about the petty details of his life as they walk. Something feels immediately off about this. At first, it’s in the way that Derek’s good buddy Martin (Joshua Burge) seems troubled, and has little to say. But then, as Derek regales him with a tale of how he’s lost his keys, he finally asks – why do you need them? Why would you need them now?

This, then, isn’t a regular catch-up, and there’s something more at play. So they walk deeper into the known-unknown woods towards an agreed destination (with a couple of pauses as Derek stops to seek out something hidden since boyhood (hardly a Pulp Fiction briefcase moment, but it serves to underline his sad attachment to an unremarkable past). Things…even things which once held some sort of meaning, some brief excitement, are disappointing. Life has been disappointing. People have passed these guys over. Even when they get to their end point, the feeling is much the same.

But it’s at this point in the film that things take a much darker turn. Should we be laughing? Yes? No? In any case, the consequences of this fateful pact begin to branch out in unexpected ways from this point, prodding at the decisions which have been made and impacting upon the lives of others.

Whilst this kind of mumblecore/slacker/Temple of the Dog fan dialogue won’t be for everyone, it’s hard to imagine Vulcanizadora working so well without it. The unplanned feel of the lines and the unpolished delivery creates a compelling and plausible impression of men for whom the passing of time has proved to be a numbing experience. They’re both still stuck at an adolescent level – when things were, even if not promising, at least possible. The unrehearsed feel of their story gradually reveals uncomfortable truths about these people, who probably always wanted to be noticed and appreciated, but were never resilient nor erudite enough to be heard.

There are differences between them, though: Derek is more openly childlike. For him, the whole trip seems childish, in the sense of shrugging off the routine inanity of adult life – which only occasionally is described in enough detail to reveal it as pretty traumatic. Marty has other demons, more specific and pressing concerns, but he is determined to keep a hold on these. He wants to stick to the plan. These characters have appeared before in a Potrykus film; here, they’re no different and no better, but increasingly jaded and lost. The pain of letting go of the past, even when the past sucked, can be a burden – and the plan, The Plan, goes characteristically awry.

As the film progresses, the occasional guilty laughter dies away and we’re left with a rather weighty, existential piece about the distance which opens up between old friends. Okay, here it’s illuminated by an absurd and brutal situation, but the fact remains. Ultimately, this film is a tragedy about being overlooked – how it feels to never get the hang of living in a world which judges you, using criteria you never agreed. Vulcanizadora builds pathos for these men without simplistically siding with them – and certainly never by overwriting them.

It’s fitting that key moments of the film feature digging around in the sand or the dirt, looking for what you think you left there; the whole film is a search for lost things, and where it does make you laugh, it comes with a side-order of something close to dread. It’s an interesting, uncomfortable watch.

Vulcanizadora (2024) is in select cinemas now.

“Who’s going to help you?” Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

To mark the recent Shameless Films release of Four Flies on Grey Velvet, we’re running a special feature on the film – which contains spoilers. Please watch before you read!

Roberto (Michael Brandon) is a young musician; things should be good, but he’s… nervous. As he has been moving around in the city lately, he has noticed someone who seems to be following him, and one evening – frustrated and paranoid – he gives chase to the man. When he confronts him, a fight takes place and the man is fatally injured as a result. Roberto is therefore implicated in his death; if that wasn’t bad enough, it turns out someone was indeed following him – someone with a camera, who snaps an incriminating reel of photos before making their getaway. Roberto is understandably troubled, and when the photos start to mysteriously appear around his apartment, he feels sure he is being set up for a blackmail attempt, or some kind of life-changing character assassination, the nature of which he can’t quite yet guess. His home is no longer his own, and seems to be quite easily frequented by the person or persons who wish him harm, promising him that further ordeals are coming. Too terrified to tell the police, and deeply reluctant to pour his heart out to his somewhat distant wife, Nina (Mimsy Farmer), Roberto has to use unorthodox methods to try to defend himself, opting for a run of comic-foil private detectives and itinerant friends of his. This has limited success: murder and subterfuge are closing in on Roberto, leaving him essentially alone to face down whatever and whoever is targeting him.

Four Flies on Grey Velvet, the last in Dario Argento’s rather accidental ‘beast trilogy’, is redolent of many of the most desirable traits of Italian genre cinema of the early Seventies. The giallo – named for the lurid yellow-cover pulp crime novels of the mid-20th Century – was rather rapidly developing and reshaping itself as a wealth of ideas, fixations and possibilities emerged in the minds of the genre’s most pre-eminent directors. Dario Argento has described Four Flies as ‘party biographical’, a Freudian nightmare which, like many of Argento’s titles (and certainly his beast trilogy) centres around a male protagonist, rather than a perhaps stereotypically highly-strung female (though that motif certainly comes into play here). It is a film about suggestion as much as it is about meticulously planned murder set pieces; violence is far more often implied than seen. In other respects, it is a dizzying dream world, with dream sequences which function as scene changes, pace shifts and psychological assessments. As much as psychologists are mentioned in the film, psychiatric care happens off-camera, or is relegated to the past – where it has proved rather ineffectual, to say the least. The only help which comes in the film is from people who are outside polite society, themselves abandoned by society’s great institutions. The killer is correct to be so sure that no one is coming: essentially, they aren’t.

Interestingly, the only time the police are really present in the film is to raise the possibility of an experimental procedure which – like most other things in Four Flies – would sit just as happily in an Edgar Allan Poe tale, but for the fact that the daguerrotypes of his day weren’t quite as handy as modern cameras – certainly not for surreptitious snaps. After the murder of Nina’s very accommodating cousin Dalia (Francine Racette), the investigating officer suggests attempting a practice known as (but not named as such in the film) optography, a debunked theory which first arose in the 19th Century, but persisted into the next century too – clearly for long enough to entrench itself in folklore, and to resurface as a fantastical plot point in Four Flies. Optography was the ideas that whatever a person saw in their dying moments would be somehow imprinted on their retinas: find a way to access this image, and you solve the mystery of whatever happened to that person. It’s a kind of charmingly simple, even hopeful idea, nonsense of course, but a bridging point between modern scientific practice and long-held folkloric beliefs about the ingenious behaviour of corpses. It was long maintained that a murder victim’s body would react in the presence of its murderer, a process known as ‘cruentation’; from the other perspective, the ‘hand of glory’ folk tale attributed mystical powers to the severed hands of hanged individuals (see, ahem, my book for more on these). Optography is the perfect addition to Four Flies, then, not only granting it a backstory for that tantalising title, but also adding a layer of myth and perhaps magic to an already heady blend of modernising Italy and forces which seek to infiltrate it, wreaking havoc on its younger generation.

You can easily argue that giallo – on the whole – is inherently reactionary, a horror fantasy of what happens when old forces and values bloodily reassert themselves against those who err. The Late Sixties and early Seventies were particularly fruitful years, a time when Italy itself seemed to grapple quite hard with issues pertaining to its new generation gap. The world of Four Flies seems immediately fraught, a film full of Seventies references from prog rock to space hoppers, but also a world impinged upon by other, older, more knowledgeable others hellbent on exploiting a talented, if nervy young man. From the earliest reels, the presence of the would-be (or could-be) assassin reveals to us an older man, suited and booted and clearly from an earlier era. A party anecdote (!) about the ultra-conservative Saudi justice system has a haunting effect on Roberto, positioning itself as the ultimate terror of powerlessness in the face of deep-rooted institutional power. The reach of the state, and its general disinterest in the individuals it affects, is present elsewhere in the film too: the great vulnerability attached to mental illness and the lifelong impacts of institutionalised care echo through Four Flies, reaching an alarming crescendo during the film’s final big reveal. However, if anything, the message here is that this care has failed. Remote or absent older generations also provide chaos for the young. The sins of the father are visited very literally upon them, even whilst ‘sin’ (and the Church) are conspicuous by their absence. Perhaps in Four Flies (and beyond), the asylum serves a similar purpose. The only ‘God’ here is a drifter, though he does at least come to people’s aid.

Cast adrift in this perplexing, discomfiting modern world, we have Roberto: Four Flies is, above all else, a very lonely film. Even before the film’s denouement, other characters seem to be queuing up to exploit him, and he is a man largely unable, it seems, to defend himself. As the audience, we are positioned in such a way that we’re invited to suspect various people in his life, usually women, but then again we are also made privy to the masked plotter assembling the photographs which incriminate Roberto: it looks for all the world as though we are looking at the film’s villain, but eventually we are disabused of this idea, too. As much as we we get to see Roberto’s trauma dreams, we are not omnipotent spectators in the film and we have to remain on his level, for the most part, as events unfold. We’re as vulnerable as him, and we’re also made to wonder at whoever is picking off other people close to Roberto.

As uncomfortable as it is visually dazzling, Four Flies is an intense viewing experience, hanging onto its secrets until the runtime is very nearly up. That much of this takes place against a rather privileged, easeful background is all the more interesting. The older generation are impoverished; however, Nina is an heiress, Roberto basks in her reflected wealth (well, to a point), and they chide (or ignore) the older, poorer people who work on their behalf, with a big share of the film’s black comedy moments coming at the expense of the working classes; that poor postman deserved more. And yet, for all that money, Nina is psychotically unhappy and Roberto is being targeted by a psychopath. He needs someone with nothing to come and assist him. Money certainly doesn’t buy happiness here, and it takes a rather balletic accident to truly end his ordeal – meaning, again, that chance, not the benevolent reach of old certainties, roll things to a close. Four Flies paints a distinctive, intoxicating version of its place and time, and a delightfully cynical spin on the world in which Dario Argento – then a young man himself – was both making his way and his films.

The Killgrin (2024)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Misery becomes a literal monster in The Killgrin – a film which nods to a number of established horror ideas and other projects, but benefits from the ambition of director Joanna Tsanis in terms of pulling those ideas together.

Airport worker Miranda (Konstantina Mantelos) is just getting off her shift at the beginning of the film: we don’t witness her lengthy journey home, but we see her interacting, a little carefully, with her partner, Noah (Fuad Ahmed), who seems to have been ill. However, he assures her he’s feeling much better. Miranda seems a little incredulous, and it seems she’s right to feel that way. Noah disappears from the apartment; he leaves his phone behind, which is never a good sign in modern life. Miranda looks further, and quickly finds out what happened…

Three weeks pass. Miranda, recently bereaved, is now in a group session – her first time. Whilst there, she is besieged by another attendee, a man called Brian (Adam Tsekhman). He blends a rare kind of social awkwardness with – god help us – a kind of attempt to hit on Miranda. She, however, has bigger concerns. Since losing Noah, she believes she has been tracked down by a controlling ex-partner, now leaving her roses at her apartment. The police have little to go on, but Miranda is scared enough to head to a friend’s place for a while. She still can’t be swayed from her conviction that someone – her ex, in fact – is coming for her. She’s nervy, seeking answers, and finally throws herself on the mercy of a psychic for a tarot reading. The psychic tells her something: that there’s a ‘darkness’ following her, which she refers to as a Killgrin – a kind of infection in her aura, wishing her harm. Miranda is not convinced, but then, as her personal situation gets more desperate and terrifying, affecting her loved ones too, she’s ready to believe anything.

Old ideas about mental illness tended to externalise it, seeing it as proof, amongst other things, of supernatural forces and The Killgrin uses this idea as a source for its own horror. Of course this necessitates playing with sensitive topics in a way which will not be for everyone, but Tsanis has experience of this kind of fable-making, and it works well here, walking a careful line between whether there is some supernatural force or a very earthly one; it’s a while before you can say with any certainty. It’s in many ways a very lonely film, focusing on a woman who has come through an immense amount of personal trauma, and you believe in Miranda’s growing sense of panic. Many of the most effective scenes here are very subtle (although there is some striking, if minimal, use of gore FX, too).

Miranda also exists in a fully plausible world of medication, counselling, group sessions, complementary therapies, routines…all recognisable points om the map for those undergoing mental health difficulties. This includes covering some unpalatable truths about suicidal ideation and self harm; the attention to detail that, despite the decision he makes, Noah has shaved and looks ‘smart’, has been sadly borne out by lots of real stories and situations. There’s a lot of careful observation here, accompanying the central conceit – the horror of a harbinger of personal doom following people, and moving from person to person. There’s some affinity to It Follows in this idea, only perhaps – worse? The people afflicted in this film have even less to go on, even less rhyme and reason for what is happening.

There are some issues with The Killgrin: there’s something of a lag in pace just before the hour mark, allowing for some character development, but dissipating some of the tension (Brian’s character changes quite a lot during the course of the film, by the by, and he can feel a little difficult to appraise). The monster itself in its different forms may be divisive; in other respects, the film may feel like a development of ideas in Smile (2022) and Tsanis’s own, earlier short film Smile (2021), and perhaps in some respects Carved (2007), if we were to turn that frown upside down. But all in all, there’s plenty here to enjoy on its own terms, with some innovative scenes, good callbacks and confident writing, and a welcome and ambitious attempt to launch new horror lore – whether or not some aspects feel familiar, that is commendable.

The Killgrin (2024) will receive a theatrical/VOD release on 24th April 2025.