Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

Get ready for Fantasia 2025…

Posted on by Keri O'Shea
Queens of the Dead (dir. Tina Romero)

The Fantasia International Film Festival – now in its 29th year – has long since established itself as a world-beating event, and it hardly needs saying that it’s one of the real highlights of the year for genre film fans, whether those lucky enough to be in attendance or those of us watching and reviewing remotely. As ever, when the press information lands, it’s somewhere between exciting and intimidating: an embarrassment of riches, you could say. It’s been quite a task to run through it and pick out some highlights ahead of the festival opening next week (it will run from Wednesday 16th to Tuesday 22nd July), but here they are – tailored for a Warped Perspective audience, but as such just a fragment of what’s on offer across the course of the week. At least a few of these titles should be available for press coverage, and if so, watch this space – but for now, take a look at some of the films coming to this year’s festival…

The Undertone

Ian Tuason is best known as an author, but in his first feature film The Undertone, look out for a blend of tech horror and folk horror as a podcaster, Evy, begins to investigate a number of mysterious audio files of a man and his wife – whose story begins to become enmeshed with Evy’s own, traumatic life experiences. With Nina Kiri (The Handmaid’s Tale) in the starring role, expect an intense performance and a phenomenal use of sound design to bring the film’s sensory horrors to life. This will be the film’s world premiere.

Find Your Friends

Party culture turns sour in Izabel Pazkad’s first-ever feature as a girls’ outing gets scuppered first by hostile locals who don’t want the girls there, and then by warped and increasingly nasty internal pressures as the friends’ dynamic fractures. Looking at the fragility both of party culture and of young women and their lives, Find Your Friends escalates into something profound, nasty and shocking. The film receives its world premiere at Fantasia.

Nesting

Horror cinema has never exactly shied away from the negatives of the parenting experience – vulnerability, isolation, exhaustion – but in more recent years, it’s felt confident to focus its whole energies on it, particularly around maternal mental health. This brings us to Nesting, which doesn’t flinch in its portrayal of Pénélope (Rose-Marie Perreault), a woman with postpartum depression enduring the disintegration of her old life as she battles to support the wellbeing of her child. This will be another world premiere for the festival.

Flush

I don’t know, maybe it says something poignant about Western society that ‘toilet stall horror’ could perhaps be considered a subgenre at this point, but while we mull it over, here’s the synopsis for Flush, which promises quite the ride. Luke, a middle-aged coke fiend heads to the workplace of his ex, a nightclub, to win her back. Long story short, he ends up in the bathroom with a heap of stolen drugs, and from that point on things get…hectic. The press synopsis suggests that Flush is “Evocative of Dupieux by way of Gaspar Noé and early Álex de la Iglesia”, which is probably all you need to know to decide if you’re interested, and I bet you are by now. This first feature by Grégory Morin will be receiving its world premiere at the festival.

The Book Of Sijjin And Illiyyin

Now this is one for Warped Perspective: a blend of Islamic folk horror, Fulci-worthy ocular torture and Evil Dead-style demons and gore as a woman sick of being belittled and mistreated by her bosses decides to invoke a few demonic forces to get her vengeance. Indonesia really has carved a name for itself in the last couple of decades, and it’s always a thrill to be exposed to new folklore and myth, so hopes are very high for this one – which is about to receive its North American premiere.

Straight Outta Space

In the neighbourhood of Schijndrecht, street coaches Amin and Mitchell have enough to contend with without the locals suddenly turning into slime-covered creatures thanks to an intergalactic intervention (think Night of the Creeps and Attack The Block). Up against all of this, it’s the local residents who need to band together to save their community in this ambitious Dutch sci-fi-comedy outing. Straight Outta Space will be getting its North American premiere at Fantasia.

…and if that isn’t enough, here are some one-line synopses for other interesting titles appearing at the festival!

Holy Night: Demon Hunters (South Korea) – a gang of exorcists track and fight a band of devil worshippers and the demons they conjure, blending dark humour with plenty of brawls and horror.

Sugar Rot (Canada) – ice-cream-flavoured body horror as a girl becomes pregnant with…something which begins to change both her body and mind, after she endures an assault at the ice-cream parlour where she works.

Touch Me (USA) – two co-dependent best friends become addicted to the heroin-like touch of an alien narcissist who may or may not be trying to take over the world.

Queens of the Dead (USA), directed by Tina Romero, whose name you might recognise, Queens of the Dead positions the zombie apocalypse outside the walls of a giant NYC warehouse party, leaving a diverse bunch of people to fight for survival.

The Virgin of the Quarry Lake (Argentina) – repeat everything I said above about Indonesia’s contribution to recent horror but with Argentina this time; here, a young woman turns to witchcraft as a means of navigating a changing and complex modern world, blending horror with sensitive coming-of-age stylings.

The festival will also be running its usual roster of retro features (including the brilliant House with the Laughing Windows and Paul Morrissey’s thus-far rare cult classic Mixed Blood (thanks to Arrow and Vinegar Syndrome for their new restorations of these titles), as well as in-person events, including panel discussions, talks and a book launch: That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Film by Payton McCarty-Simas.

Pins and Needles (2024)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

We start Pins and Needles (2024) in the same brisk, grisly manner which remains consistent throughout the film. The first quick lesson we learn is that blood is hard to shift, even when you’re scrubbing it away as hard as you can. We get this message before the title screen even appears, mind; this is not a film here to waste time, and it’s great to see.

However, this is just a brief shock before we move elsewhere, first getting a sense of scale – via shots of wide, open spaces – then zooming in on the strange minutiae of nature, its insects and invertebrates, squirming in jars. This is because our protagonist Max (Chelsea Clark) is an environmental science grad student doing field work, out collecting specimens. She’s heading off early though, getting a ride from her friend Harold (Daniel Gravelle) – a nice guy, if a little misguided, who has arranged to pick up a friend-of-a-friend on the way who’s pretty obviously a small time drug dealer. This bad call is partly responsible for a chain of events: a near-miss police stop, a hasty detour and an unplanned pitstop.

Fortunately – although the ominous soundtrack does anything but signpost this as ‘fortunate’ – their vehicle has gotten a flat right outside a surprisingly state-of-the-art house, right out there in the middle of nowhere: surely the people who live there can help? Max heads off to investigate – and so it begins, with Max, a Type 1 diabetic, at the mercy of her depleting insulin supplies, as well as everything else which begins to escalate once they’ve encountered the owners of the house. But as it soon turns out, only the house itself can offer any hope for finding the means to get the hell out of there and to safety, leading to a kind of double jeopardy for Max, who has to get inside to get outside. What she discovers inside is grotesque, alluding to the right amounts of rumour and urban myth about the super rich whilst turning it into a tense, gruesome game of survival.

Whilst later in the film director/writer James Villeneuve – who also directed the superb Vicious Fun – permits more and more slivers of dark humour to creep in, the set-up in Pins and Needles really isn’t comedic; from the outset, it has an artfully awry vibe, a feeling of something being ‘off’. It’s hard to pin it down. It could be because of the oppressive soundscape; maybe it’s the lush-looking, but disjointed early scenes; it could be the feeling of being in medias res right from the start, or even just the expert use of handheld cameras to keep us feeling like we’re stuck on Max’s level, enduring horrible surprise after horrible surprise alongside her. Whatever it is – probably all of this and more besides – it does its job, spinning a visually strong, atmospheric experience which is sustained.

Whilst our first up-close introduction to affluent homeowners Frank (Ryan McDonald) and Emily (Kate Corbett) feels like the film’s first big gear shift, with their casual cruelty being presented through some overblown dialogue, it does begin the process of adding in that dark humour whilst also resembling a lot of the most effusive claptrap spoken by the world’s very real super rich, whose words and performances are no kin together. This is a Canadian film, but the way Pins and Needles combines its wide open spaces, slick modern interiors, arrogant affluence and have-more cruelty feels very American. That could just be a personal perception thing. Hints given as to the source of all this wealth surpass land borders, anyway.

Whilst you may recognise some of the elements in this film, because there are a lot of familiar plot points from other, older horrors, there’s never a sense of Pins and Needles feeling simply derivative. It hasn’t set out to emulate anything, anyway: it just has a sense of what has come before it and ideas on how it can do its own thing with some of those central ideas. Furthermore, it retains a taut, crisp structure throughout, with an engrossing lead performance and a growing sense of confidence which serves it well. In some respects, despite the differences in plot, it reminds me of Apartment 1BR: it shares the earlier film’s dedication to getting the core elements right, understanding the importance of a strong lead role and avoiding the temptation to let things balloon to an overly-long runtime. It’s clearly been edited right down to the bone, and it absolutely works to the film’s credit. This is one sharp, economical horror, great at sustaining tension and a genuine pleasure (?) to watch.

Pins and Needles (2024) is available now from Filmhub.

Ba (2024)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

In the opening scenes of Ba (2024), the presence of a strange, hooded figure making its way into a hospital ward is clearly, strongly reminiscent of Grim Reaper folklore. It’s a fair first impression, borne out by what follows – but in its own mythology-building and the careful ways it humanises its main characters, Ba is much more than a re-tread of tried-and-tested subject matter. It takes a trope, a well-established set of beliefs and does more than enough with these to make the film as a whole feel fresh and worthwhile.

We move back six months earlier: father Daniel (Lawrence Kao) and daughter Colette (Kai Cech) are driving and chatting, seemingly happily. But it’s not long until we see that this is bluster: they’re homeless, and they were hoping to stay with a friend, but that falls through, too. They have to change their plans: dad tries to keep things upbeat, but staying overnight in a parking lot with your child? It’s not ideal, to say the least.

The situation shifts. When Daniel finds an abandoned bag in the parking lot, he is curious enough to open it. Inside, he finds cash – lots of cash – and a note. It tells the reader that if they take the payment, then it’ll be considered a sign-up to the ‘eternal profession’. For now, that sounds scarier than it does tempting, but you know Daniel won’t be able to hold out for long. He loves his daughter, he’s a single parent and he wants to provide for her (the ‘Ba’ of the title is a version of ‘Pa’). The next day, Ba goes back to the bag – still there, still untouched – and this time, he takes the cash. The contract is now sealed.

As the film progresses, we get glimpses of all of the things which have brought father and daughter to this point, providing a picture of a family beset on all sides by recognisable, realistic problems. This is important, because to believe in the supernatural turn of events, you need characters with plausible backstories. It’s a lesson many indie filmmakers could stand to learn. We see just enough of the injuries (Daniel is, or was a pro dancer), the health conditions, the family schism, the eviction notice which have led to the parking lot: it isn’t overwritten, but it helps significantly to generate pathos for both of these people. The film’s spin on the idea of Death personified turns death itself into a shady, underground industry of sorts and it’s surprisingly effective: in this universe, and I can’t help but think of these ideas as a kind of horror shadow to some of Terry Pratchett’s best work, the Grim Reaper works as part of a conglomerate, not dead but not alive in the normal sense, with a job role and a contract which has workplace stipulations. Fulfil your contract, and you can quit – if you do things to the letter. Of course, roles and responsibilities like this have quite a lot riding on them, with much that could go wrong. Beyond this idea, Ba can be read as a critique of the whole idea of indentured labour – particularly given that we have an immigrant single father here, already pushed to the margins of society with a pre-existing array of very tough decisions to make.

For all its fantasy components, however, Ba isn’t an especially complex film; it does enough, it has great ideas, it utilises subtle effects, but it’s the touching details and strong performances which truly carry it. It also adds in new characters and stories very carefully, with only one exception (a villain arrives, misbehaves and departs at twice the speed of anyone else). However, misfires here are so infrequent as to be easily overlooked. Ba is a richly colourful, well-framed and visually appealing film, and it’s equally gratifying that writer/director Benjamin Wong and his team haven’t succumbed to the frequent indie temptation to push the film to a much longer runtime because they couldn’t bear to part with any footage. The runtime we have – an economical 75 minutes – is more than suitable for the story at hand. Ba is a supernatural tale, sure, but it works as well as it does because of the loving – if damaged – family at its heart.

Ba (2024) is now available digitally in the US.

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 sadly, despite its many strengths, 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.