Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

There’s not a lot of greenery in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, but we get a few flashes of a more abundant way of life as, at the very start of the film, we meet the heroine of Fury Road in her childhood days. This is the mysterious Green Place, then, and it’s somehow been concealed from all of the marauding fuel heads until now. As they play, and eat! Fruit! a young Furiosa and an even younger Valkyrie spot a group of bikers, who have seemingly just stumbled upon this place. Furiosa (Alyla Browne) tries to sabotage their bikes – they can’t be allowed to carry word of what they’ve discovered elsewhere – but she gets caught and kidnapped.

These bikers – or ‘Roobillies’ as they’re known (one of the film’s lovely coined words) want to ingratiate themselves with petty gang leader Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), which they wager they can do by bringing him a living, breathing, pathfinder. Resources in the wasteland are scarce. A little girl who can lead them to her home? Perfect. They’re right to guess that Dementus will be intrigued; we see him at his momentary most hinged moment here, if people can be hinged: he’s clad in a parachute-silk vestment, like a religious figure. It’s interesting to watch his cowl change colour as the film progresses, with a darker hue for every increasingly unhinged stage. But for now, he’s happy to treat the child well, then on the next day, to follow her trail. However, the trail runs both ways: Furiosa’s mother has tracked them to the camp, and wants her daughter back. The rescue attempt does not go very well, but she does at least extract a promise from Furiosa to make it home one day. So here we have purpose and key enemy: locked in.

We get to spend some quality time with Dementus’s gang, just before they move on again. There are some interesting dynamics and world-building to enjoy here, and the casting of Hemsworth, who was pipped to the post to play Max in Fury Road, is an inspired choice: forget Thor; what a damn good villain he makes. Later down the line, a chance encounter with a War Boy – for this reviewer, the War Boy phenomena is still the most intriguing aspect of the Mad Max universe – alerts the Dementus gang to the presence of the Citadel, as of course being run by a …comparatively rather healthier-looking Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme). Dementus’s merry men sense an opportunity to grab some of this power for themselves, pushing for a food, water and guzzolene deal, once they’ve overrun some important Immortan territory. Quid pro quo.

One of the quirks of this film is that Immortan Joe comes across as a rather measured figure compared to Dementus, who – though choc-full of ambition and pluck – is exactly what happens when people get overpromoted. A message for our times, perhaps. As a result, when when Joe asks to retain the mysterious child in Dementus’s party, seeing her as a would-be wife of the future, the Citadel still seems less awful than the chaos which soon begins to unfold elsewhere. Come to think of it, Miller definitely enjoys playing around with the ghosts of bureaucracy in this film: it’s Dementus’s failure to turn up for a scheduled meeting which really pushes Joe over the edge later on. Dementus reluctantly agrees to part with his ‘daughter’ Furiosa, but she doesn’t really think much of the easeful, but horrific lifestyle which threatens to unfold before her, and as soon as she’s able, she escapes, making herself too useful as a mechanic to be sought for elsewhere. So that’s another big question answered. As Furiosa grows up (with a super-subtle segue from Alyla Browne to Anya Taylor-Joy) and as she gets entrusted with more and more responsibility for Joe’s beloved war rigs, she never loses sight of her desire to avenge herself on Dementus.

It’s a fairly simple set-up, just as the glorious (and it has to be said, vastly superior) Mad Max: Fury Road is essentially a drive out and back again, and so at its absolute best Furiosa is another high action, high drama road movie, with massive pursuits and disasters, and sustained, engrossing sequences. There’s so much to recommend it: George Miller clearly eats, breathes and sleeps this universe, and so the little touches (the props, the costumes, the finer points of the script) are incredible. That being said, one thing that the Mad Max films have never needed is ample explication. In fact, they’ve made an artform of doing the opposite. The same script which can draw a laugh in Furiosa can also overstay its welcome in other moments; we know the world has been killed, and we’ve never really needed to know much else, so why talk things through so much here? Of course, the argument could easily be that this isn’t a Mad Max film – except it can’t quite decide if it is or it isn’t. Max is shoehorned in as a kind of token gesture; excerpts from Fury Road bring us full circle, and he’s right there in the title, too. From the outside looking in, things don’t quite hang together without him, and Miller seems to know that – or else, there were some difficult chats at the planning stage, which is of course, more than possible.

There are some other puzzlers and problems in Furiosa. The film is at its absolute best when the physical spectacles it offers are most plausibly real, with sustained live action and stunts. In other aspects however, things are almost entirely derailed by great, clumsy dollops of CGI, not just at scale, but in the detail, too: bringing these extraordinary scenes to life probably necessitates the use of CGI, but when used, it has to be beyond reproach, or else the brain checks out: this happened a few times, unfortunately. Then there’s the length of the film: at just shy of two and a half hours long, it still feels like the timeline gets rather squashed at the end, with the rush to line everything up for Fury Road affecting the pace, which had grown quite uneven by the last chapter, and as ever, we don’t need the bloody chapters: the audience are always capable of working out that we’ve moved on in time and place without text to explain this.

But, look. A few flustered moments don’t mean I’m not glad to revisit this world: George Miller, still working, with maybe another Mad Max film in him, gets held to a high standard because of the work he’s done throughout his career. And Furiosa herself is an engaging character, worthy of her own story: Anya Taylor-Joy, despite her current ubiquity – popping up in any interesting epic – does a good job in this very physical role. It’s Charlize Theron’s part. We know that. But Joy is a close second, and that’s no insult at all. With its high colour, visceral sound design and roaring vehicles, there’s a lot to love about Furiosa, and a few misfires don’t derail the appeal of the film as a whole.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) is in cinemas now: go and support it, or get more and more superhero films until you reach a lethal dose and can no longer walk away.

Handling the Undead (2024)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Are the undead growing less vicious? Once upon a time, they’d be up and at you the second they were resurrected, but a few films of late have taken a drastically different approach, repositioning the dead as a moral and philosophical quandary – which brings us straight to Handling the Undead, a film which very nearly skips straight past the presence of the undead in order to ponder their existence. The resulting, more-or-less arthouse approach to the topic will not be for everyone. In some ways, it’s not for me either, but the film’s deep commitment to its bleak, minimalist approach does hold a certain appeal.

We start, to give director Thea Hvistendahl credit, as we mean to go on: things are quiet, and they’re ominous. The credits hang in darkness for what feels like a suspiciously long period of time, before finally ceding to opera music. We meet one of our characters, though like most of the characters here, we find out very little about him. This older man sits at home alone; after a while, he gets up, grabs some food from the fridge and sets off from his apartment to another apartment in a different block. Still silent, he enters, where he encounters a young woman who – there’s a pattern emerging – studiously ignores him. Trauma hangs in the air. Clearly keen that she eats something, he plates up a meal for her, but she gets past him, finally telling him that she will, ‘eat at work’. Unfazed, he covers her plate with clingfilm, and puts it in the fridge, with all the other clingfilmed plates. We follow the young woman to work, watch her keeping calm and carrying on, clearly evading well-intentioned offers of help from her colleagues.

Elsewhere, we encounter some other domestic scenarios: an elderly woman says goodbye to a relative at a chapel of rest; a reluctant teen is tasked with babysitting her younger brother, Kian, as her her parents head out by car. What is going to link these stories, we wonder?

Death. It’s death. It’s undeath, too, but perhaps not quite as we know it. Later that evening, a weird electrical phenomenon overruns the country: radios crackle, heads ache, lights blink out. Whilst all of this is over as soon as it begins, it has an incredible impact: it resurrects the dead. Just the newly dead? That is not an answer we get from the screenplay at hand, but for those people we have already met, it has a significant impact, as they have recently lost a loved one. Of course, the reappearance of these grieved-for people is a profound shock; we have no schema for such things. Why would we?

A lot of horror cinema usually skips quite neatly past the schema idea because things are a tad more urgent; Handling the Undead, by contrast, has all the time in the world to show us everyday people struggling as the only great certainty they have ever known, shatters. Nonetheless, there are also some meticulous, and rather repellent examples of of attention to detail when it comes to the dead themselves. Of course, for example, their eyes might be uncomfortably dry. If this film resembles any other film, then it’s Birth/Rebirth, which shares some of the same predilections, and takes the same approach to the undead – here, as there, shadows of their former selves, inert more than wicked, and presenting issues for human relationships. Handling the Undead focuses with great scrutiny on human relationships, even if we glean whatever we know. No one expounds anything. The dead are only slightly more reticent than the living.

However, even before the going gets properly strange, the films sets out its stall as an odd, minimalist piece of horror-drama. From the array of perfectly comfortable but anodyne housing, to the amount of aerial shots creating distance, to the slow, deliberate pace of the film, you always feel at arm’s length. The film looks weirdly cold throughout, too, despite it being set in the middle of summer. When we first meet Anna (Renate Reinsve), she’s sat nearly on top of a room fan; at work, her face is moist with perspiration. Throughout the film, people sit around in various states of undress, but it looks like the whole thing is in some kind of deep freeze. It makes New French Extremity look positively tropical by comparison. Essentially, the world feels awry, even before the phenomenon takes hold: there’s a definite, sustained artistic vision behind the film, lending a kind of consistency to proceedings which does help to hold things together.

The film’s key issue is that all of this build up, aesthetic and otherwise, begins to groan and collapse under its own weight. Its unusual depiction of the undead – for the most part as mute, unfeeling, inexplicable beings – gives us the bare bones of an engaging plot point, but also a sticking point. So the dead are like this, then: what happens now? Where do we go from here? The screenplay hints that similar crises are unfolding everywhere, though we learn almost nothing about what could have been a fascinating contextual backdrop for the more intimate storytelling. And, when things do become more interesting, it’s when the film gets closer to far more familiar treatments of the undead, and what the undead tend to do. That’s a problem, because we get neither fuller world-building, dramatic tension, nor resolution. The original short story, by Let The Right One In author John Ajvide Lindqvist (who also co-wrote the screenplay) looks more at the conflicts between society and individual in such a scenario. Indeed, the film has been in ‘production hell’ for some time: perhaps some of that troubled development has had an impact on the film itself.

But, troubled birth (or troubled resurrection) aside, the film does offer sometimes brutal, but more often very sad, sustained depictions of grief and loss, and it deserves credit for that. It’s the old idea that ‘sometimes dead is better’, but handled very carefully and deliberately. It will be too sparse, too ponderous for some audiences, but Handling the Undead does boast a crisp, artistic presentation, a brooding, death-march pace and plenty of rich symbolism. It has its issues, but all in all, it’s quietly provocative.

Handling the Undead (2024) opens exclusively at the IFC Center in NY on May 31st, then in select cities on June 7th.

Win! A Bittersweet Life Box Set

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Multi-award-winning director Kim Jee-woon’s (The Good, The Bad, The Weird, I Saw The Devil) ultra-violent Korean neo-noir A Bittersweet Life gets an all-guns-blazing Limited Edition Dual UHD and Blu-ray release this summer courtesy of critically acclaimed label Second Sight Films. The brand-new set promises an extensive array of fascinating special features and is slated for release on 22 July 2024. It will also be available in standard editions.

A loyal gangster Sun-woo (Lee Byung-hun – I Saw The Devil, The Magnificent Seven), falls foul of his gang when he’s assigned to keep watch over the young mistress of his crime boss. When he’s unable to carry out an order to kill the girlfriend and her new lover, things take an ultra-violent turn.

His boss wants payback, but has he taken on the wrong adversary? After a brutal beating, Sun-woo is hellbent on vengeance and embarks on a vicious rampage of punishment… there will be blood, blood and more blood. As the body count rises, the action ramps up, until the furiously violent mayhem reaches its thunderous crescendo.

A Bittersweet Life Limited Edition Box Set is presented in a stunning rigid slipcase with new artwork by Michael Bolland, accompanied by an in-depth 120-page book. There’s an arsenal of extensive new and archive material, including new commentaries, a making-of featurette, music videos and much more.

Life’s what you make it, so make yours A Bittersweet Life with this must-have kick-ass collector’s edition.

We have one box set to give away, so if you would like to be in with a chance of winning, please email the site with the email header A Bittersweet Life (and please include your name and address). This prize will be drawn on Friday 12th June at 12:30pm (GMT). Sorry folks, but this prize is for UK readers only! Your details will be securely stored until the end of the competition and then deleted.

Thanks and good luck!

ETA: apologies, this competition is now closed

Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (1981)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

The best way to sum up Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker is to say that it’s mesmerisingly weird – both in its plot and in its origins. It was directed by William Asher, who is better known for gentle TV comedy series such as I Love Lucy and Bewitched: this film is – to say the least – a change of pace. A domestic psychosexual horror which morphs into a slasher, it has a few echoes of Pete Walker here and there, but it’s very much still its own beast. It doesn’t move from the sublime to the ridiculous, but rather holds both in balance throughout its runtime. None of its given titles – Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker, Night Warning nor Protégé of Evil – really make sense, but that’s okay. That’s not really the point.

We start innocuously enough, with a family trip: two young parents are leaving their toddler son Billy in the capable hands of his loving aunt Cheryl (Susan Tyrrell) while they head off to visit grandma: all perfectly normal. However, soon there’s a (horribly protracted) problem: the car’s brakes don’t work. Being in an American car, dad probably can’t change down through the gears to slow himself down, though that’s not the only reason that both parents are killed as the car weaves from one side of the steep-sided mountain road to another. The upshot is that Billy is orphaned.

Fourteen years pass by, as they have a habit of doing. It seems that Aunt Cheryl stepped in to raise basketball-mad Billy, in a fairly comfortable middle-class home stacked with Catholic iconography and – photos of Billy. Aunt Cheryl is a little overbearing: clue number one. Clues number two and three are a little harder to miss: we see her rummaging through Billy’s wallet, less than happy to see that he has a condom in there, and then waking him up by purring in his ear. But for the moment, at least, Billy is none the wiser, because this is all he’s ever known. He has a few other things going on: there’s some jealousy and conflict in his basketball team with a guy called Eddie (a young Bill Paxton, who unfortunately disappears from proceedings rather early on). Then there’s girlfriend Julie (Julie Linden) and the odd squabble.

But the biggest problem for Billy, and one which we see blown up to immense proportions, is his error of growing up. He’s delighted when he gets a chance at a college sports scholarship: Cheryl is very much opposed to the idea, and it’s from this point that the veneer of domesticity begins to crack. Disaster (well, the first disaster) strikes on Billy’s birthday: Cheryl knifes a TV repairman after making a clumsy attempt to seduce him; by chance, as he’s looking through the window at the time, Billy finds himself complicit, and initially tries to cover for his aunt’s story – that the repairman tried to rape her, so she killed him in self-defence. This brings them into contact with Detective Carlson (Bo Svenson), a deeply unpleasant man who doubles up by being profoundly useless at his job, but his unstinting attention to the case definitely ups the ante in an already tense situation.

As Cheryl tries to reassert control, and as Carlson (together with the slightly less useless, albeit Safeguarding Awareness Course drop-out Sergeant Cook) continue investigating the repairman’s murder, Billy gets hit the hardest. Poor, sympathetic Billy, well played by Jimmy McNichol, who briefly ended up in light entertainment after Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker – appearing in The Love Boat). He gets caught between clashing moral attitudes, both his aunt’s and Carlson’s, so whilst the film is definitely a domestic horror, it stands in for a bigger picture, too. It’s hard not to use the word ‘microcosm’, so – here it is. Something very interesting here is how the normal and the functional intrude onto the dysfunctional, not the other way round: visits from Julie, or well-meaning neighbours, are what initially complicate things. The prospect of Billy heading off to have a normal life is total anathema to Cheryl. Carlson can’t allow himself to believe that Billy is ‘normal’, either.

This brings us to how fascinatingly unreconstructed the film is. It’s not all that unusual, of course, to see and hear things in older films which wouldn’t fly today, and in a way this is all part of the time capsule effect which we get so often in films of this vintage, and older. But still, look at the way Carson interrogates Cheryl on her marital status, designating her as a lesbian when it turns out she’s neither married nor divorced. Then there’s his immense paranoia about Billy’s sexuality, reflecting casual and institutional homophobia in increasingly pig-headed, unpalatable ways. But, hey, these attitudes are still around, and Coach Landers (Steve Eastin) is one of the film’s sole decent, measured individuals, despite being threatened and outed by Carlson as a ‘fag’. It’s clear we’re meant to see Carlson as just as dangerous as Cheryl in several respects, and to understand that he has the weight of powerful institutions behind him, too. One monster facilitates the behaviour of the other, when it comes down to it.

In terms of performances, though, Svenson may be good, but Tyrrell is brilliant. Going from inappropriately flirtatious, to overwrought, to authoritarian, she dominates the screen. Sure, some of the final act exposition could use a little more work, and the film’s slasher mode shifts things quite a long way from where we started, but Cheryl is always queasily interesting to watch, giving a very physical performance. Nothing is phoned in. Representing something of the warped maternal drive which has been used to designate psychotic females for generations, she adds something else – societal expectations around marriage, and childbearing, are brought to bear here too. Carson speaks for some of these, but it runs deeper than that.

Little wonder that this title ended up on the DPP 39 Video Nasties list – it’s basically a shopping list of all the elements that the 80s censors disliked enough to prohibit. Still, Severin have stepped up and put together a phenomenal presentation here: the film looks very much of its era but colourful and crisp. There’s a wealth of extras, too: audio commentaries, interviews with stars and crew, a cinematic trailer and a TV spot. It comes highly recommended. Take a look.

Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker was released on 4K UHD/Blu-ray on 13th May 2024.

In Flames (2023)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

As the film begins, it seems that two different spheres – the domestic and the world outside the home – are being drawn into sharp relief here; navigating these two spheres, and the risks attendant on each, does indeed form a key part of In Flames. We are first faced with a young woman, who looks fearfully through – it’s not immediately clear where she is, but she looks alarmed, and a raised male voice is what is making her nervous. This is a family home in modern Pakistan, and by day, we see that the same household is dealing with the shock news of a recent death. The family’s patriarch has died unexpectedly; neighbours arrive to pay their respects, but the women do not attend the burial, scheduled for that day. It’s their job to prepare a special meal and to clean the house – there’s that domestic sphere again. They are less well-placed to deal with a sudden slew of financial concerns. Not knowing he was about to die, the patriarch has left debts. Uncle Nasir, arrived out of a blue sky to attend the funeral, offers to help them out: it’s the least he can do. At least funerals the world round seem to bring out the very worst in people; all he needs is a few signatures and their problems are over…

Mariam (Ramesha Nawal) is clearly, quietly troubled by it all. She attempts a spell of normality away from the house, taking her mother’s car to go and study and the nearby library, but as she waits to drive on, she is startled by an unknown man who smashes the car window and tries to take control of the vehicle. (To do what? We could hazard a guess. Festering, repressed sexuality haunts this film like a ghost throughout; you get the distinct sense that commandeering the vehicle is only step one of this new, opportunistic plan – and the man’s yells of ‘whore!’ as she gets away from him are another clue.) Mariam is shocked, but clearly no pushover: she continues to her destination, meeting up with her friend Rabiya as planned. Rabiya also has a friend with her: recently returned from Canada, Asad (Omar Javaid) has clearly brought a few more progressive values back with him, and he’s shocked by what Mariam has just gone through for simply driving down a residential street.

They soon begin to grow close, even though at first, Mariam seems honour-bound to question his motives. However, their connection is wholly innocent, loving and sweet – even if it means that this questioning eldest sibling of the household isn’t around when her mother Fariha (Bakhtawar Mazhar) finally acquiesces, providing Nasir with the paperwork he wants. It’s the perfect storm; no, scrub that. Mariam’s absence and Fariha’s trusting desperation create a sequence of storms, the navigation of which makes up the rest of this captivating, slow burn film.

It’s certainly not just the presence of brazen, grifting crooks exploiting an outdated and misogynistic legal system which grants In Flames its well-rounded sense of outrage. The whole film builds a picture of a heavily-surveilled, policed world – which impacts, in the main, upon women. ‘Good’ girls don’t walk the streets; they don’t sit inappropriately close to male acquaintances; they study indoors, privately, if they know what’s good for them. But nor are they safe at home: the whole film’s premise is how even that security can be taken away, whether by depraved men literally clambering into supposedly safe compounds, or by malingering male relatives. Open spaces are – with one notable, beautiful exception – dangerous, hostile places. Mariam’s disorientation when placed in these open spaces is palpable, not least through the cinematography itself, for example with the use of a rolling, careering camera going in and out of focus: the sense of panic passes to us, too. The whole film is perfectly engineered to engender queasy sensations of anxiety: the heat, the streets, the people. Long before any hints of supernatural story-building, the film is rife with sickly, brewing foreboding.

Rich visuals are refracted more and more through carefully-crafted fantasy elements which, as the film gets closer to its final scenes, are recognisably horror in origin. They are woven into dreams and flashbacks, but seem very real; their presence doesn’t detract from the film’s otherwise meticulous realism, however, nor from its cautious pace and superb characterisation. Ramesha Nawal as Mariam is fantastic, enigmatic but still clearly sensitive, a young woman of few words who nonetheless makes you believe in her completely. When she’s ferocious, you want her to succeed, but how quickly she has to put that fire aside – for propriety’s sake, or because she simply cannot match the bleak ferocity of the world she lives in. Likewise, when she’s adrift in that world, you want her to be safe. Such a precarious emotional investment, this. Her mother Fariha begins to blossom as a character, too. It happens under duress, dreadful duress, but regardless, even in her desperation she has a matchless, quiet reserve of energy. Together, they are quite something.

The film as a whole is quite something, even with a few unresolved questions hanging there in the dark by the end. Whether via its meticulous realism or the increasing use of supernatural content, In Flames illuminates, with clever detail, a greater kind of darkness. Challenging and complex, it is a tour de force meld of harsh reality and harsh fantasy; that this is director Zarrah Kahn’s first feature is just incredible.

In Flames (2023) will be in select cinemas from 24th May 2024.

The Seductress From Hell (2024)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

A genre-splicing look at broken people and relationships, The Seductress From Hell has a wealth of creative visual ideas, but its rather flustered approach to storytelling (and its script issues) do unfortunately hamper the film’s overall success. In essentials, this is a revenge flick – albeit some of the targets are more collateral than anything else. Along the way, we get other narrative ideas being tantalised but not always developed more fully, leading to some issues in terms of focus, clarity and tone.

The film is set in Los Angeles, and boy, does it make that clear throughout. We start at 2am, and there’s a couple in bed – which turns out to be husband and wife Robert (Jason Faunt) and Zara (Rocio Scotto). Our first acquaintance with Zara is as she sneaks out of bed, down to the garage to get a mysterious box out of a lock-up. Inside is some occult paraphernalia, including a notebook filled with Satanic scrawls and artwork: you know exactly what these look like without laying eyes on them. Satan isn’t very often represented via Impressionism. As the opening credits roll, we see Zara flicking through the pages of the book. But, post credits, we’re at the breakfast table. It’s not long before we’re shown in no uncertain terms that Robert is not a very nice guy. He berates Zara for her lack of acting work; she vocal-fries her way through a ream of apologies. But she’s waiting on a call-back; unfortunately, when Robert the bully leaves the house to go to his soul-crushing sales job, Zara retaliates by knocking back a handful of pills, passing out and missing the all-important call.

She lies about this to Robert at dinner, but thankfully there’s an upcoming distraction: old friend Derek (Raj Jawa) and his girlfriend Maya (Kylie Rohrer) are coming to dinner the following night. (We check in with them too and they’re not exactly looking forward to it: awkward dinner date incoming!) It’s a disaster, we see more of the kinds of treatment Zara has to ensure, and it’s all enough to trigger a late night visit to the lock-up with the Satanic sketchbook; she also picks up some chloroform, a few tools and – as luck would have it – some surgical scrubs.

Zara is now set on a new phase as a torturer and enthusiastic amateur surgeon; the set-up in the impromptu surgery shifts the film from being reminiscent of the famous-at-all-costs Starry Eyes to being a little more reminiscent of the surgery-as-penance movie American Mary, but there’s also a few hints and clues regarding just how much of all of this is pure fantasy, or at least, not quite unfolding as it seems to be, which keeps the viewer questioning the ensuing events. However, it’s to Scotto’s credit that she’s able to turn in an increasingly spirited performance, going from terrified victim to easeful aggressor and back again (as the film experiments with fantasy and flashbacks in places, too).

So what’s the problem? In a nutshell, it’s this: The Seductress From Hell spells out a lot of things we could assume, glean or accept quite readily without being told, whilst dodging some of the key details which we could really do with knowing. It paints in incredibly broad strokes; its important themes (Hollywood! Capitalism! Gender!) are represented by repeated, overblown mentions in a script which really needed a solid, uncompromising edit. No one talks like this, in such long, complex, grammatically accurate sentences loaded with abstract nouns – not in informal settings, anyway. It occurred to me that this may have been a deliberate symbolic decision; the script could be some way of addressing the scripted, unreal nature of our lives – or something like that. But I’m not so sure; this script tells us in such detail who and what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ that it loses a lot of its plausibility, something which is still needed, even in a film with fantasy elements. And yet, the Satanic content is barely mentioned; it creeps in, rather than being properly introduced, then it becomes integral to the plot, for reasons unexplained.

Perhaps a stylistic decision to either go for the arty and experimental, or full-on Satanic horror, would have focused the film more successfully; in either case, the film’s themes and ideas could have emerged without needing to be explained to the audience as they have been here. For all that, though, there are some interesting and engaging visuals, and finally we have some Euro trance music assuming its rightful place in a kill scene.

Last Words (2023)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Much is made in supernatural horror of what is seen or unseen, but so much of what scares us is down to what we hear – or think we hear. Using that idea, Last Words (2023) is an effective short film which, although it tantalises several ideas regarding the source of its horror, is ultimately frightening through what it does with sound. It may have a very different location – unfolding its horror for the main part in a sunny, bright and starkly beautiful setting – but it’s reminiscent of The Signalman, with the same, ominous voice carrying uncannily across the divide.

We start in medias res – never a bad idea in a short film with a limited timeframe – and we encounter Kira (Ché March), a hiker who has just fallen down a stony ravine. She’s able to stand, but she has injured her ankle. Her friend Max (Nick Luberto) thankfully manages to spot her from above, and suggests he’ll come to her. It’s not the best of ideas, given how treacherous the drop is, so Kira begins to make her way along her new path, presumably looking for the safest route back – for both of them. However, as she shuffles along, she spots someone else. There’s a young man, watching her. She instinctively calls out to him for help but he responds passively, only pressing a finger to his lips to gesture for her to be quiet. It’s a simple and strangely uncanny gesture; Kira is unsettled, but as this strange few seconds unfold, she hears Max – and now it sounds as though he is the one needing help. This is one of the ways the film subverts expectations: here, the person who has fallen is not, at least initially, the person at the most risk.

Sound has now overtaken sight as the key means of interacting with the world. As sunny and as bright as it is, Kira is dependent on Max’s voice; she may as well be in the dark. Hearing him cry out in alarm only fills her with more urgency to reach him. But none of this feels right: the sound of his voice has become uncertain, unsettling. If he cried out in pain just now, how can he now be calling out to her, semi-normally? She has no choice but to try her best to get back to her friend, but what will she find when she does?

If the odd moment in this film – a key reveal, in fact – looks a little tried-and-tested in terms of its appearance and make-up effects, then it hardly matters when looked at against the film as a whole. This is very nicely pared down, works well within the nine minute (or so) runtime and directors Teal Greyhavens and Nikolai Von Keller understand that you can get a great deal from an essentially simple idea – here, the uncanny horror of a displaced voice. This is the film’s real strength, although the end sequences suggest the presence of a myth or mythos of some kind, some barely-glimpsed orchestrator, lurking in the film’s rare dark corners. The film is genuinely creepy where it presents the audience with its voiceless watchers, and it produces some truly effective scenes along these lines. Best of all, Last Words is available to watch on Alter right now. Have at it.

Pandemonium (2023)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

There’s nothing more galling in life than a dwindling promise, and sadly, that is a real problem for Pandemonium (2023). What begins as a rather beautiful, stark and savage riff on what happens to us after we die disintegrates into a mess of clumsily-stitched parts, united for the most part only by two ideas: death is cruel, and so are families. As much as Pandemonium boasts intense sound design, some initially stunning visuals and a decent opening idea, its rapidly meandering focus cancels them out, leaving us with a tonally odd hodgepodge which just doesn’t work.

We start out with a man called Nathan (Hugo Dillon) who awakes, disorientated, on a remote mountain road. His first thoughts are, ‘I made it,’ and ‘I’m not hurt,’ which you can quickly guess are just wishful thinking; once he stands up and sees the nearby wreck of his car, we are perhaps privy to something he has yet to accept. But for exposition’s sake, he is helped to accept it by the presence of another man, Daniel (Arben Bajraktaraj). Daniel has worked it out: they are dead. He was on his motorbike, Nathan was in his car and they fatally collided.

Nathan’s distress is genuinely painful to watch as he is gradually convinced of what’s happened to him. Both men grieve for their lives, but for the moment they’re unable to move. No one has come for them; no one is there to guide them. Rather like the death which occurs in the wonderful A Ghost Story (2017), they seem doomed to remain in one place – in their case, where they passed away. However, Daniel hears something, and then he sees something. Two sets of doors appear on the now impassably snowy road and, if it seems that Nathan’s past actions preclude him from following Daniel through one of the doors, then it ain’t so simple for Daniel, either. No one is getting off lightly here. If it seems, for a moment, like it’s all about to turn into a version of the idea that ‘good guys go to heaven’, then the film at least spares us that.

However, Pandemonium next opts to park this sequence, and in so doing, dispenses with the most successful part of its storyline. It broadens its scope, beginning to take in other scenarios, characters and settings. It slowly transpires that this is actually an anthology film: that could have all been fine, with a genuinely solid overarching narrative. Instead, the icy horror of the opening twenty minutes or so is first replaced with an odd, Gothic storyline about a disturbed little girl in a chateau, a blend of My Pet Monster and something altogether bleaker. Then there’s another, more worldly chapter which, again, has little to do with the two previous ones, other than how it takes death for a theme. This is horror cinema, folks, or at least it’s horror-adjacent: we’re already wall-to-wall with scintillating stories about death in horror, and audiences generally require more convincing than this. Even the presence of a clear nod to Fulci’s The Beyond (1981) – if openly lifting a scene constitutes a ‘clear nod’ – can’t cut it on its own. The nagging suspicion here is that these segments were never scripted at the same time, and have found themselves cut and shut together for reasons of expedience, rather than coherence.

At its best, Pandemonium‘s simple symbolism, stark scenery and the effective performances from Bajraktaraj and Dillon are very appealing, whilst its booming, sturm and drang music (together with a well-realised soundscape more generally) make this, initially, an engaging, sensory experience. There are some interesting ideas too: for instance, around the seeming corporeality of the newly dead: can Daniel really heave a corpse from one place to another? Or is this part of the fantasy? However, after experiencing this feeling of total engagement, the next phase feels like falling out of love: you remember what appealed to you in the first place, so you try to maintain interest, but as time passes – though you can’t pinpoint the exact moment – you find yourself moving through uncertainty and boredom to a final feeling of rather shameful hostility. There are just no convincing links between these tales; each tale feels reticent about any kind of closure or cogency. Fantasy shouldn’t mean that all narrative expectations go out of the window, after all, if you have clearly elected to start using those narrative elements. And then, when we get Dillon back again, he’s being made to guest star in an episode of Buffy.

It’s genuinely very difficult to account for what happens to this film during its runtime, and whilst there are technical aspects to applaud, it takes more than effective cinematography to make a film.

Pandemonium (2023) launches on Arrow’s streaming service in May 2024.

Interview: Alberto Corredor, director of Baghead

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Following up from my recent review of Baghead (2023) – a broadly successful and often intriguing supernatural horror tale – Warped Perspective has been fortunate enough to have a chat with its director, Alberto Corredor, about his experiences working on this film, his first feature. Keri asked the questions: many thanks to Alberto, his team and all who facilitated this interview.

Keri/Warped Perspective: having initially made Baghead as a short film back in 2017, you decided to expand it into a feature-length: what inspired you to do this, and what were the challenges of this process? How pleased are you with the results?

AC: From the moment I read Lorcan’s script for the short film, I recognized that Baghead was a character with significant potential for a feature film adaptation. We approached the short film with this expansion in mind. Although the script was a complete story in itself, we always saw it as a proof of concept for a longer tale, exploring themes of grief, family, and closure. We invested considerable effort in designing Baghead, knowing that an iconic character would be crucial for the transition to a feature film.

There were numerous challenges in achieving this. The main challenge was crafting a story that retained the mood and essence of the short film without becoming redundant. Additionally, the transition from a short film, where I managed every aspect, to a studio-led project was substantial. It can be overwhelming, and feelings of insecurity—the well-known “impostor syndrome”—can surface, so it’s essential to be adaptable and rely on your team.

I am very proud of the film, especially considering the challenging circumstances we faced working during the COVID pandemic. Saying that, as a director, I now can only see all the mistakes and think about how I could have approached certain scenes differently. However, it’s important to accept these imperfections and apply the lessons learned to future projects.

WP: Where do you see Baghead in terms of its predecessors: did particular films or styles influence it?

AC: Visually, I discussed my references with Cale Finot, the director of photography. I am drawn to expressionism and J-Horror, as well as films like Mama and the works of Guillermo del Toro. We focused on the use of light and shadows, and the strategic use of negative space, as these elements significantly enhance the mood and tension necessary for genre stories. For the initial scene in the basement, where our protagonist encounters Baghead, I wanted to infuse a touch of Sam Raimi’s style. Raimi is a master at creating an uncanny yet amusing atmosphere, which was perfect for setting the tone for that scene.

WP: Reviews and articles about Baghead have so far tended to point out its (I’m sure entirely coincidental) similarities to another recent horror with a similar theme, Talk to Me. As an audience member this felt a little frustrating, given the fact that the short film came out years before Talk to Me. How do you feel about this as a filmmaker, first of all, and do you personally feel that these comparisons have had any effect, good or bad, on Baghead?

AC: I first learned about Talk to Me through an actor friend I met during the festival circuit for our short film in 2018. By 2023, we had been in post-production with Baghead for over a year when he mentioned that Talk to Me had a very similar premise and was quite impressive. Naturally, I knew the potential negative impact on our film, fearing that the novelty and shock factor of our character might be diminished. As a filmmaker, you must come to terms with the fact that people might independently conceive similar ideas, and sometimes the timing can be an issue. That’s simply part of the industry.

What is harder to accept, however, are the reviews or comments suggesting that we copied Talk to Me, especially considering our short film and its concept predates Talk to Me by five years. Honestly, I still haven’t watched Talk to Me; the thought of making comparisons is something I’m not ready for right now. Perhaps in a couple of years…

WP: Tell us about working with Freya Allan: she’s probably best-known in her career so far for playing Princess Cirilla in The Witcher: how did she enjoy working on a supernatural horror of this kind?

AC: Working with Freya was a fantastic experience. It was my first feature film, and it was also her first time leading one. We last discussed this during a promotional tour in Mexico. Initially, we faced some challenges, but we gradually found our rhythm. As Freya had never acted in a horror film before—despite her experience with fantasy elements in The Witcher—it took some time to determine the best approach for her character. Nevertheless, she was incredibly dedicated and succeeded in creating a compelling Iris, a character that audiences can understand and empathize with. Everyone on set could see her potential for a remarkable career. Freya is professional, a proper trooper, and has a natural rapport with the camera, which is something priceless for actors.

WP: It can be fun to ask directors to tell us something about making their film which audiences wouldn’t necessaily know about otherwise: some back story, some event, or anything of interest. Did anything unusual or interesting happen during the making of Baghead?

Looking back now, it was a crazy time to shoot a film. We just came out of lockdown and everyone wanted to shoot their projects, as we didn’t now if the restrictions would come back. We faced challenges in securing parts of our cast, crew, and even locations. Ultimately, we relocated the shoot to Berlin. The producers from The Picture Company were already there working on a Liam Neeson film, and they believed we could persuade some of the core crew to stay on and join our project. But the funny thing (well, funny now) was that [John Wick director] Chad Stahelski was shooting John Wick 4 at the same time. This meant that any location we were interested in was either unavailable to another film crew, or had become prohibitively expensive due to the John Wick effect!

WP: And finally, now that you’ve worked on a horror feature, do you have any new plans or projects on the horizon?

Oh, absolutely. I’m currently involved in a couple of projects, each at different stages. One is a military-horror story set against the backdrop of renewed Cold War tensions, inspired by the conflict in Ukraine. It draws from the mood of John Carpenter’s The Thing, taking place in a U.S. military barracks in the German mountains, adding an element of isolation in a frosty, hellish setting—complete with a monster. Mad Chance (Andrew Lazar’s production company) is producing this project, and we are currently in the process of casting.

Also, following my experience with Baghead, I realized I wanted a deeper involvement in story development, which meant taking on writing duties. I’ve completed the first draft of a screenplay in collaboration with Stephen Herman. This story feels very contemporary as it explores themes of human isolation and the challenges of finding compromises, all set in a dystopian, ultra-violent future. I like to describe it as A Quiet Place meets Mandy…

Baghead (2023) is available to buy or watch now.

All You Need is Death (2023)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

There are a couple of mysterious proverbs – at least they seem to be proverbs – at the beginning of All You Need is Death. ‘Love is a knife with a blade for a handle’; ‘Love goes in at the eye’. Taken together with the version of a certain Beatles track used for the title, and there we have it, one of the film’s themes: love as something toxic, love as pain. But the police interview which forms the opening scenes of the film, as a musician recounts a recent experience with a visitor, also establishes that music itself is key here. A young woman, Anna (Simone Collins) was caught recording folk songs being performed; CCTV in the pub captured a scuffle which broke out as a result, an event which is initially woven into the film itself. As the film dispenses with this framing device, becoming a more conventional narrative, we work out that Anna actually knows the disgruntled stranger – it’s her boyfriend, Aleks (Charlie Maher) and the whole scrap was just some convoluted means of getting more information on the songs.

Is folk music so desirable? So important? It would seem so, and it’s an especially difficult world to navigate without insider knowledge. Aleks is a foreigner and Anna, although Irish and conversant in Irish Gaelic, another important signifier, is from Dublin, so she’s quite unfamiliar with the rural Ireland they need to explore. Theirs is a race to capture and keep songs which are going extinct by the day: unless they are written down and preserved, then they’re gone forever, which makes them both potentially lucrative and historically important; there are others like them too, particularly folklorist Agnes (Catherine Siggins) who runs strange, secretive seminars where she gives advice, and it’s hard not to see some of the film’s occasional moments of dark humour at play here: niche coaching sessions for intrepid ethnographers. Anna and Aleks potentially get ahead of this game when they hear of an old woman living locally who can sing a vast retinue of ‘the old songs’; when they track her down, however, they find that Agnes has already acted on their information and beaten them to it. All three of them therefore arrive at the house of Rita Concannon (Olwen Fouéré), at first facing down the woman’s deep suspicion. There’s one song in particular which Rita expected to die with her, as she has no daughter to teach; so here we are, a daughterless woman and a motherless girl, seeking a song which has an ancient, tragic history. Rita finally agrees to sing it, provided that Anna agrees not to record it.

Promises are never precisely kept in films of this nature, and at its heart All You Need is Death is another rendering of a well-known cautionary tale: an outsider who reneges on vows or breaks rules, wittingly or unwittingly, and can expect to face the consequences. Perhaps ultimately All You Need is Death cannot sustain all of the elements it clearly wants to explore, and little wonder; it tries to do so much, linking magic, music, matriarchy and meaning, exploring the roles of language, knowledge and storytelling. But it raises so many interesting ideas that the film is definitely worthwhile, even though it uses a risky circular structure, starting out with a throwaway line which promises grisly horror to come, forewarning us that we will find ourselves back at this point again, police interview and all. So we know where we’re going: what comes in the meantime is nonetheless thought-provoking and engaging, even if the film crams pretty much all of its big questions and ideas into the first third of its runtime. The stage it sets is incredibly intricate.

In its use of music, All You Need is Death suggests a novel set of ideas whereby outsiders – collectors – take a strange, proprietorial attitude to folk songs, and by extension, to the culture which enfolds them. The songs themselves become saleable, desirable artefacts, even when their meaning is lost or obscured. More than that, though, music acts like a kind of portal in the film – not in an Evil Dead way, and not quite like The Shout, either. It’s not simply singing or even hearing the mysterious Concannon song which generates harm, but the more complex ways it leads to life imitating art imitating life, as it draws upon a horrific history and spreads something of this history in the meagre present. The history may be threatening – very much so – but it’s represented as the only hope for finding real meaning of any kind, which justifies at least in part the risks people are prepared to take in order to somehow own it. As Agnes puts it, ‘the future has been picked clean’; the past prevails. The word ‘alchemy’ is mentioned in the film, too, and it’s a good fit: this secretive, specialist, quasi-mystical practice promising both knowledge and wealth sums up what these people are trying to do, whilst the clobbering weight of Rita’s song embodies the great risks at play. And, at the heart of it all is language: a fascination, a hurdle, a riddle and a literal shibboleth.

If the sometimes smudgy estrangement, body horror and retribution plot points work less well than this extraordinary opening third suggests they might – with the script even resorting to explanations in the closing scenes, suggesting some lack of confidence that the audience are getting all of this – then the film still works overall. It’s an ambitious brand of folk horror in an increasingly crowded, and often now rather samey, field: it has interesting things to say, and in the dark, sparse, claustrophobic version of rural Ireland it offers, it conjures something intense, complex and provocative, with plenty to ponder.

All You Need is Death (2023) will be released on April 19th, 2024.

Baghead (2023)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

In a dusty pub, an evidently already troubled man (Peter Mullan) is disturbed by the arrival of a stranger, who enigmatically requests an audience with ‘her’. A short conversation ensues and the younger man, Neil (Jeremy Irvine) is sent away, agitated, in evident grief. It seems that this situation, and even living in this place, is coming to a head: Owen is next seen leaving a video message for the next owner of the pub, in which he describes a particular kind of sitting tenant. Whoever ends up with the pub takes the tenant: this is a warning. The ‘tenant’ has to be contained, or else only the worst can ensue. Okay, so the start of Baghead (2023) feels reminiscent of other supernatural horror tales – hints of curses with conditions attached – but scathingly critical reviews of this film seem to be missing the mark, or else they’re judging this film as lesser somehow because they happen to have seen it after they’ve seen Talk To Me (2022), a film which came out some years after the short film upon which Baghead is based; the tremendous reach which has been enjoyed by Talk To Me is hardly the fault of the team behind Baghead, even if we accept that Talk To Me is a very good horror story in its own right. But so is Baghead: some minor issues aside, this film’s deft pace and its array of intriguing ideas are genuinely worthwhile, and if there are a couple of plot puzzlers here and there, then so be it – these hardly derail Baghead‘s very strong elements, either cinematically or thematically.

The video message recorded by Owen turns out to be his last deed, and his attempts to escape The Queen’s Head – actually located in Berlin, which is curious – come to a grisly nothing. So his property now falls to his estranged daughter Iris (The Witcher‘s Freya Allan), his closest relative. Iris – and this is significant – is between jobs, places to live and programmes of study; we first meet her clambering into her old flat to retrieve a few bags of personal possessions before heading off with her friend Katie (Ruby Barker) to – who knows? Ivy is a rootless figure, so the mysterious call she takes informing her that her father is dead and she’s needed in Berlin to settle his affairs comes at a good time for her. She borrows the air fare and heads straight there, seeming perplexed, but not displeased to discover that she’s now a property owner. The mysterious Solicitor (Ned Dennehy) gets her to sign on the dotted line and that’s that (but of course, that isn’t that). Short on accommodation options, she immediately decides to stay the night.

It’s not long before Iris encounters her first scare at the pub, but it’s of mortal origin, at least at first: Neil is back, still seeking an audience with the mysterious ‘her’ who resides in the basement, and he obligingly fills Iris in with what he knows. There’s a creature, a woman, in the basement who can allow the dead to speak via her: her face is concealed, but once she is given an item which belonged to the dead, she can manifest as them – but for two minutes only. Any longer that that, and this malign entity will begin to manipulate the sitter, clawing out troubling truths about old relationships and using them to gain power over the situation. This undead witch’s ultimate aim is to gain mastery, but so long as the rules are followed, then the property owner can control her. Neil wants to speak to his deceased wife; he will give anything, but initially a large sum of money, to be allowed to do it.

‘As long as the rules are followed’; ha! I don’t think the rules are ever followed in Baghead, but let’s give credit where credit’s due. This is a genuinely effective idea, and the very first basement scene packs a punch – it’s creepy, it still feels novel and there’s an element of pathos in here, too, which is gradually twisted into something far more sinister. Even the jump-scares are handled well. When short films get spun into feature-lengths like this one, then all sorts of errors can creep in, or else, errors which you may have overlooked in the shorter story become unavoidably clear; Baghead (2023) knows well enough not to clutter the plot with acres of backstory and nor does it try to stretch things out for too long. Ninety minutes often feels like an economical runtime in today’s climate; it works just fine here, with a decently rolling pace throughout. The set is fantastic, authentically sparse, dusty and unwelcoming; the cinematography is of a high standard, the film is beautifully shot, the soundscape is immersive. Whilst this is a classic ‘haunted house’ in many respects, there are nice visual touches to enjoy: the carved tallies and sigils on the basement door, the clearly ancient-looking door key. There’s something else which is done very well here, and it’s something which seems like it should be obvious in a horror film: the film knows how to shoot darkness.

Iris herself is a good blend of fiercely independent and vulnerable, a stranger in a strange land, but in a place which appears to be quintessentially English – this is disorientating enough in its own way, even without the dweller in the cellar. It’s important to note that, rumbling away in the film’s context, Iris is broke, alone: she craves some kind of connection with her estranged father, and she has nowhere to live. Necessity breeds these circumstances. Baghead isn’t busy with a large cast, but nonetheless everyone here wants or needs something significant. Kudos has to go to both the writing and the performance of the character of Neil, a man who starts off as a seemingly sympathetic, grieving husband, but morphs into something else – not as a cartoon villain, but as someone whose darker traits steadily seep through. His presence in the film raises some impressive quandaries: what if the person who wants to talk to the dead is a bad person? What if their demands to have ‘one last conversation’ are coming from a dark place? What are the power dynamics here?

Towards the film’s close, Baghead‘s seemingly motiveless malignity is briefly grounded in a given history – some critics seems to have missed that bit as I have seen complaints that it wasn’t done – but honestly, the plot works well as a blend of folk legend and urban myth in its own right, as many of these, both on screen and culturally, have very thin origins stories – but aren’t traduced for it. It loses some steam here and there, and there are a few thorny plot elements here and there too, but taken overall, I was genuinely impressed and pleasantly surprised by this competent, cautionary tale of communing with the dead.

Baghead (2023) is available now.