Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

Interview: Ian Mantgani, director of Nosepicker

Posted on by Keri O'Shea
Ian, Leo – and you-know-what

Warped Perspective has long been promoting short films, and thanks to the ALTER channel on YouTube, it finally seems that there’s a decent outlet for them which extends beyond the enthusiastic, but limited remit of the festival scene. And so, we recently reviewed a body horror/cautionary tale called Nosepicker: if you haven’t already, then you should head over and watch the film, and then perhaps take a look at the review.

Then, you might like to take a look at this interview with the film’s director, Ian Mantgani. Ian has very obligingly answered some of my questions on Nosepicker: subject matter, snot, influences and everything in-between. Many thanks to him!

Responses below:

WP: My first question is probably the most obvious one, but let’s go for it: why did you choose nose-picking as your subject matter? And did any particular films, or anything else, influence your ideas?

IM: I’d actually intended to do another body-horror film entirely: An adaptation of the Roald Dahl story Skin, which had already been done as a terrific episode of Tales of the Unexpected starring Derek Jacobi in 1980, but which I thought would be a good vehicle for a filmmaker today to take another crack at. I was for whatever reason just desperate to do something in a horror short story form. The very week I intended to write to the Dahl estate seeking an option on the material, the deal was announced where Netflix bought the rights to Dahl’s whole catalogue.

Having Dahl in mind, I started thinking about doing something in that vein, and fairly quickly fixed on doing something morbid involving kids. What do kids like? Things that are gross, like snot, blood and guts. From there, pun intended, the rest just poured out of me.

WP: Practical effects are clearly really important to this film – no one would buy CGI snot, I don’t think – but what no-doubt interesting discussions, storyboards and perhaps even prototypes got the film where you wanted it to be?

IM: It was a surprisingly arduous journey. With friends, I’d made several backyard practical effects films before, so had some experience with creating life casts, wounds, decapitated heads, and things of this nature. And I naively figured there was nothing in this film that hadn’t been done in, say, The Blob in the late 1950s, so it must be easy to communicate some agreed upon orthodoxy on how to achieve everything. We also had detailed briefing books on everything from the various grades of bogey and snot we required to colour charts, animal comparisons and movie references for how the eventual monster should look.

So we went in armed to execute the effects efficiently, but it was a nightmare. Without dropping anyone in it, we tried to go the semi-professional route to both save money and give a young designer an opportunity to step up, but several people let us down and left us without our main effects ready in time for the main shoot. We then hired a more experienced special effects technician and arranged a split SFX unit, but his expertise didn’t really lie in creature effects, and the monster this designer created really wasn’t convincing or consistent.

As they say, buy cheap, buy twice, or in our case, buy cheap, buy three or four times, because at this point, we had to go the route we thought we couldn’t afford in the first place, which was hiring a majorly established creature effects designer. And we were also running out of time to make autumn festival deadlines, so didn’t even know if we could get one who wasn’t too busy with a more pressing project. So thank God that Dan Martin of 13 Finger FX agreed to step in; he and his team did a terrific job of building bladders that felt alive on set when they operated them. Dan and the team really saved our bacon; I love the effects in the final film.

WP: As much as it’s a body horror, there’s also a lot in the film regarding childhood and perhaps how adults relate (or don’t relate) to children. Can you tell us about that?

IM: There’s a characteristically thoughtful and perceptive review by the great critic Anton Bitel that situates Nosepicker as “the horror of abjection.” I don’t like talking too much about subtext, not wanting to ruin any viewers’ interpretations of anything, but to me the film is largely about being twisted, perverted and made violently crazy by a society that’s obtuse, or cruel, or patronising.

The ethnicity of the character wasn’t specified in the script, but I did prefer to cast a lead who was non-white, so Leo Adoteye, who is mixed-race Ghanaian-Italian, fit the bill and I think gave another unspoken dimension to the story, being non-white in a film of entirely white antagonists. The story is about the perversion of the underdog, in a society where the dominant races, the upper classes and the normative attitudes can all just make a minority misfit want to crack.

WP: Did you ever plan for Georgie to speak? Or did you always envision the character being silent?

IM: It just never occurred to me that he would speak. He doesn’t need to. He is alone on his weird little island, immovable as people talk at him and around him. I hope his silence doesn’t seem like a stunt. I hope it does make the viewer lean in. Additionally, I tend to come from the school of thought that every movie should work as a silent movie on some level, whatever sound and dialogue ends up adding to the overall melee. By the way, it’s funny that I should end up writing and directing a movie about a completely mute child, because I myself was always a motormouth smartass class clown when I was a schoolchild!

WP: I’ve enjoyed reading the responses to the film over on ALTER: lots of takers, lots of quite appalled people too! What have been some of your favourite responses to the film – either from critics, fans, or anyone else?

IM: People do seem to think the film is disgusting! Which is gratifying in a way, because a greater concern during the making of the film was that the bodily fluids would end up looking fake. Interestingly enough, child viewers more or less take the film in their stride and see the gruesomeness all in good fun. Adult viewers are more sensitive to it. Which coheres with my own experience as a film viewer – I think broadly as a very young person you respond to things completely instinctively, then as you get into adolescence you develop a sort of harder skin and then as you gain maturity you become sensitive again in a different way.

WP: How do you think your work on Nosepicker will influence you moving forwards as a filmmaker? Any important lessons learned? And while we’re on the topic, do you have any new projects or ideas for projects lined up?

IM: Hopefully Hollywood will come calling! Netflix, let me at your Roald Dahl stable! Let’s talk Tales of the Unexpected and The Twits! There’s also a film about lucid dreaming that I’ve been noodling away at for a few years and will hopefully achieve a breakthrough with before long. Right now, especially after all the uncertainty we had in completing our SFX, and after a long run of festival screenings, I’m so glad that Nosepicker is out in the world at the click of a button, and I hope people enjoy it.

The Vourdalak (2023)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

When a film starts with a grand, Gothic peal of thunder, it had better mean it. It had better not be suggesting something it can’t deliver. Well, thankfully, The Vourdalak (2023) very much delivers: it’s a gloomy folktale made even gloomier by writers Adrien Beau and Hadrien Bouvier, and it’s an intimate, though always dreamlike piece of world-building.

We start – as with the novella by Leo Tolstoy, upon which this film is based – somewhere in 18th Century Eastern Europe. It’s named as Serbia in the book, and might well be Serbia in the film, although it’s not specifically addressed: what’s key is the strangeness of the setting. In the depths of a stormy night, a man hammers at a door, begging for help: his horse and his provisions have all been stolen by marauding Turks. The man inside, not unkindly but very much unhelpfully, refuses to open the door, but advises the stranger on where to go to get aid. He tells him to walk on, to find the house of a man named Gorcha, and get help from him.

The visitor has little choice, so he continues on foot, skirting through the forest he’s been told to avoid, but what’s a man to do in such a situation? Along the way, he seems some strange things: the film sets out its stall. A beautiful young woman, dancing alone. A young man dressed in women’s clothes. Not put off by this – he is from the painted world of the French Court after all – our stranger, Marquis d’Urfé (Kacey Mottet Klein) speaks to the young man and it soon transpires that he is son to the Gorcha in question. He follows the young man, Piotr, to their house and meets the rest of the family, with the exception of old man Gorcha and his oldest son, Jegor (Grégoire Colin). They’re all appropriately surly, but they attend to d’Urfé and promise to help him: when Jegor arrives, fresh from fighting against the Turks, he says he will find a horse and help get the envoy home: he agrees to get d’Urfé a meeting with the patriarch, too.

There’s a problem. Old Gorcha, the head of the household, has also absented himself to go and fight the Turks, despite his apparent age and decrepitude. The family is shocked. As it turns out, the woman d’Urfé saw dancing in the forest is another Gorcha sibling, Sdenka, and she passes on a message from their father – that, fearful of being thought a coward, he has gone to fight, and that if he doesn’t come back, to say a prayer for him. If he comes back after a period of six days, however, don’t let him in even if he does appear: he’s no longer the man he was – he’s a vourdalak (a kind of revenant, reminiscent of a vampire).

So we wait, observing a difficult but interesting connection springing up between Sdenka (Ariane Labed) and d’Urfé during the first act. Things grow more complicated when it looks like Gorcha Sr. never left the grounds of the house at all: Jegor spots him, lying close to death nearby. Forgetting everything about Sdenka’s message, he hurries to take care of him; obeying him, as is proper, the rest of the family follows suit. They say love is blind, and bloody hell, it must be: old man Gorcha looks decidedly peaky. Whilst this increasingly heavy and tragic story isn’t exactly a laugh a minute, there is perhaps still a surprising amount of equally pitch-black humour in the film, and the way the Gorcha family accept the presence of their wraith-like father has something of The Emperor’s New Clothes about it, even accepting that gramps’s desiccated corpse is still very mannerly – and valiant, as he’s come home with the head of a notorious Turkish warlord for his pains (sound familiar?) There’s some humour in the early depiction of d’Urfé, too, as an archetypal pampered stranger in a strange land – a Lockwood, or, yes, a Harker, dropped into a culture he has little chance of understanding.

But the overriding atmosphere of the film is incredibly disconsolate, and grows more and more so. Very much a tale of a doomed family, with the script exploring ideas of fate and loss, it’s the love and respect which the family has for one another which traps them in this stifling, sickly curse. D’Urfé might have simply ridden his horse (or someone’s horse) out of there, too, were it not for the fact that he seems so rootless and remote, even from the society he champions. Finding meaning in his new connections would in a different time and place be a positive, but The Vourdalak isn’t too keen on positives, and instead makes an artform out of its irrepressible misery. It’s both more painterly, and more devastating, that Mario Bava’s adaptation of the same story.

Where Bava’s version is stark and shadowy, Beau’s is much more beautiful, an homage to Eurohorror – Hammer too, to a point – with a sensuous atmosphere and great attention to detail. Shot only using natural light, it always looks wonderful, an understated background for some very unpleasant, though sparing, horror. Dreams, rituals, tableaux – the framing and shooting of the film is multi-layered. The sound design here is superb too, adding a tremendous amount of horror which you don’t see – as such, anyway, even if you certainly see it in your mind’s eye. But perhaps the film’s real triumph is in its use of a marionette: it’s absolutely horrible. It makes you recoil, and it’s full of ghastly otherworldliness, just what you need for a Gothic tale like this one. Beau’s additions make the story even more pernicious than Tolstoy or Bava’s versions, too, and the resulting film is very successful indeed. Bravo.

The Vourdalak (2023) hits cinemas on Friday, June 28th.

Boy Kills World (2023)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Dystopian cinema – often based on dystopian literature – sometimes likes to centre itself around a special event of some kind. A TV show, perhaps. A day where conventional law goes out of the window. A special competition, or spectacle of some kind – or, if you’re the screenwriters behind Boy Kills World, maybe a little of all of those things. How come, then, that with so much ostensibly going on, that the world-building here feels like so much of an afterthought? Whilst there is likely enough fighting here to satisfy fans of…fighting, anyone else might find themselves labouring through nigh-on two hours of limited characterisation, setting and thematics.

As the opening credits roll a voiceover – not the film’s star, Bill Skarsgård, but H. John Benjamin – quickly fills us in on the world of the film. We get, in quick succession, the information that there’s been a violent overthrow of the political system by a ruling family, the Van Der Koys, and that these Van Der Koys keep their autocracy spick and span by having a special yearly event where they kill a number of dissidents on telly. Our narrator loses his family – his mother and sister – this way, but he escapes the melee to train as a fighter in the woods, under the watchful eye of a ‘shaman’ (Yayan Ruhian). It’s a little Karate Kid, a little Jaqen H’ghar. The main character – never named – progresses well, but he misses his family, particularly his little sister. All he can do is train, train, train. As he reaches adulthood (via a nice segue as Skarsgård appears to shake hands with his former self), preparations for the incoming grand vengeance epic begin to form in his mind.

Things move on quicker than planned when the Boy is running errands in a nearby town: wouldn’t you know it, but it’s the day of the Grand Culling on this particular day, and the Boy finds himself witness to the unpleasantries of the selection process. Even before he gets involved, things go badly wrong when there’s an accidental shooting: the Van Der Koy goons restore order, but the Boy has both learned a few things, and remembered a few, too. So we’re off: it turns out that today is as good a day as any to track down the baddies who destroyed his family. With the help of a handful of other dissidents, he’s off to find the matriarch, Hilda Van Der Koy (Famke Janssen).

There are good traits in this film, such as its best moments of sending itself up – and by extension, sending up the more serious genre films which operate along similar lines. Skarsgård does a decent job with a challenging role, being both very physical, and non-verbal: however, you might question the latter. He’s been written as a Deaf character who doesn’t speak, despite being a lip-reader; this leads to a sometimes strained and sometimes irritating use of the voiceover as the Boy’s own, unspoken voice, which unfolds in real time and can be heard by some characters in the film: so it’s sort of spoken, sometimes. This motif doesn’t bear much scrutiny, and can feel very thin.

As some of the film’s issues aggregate, it causes some insurmountable problems. For example, some of the film’s little asides and ideas can’t bear the amount of repetition which they get; the appearance and reappearance of the sister, for example, though no doubt intended to evidence the Boy’s complex inner world and tragic backstory, feels like a distraction as things tick on, as much as Quinn Copeland as Mina is a charming presence on screen in her own right. Given the film’s length, this kind of recurrence feels tantalisingly like something which could have been cut. Less is more. That goes for the sheer amount of time it spends sending itself up, too: a joke rarely bears much retelling. And for all that, the tone – which begins well, jogging along quite lightly – lurches and shifts in places, with events becoming increasingly heavy and unpleasant. Perhaps the film simply wants to be too many things.

Its increasingly protracted problems are no doubt exacerbated by choosing a dystopian setting which barely emerges from the murk. The budget, which is no doubt mostly focused on the fight scenes, strains when it gets anywhere near the scale and complexity needed to create a convincing framework. It’s giving The Hunger Games with its corrupt ruling family and gathered masses, but we lack for the kinds of numbers, the kinds of spectacles, which the film suggests are there, Hunger Games-like, in the background. A rule of thumb: don’t borrow what you can’t pay back. And when you can’t do scale, then you need great details, but Boy Kills World doesn’t have these either – it’s always fighting against what it wants, or needs to do, cutting corners in some places to fixate on its own self-selected quirks somewhere else. There may be just enough OTT violence here for fans of that, and people who like those old Far Eastern revenge flicks will see some pleasing moments of parity here, but for the rest of us, Boy Kills World contains way too many irritations to fully land its punches.

Boy Kills World (2023) is available now.

Nosepicker (2023)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

We start this short film in the natural domain of the nose-picker: a classroom, where a group of kids are learning all about plant biology. Little Georgie (Leo Adoteye) is not fully paying attention, however: clearly distracted and distant, he’s more engaged by digging things out of his nose than he is the lesson at hand. This draws down the wrath of a classmate who, as mean as she is, probably has to put up with this behaviour day in, day out (to be diplomatic here). The camera adds weight to her outrage by briefly showing us the underside of Georgie’s desk. The class teacher tries to reason, quite kindly, with Georgie – but he closes down entirely.

This prompts a phonecall home: as it turns out, Georgie indulges in a bit of nose-pickery at home too, and his behaviour seems to be getting worse. His mum takes a more active approach, whereas dad is all for giving the child some space. Finally, school rocks out the big guns: a counsellor! Rather neatly, the film explores the great deal of hope that we, as a society, place in encouraging, or even brow-beating children (and adults) into talking about their problems. Here, as more generally, you could have a sneaking suspicion that this process is as much about wanting to hear things, as it is about the benefits of saying those things. Despite the pressure placed on him, Georgie stays shtum.

What happens here is that Nosepicker moves from a well-observed look at the day-to-day existence of a possible traumatised child, to being a kind of surreal body horror. Not only does this play with the sorts of cautionary tales we tell children about doing things which polite society can do without (‘the wind will change and you’ll be stuck like that!’) but it expands the premise to its icky, but probably fullest expanse. The practical SFX here is quite something, skirting the line between funny and gruesome, as Georgie continues to pull things out of his nose which – when the right time comes – turn into something altogether different. But, quite honestly, any film where a child puts together a personal snot hillock could have headed in a couple of directions which could also have been funny and gruesome.

Adoteye as Georgie does a good job of representing a child who creates a fair amount of repulsion both in his peers and the audience, but is still a reasonably sympathetic character, as much as we figure out comparatively little about what is troubling him, beyond the general awfulness of the characters in his life. The film presents us with a raft of unpleasant kids, too, always ready to pick on the outsider – as kids are wont to do – so their more voluble performances are a good foil to the silent, largely unknowable Georgie. The film also manages to show us something of the perspective of children being faced down by adults, some well meaning, some more self-motivated. This sets us up for what follows giving us a plausible base layer of snot, sorry plot and character before things get a lot more weird.

And it is weird. Bravo. This is possibly the first truly mucosal body horror I can recall, though it feels like something Frank Henenlotter could have come up with, maybe to fill the time between Brain Damage and Basket Case 2. It’s never quite as camp as Henenlotter, but some of the cut scenes (especially the spaghetti!) and some of the trippier moments recall his work; you’re almost honour-bound to think about a few of the other 80s slime horrors, too, and any number of the ‘moral comeuppance’ horrors of anthology horror shows, because ultimately – and by grotty means – Georgie comes out on top. A bizarrely memorably little outing, this one, which gets more lurid as the film’s fifteen-minute runtime passes by. Great, noisy soundtrack, too. Plus, the film’s plotline has really upset a gentleman from Brazil on ALTER, who has insisted in the comments that this film could be a terrible influence on children, should anyone out there have the interesting idea to show it to them.

Check the film out for yourself today by popping along to ALTER and taking a look.

Raindance 2024: Body Odyssey

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

It’s not instantly clear what you’re looking at as Body Odyssey (2023) begins: perhaps led by the title, my first guess was an Inner Space type scenario, which turns out not to be the case. In a way, this is a very fitting opening for such a strange, unsettling but highly rewarding film: disorientation is key. What we’re actually looking at is a lake bed; above, floating on the lake’s surface, is Mona (Jacqueline Fuchs).

Mona is a bodybuilder. Meeting her more properly in the next scene, we see something of the dynamic between her and her coach, Kurt (the inimitable Julian Sands in one of his final roles). He runs her through a range of competition poses, studying her form on each muscle group. Finally, he praises her – as he should, as Fuchs is impressive, and Mona is at the top of her game. Bodybuilding is, as Mona puts it, a gesture to the self, born of love. And sometimes, love hurts: Mona is faced with constant scrutiny, an increasing workout burden and steroids, too: her every move is managed. Mona is in her late forties, and insists that she knows her body well: she is used to this codified, surveilled existence, and still thriving on it.

When she qualifies for a new competition, due to take place three months down the line, the regime intensifies even further. However, for all her avowals that she is comfortable with the plan, she begins to unravel. A chance encounter with a young man called Nic (Adam Misík) provokes her imagination: she comes to understand what she has sacrificed to be where she is, and this disrupts her usual relationship with her body. It also prompts a kind of wondering about the life she might have had, and even may still. As the script puts it, ‘the landscape is fracturing’. Mona’s journey onwards is fascinating to behold.

Films about women whose relationships with social roles and expectations cause them trouble are nothing new, but my word, Body Odyssey feels very new. What an impressive piece of world-building. The film establishes a cogent, engaging and otherworldly atmosphere: consider its use of colour, chiaroscuro, lingering macros. Then there’s the sparse, significant dialogue, heavy with subtext but free to add in dabs of humour here and there. Its sinister, rumbling soundtrack – and its wonderful, minimalist sets, adding surrealism to the world of bodybuilding. Where there’s form and dietary regime and gym sessions, there are dreamlike disruptions to the norm: clairvoyants pop up to give guidance, contests take place in bizarre settings, symbols and hallucinations weave through the film’s more linear moments. If there’s any comparison to be drawn, it’s to the work of Brandon Cronenberg – and Cronenberg on the world of body-building would be quite something, but it’s doubtful he could outdo director Grazia Tricario. Tricario has form, too: he essentially made a short-film version of Body Odyssey in 2014, also with Jacqueline Fuchs, titled Mona Blonde. Whilst this isn’t quite body horror, though horror always feels like it’s pressing in at the periphery of Body Odyssey, it’s certainly a film preoccupied with new, unusual discourses on bodies and selves.

The representation of Fuchs and her body is very interesting. It’s one of those odd quirks of cinema that, just recently, Love Lies Bleeding (2024) has popped up with its own close focus on a female bodybuilder, although Body Odyssey doesn’t deviate from Mona’s journey as a weightlifter in order to tell a different story. Her body is the story, really, and we follow her where she takes it. Sometimes she is represented as having a dizzying erotic appeal to men, though in the film men typically appear a little foolish, disposable and part of the general compartmentalisation of her life – excepting Nic, who operates differently. In other moments, the script addresses the ways that many men find a very muscular female body repellent. Whether or not you personally approve of the aesthetics, however, you cannot deny that this lifestyle demands incredible focus and commitment. There’s very little attention paid here to the kinds of passive, nubile female flesh beloved of the likes of Rubens, where beauty is associated with the-then rare privilege of being well-fed and idle; people always fantasise over what they can’t easily have. Perhaps, in that, Mona’s body offers another version of the tantalising female form, though of course you also need time and money to achieve it. The camera is fascinated with Mona, but doesn’t gloss over the realities of her chosen lifestyle: we see sweat, veins, dry skin, tense muscles. The inclusion of so many post-50 bodies is interesting too: we see them as they are: amazing, yes, but also ageing. The film allows itself fantasies, but in other respects it’s crushingly honest.

Equally engaging is the relationship between Kurt and Mona, not least because Sands is able – in a comparatively small amount of screen time – to bring his customary gravitas to the role. As he ever did, he grasps the film’s cultivated weirdness perfectly, and where other actors might have disappeared into the background, he never does. Magnetic, watchful and mysterious, Kurt is an intriguing character who keeps us at a distance, and it’s thanks to the skill shown by Sands, to whom the film is quite rightly dedicated.

There’s something of 80s-era Eurocinema in Body Odyssey which is hard to pin down: the experimental touches, perhaps, the roiling atmosphere, the fracturing narrative, or the fever-dream artistry of the film as a whole. People seeking a more straightforward piece of storytelling may be left behind here, but for anyone else this is a bold, painterly study of mind and body, with an unusual locus. I was mesmerised from start to finish, and this film is highly likely to be one of my favourite films of the year.

Body Odyssey (2023) will appear at the Raindance Film Festival 2024 on 22nd June. For more information, including tickets, please click here.

Raindance 2024: Cat Call

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Cat Call (2023) is essentially a rom-com, though it starts by subverting a few expectations and – to do it justice – it sticks with this odd, if easy-going approach throughout. We’re introduced to our main character, a young woman called Fáni (Franciska Töröcsik) sauntering through – a cemetery. And yet, her laidback demeanour and the chipper accompanying music suggests a lightness of tone, despite the backdrop. The film sustains this lightness of tone throughout, so that when Fáni quite literally tumbles into the arms of a burly gravedigger a few moments later, even a certain revelation about her feels quite light. And what is this revelation? Oh, it’s just that Fáni fantasises about the grisly deaths of every guy she finds attractive; the gravedigger is just one in a long line. This is a problem. Equally a problem: today she turns thirty, and her family (who clearly know her well) have brought both a birthday cake and a birthday date to the cemetery, where she is hanging out at her father’s grave. They seem to make more of her age than her morbid affliction, quite honestly, which tells you a lot about cultural expectations around certain birthdays.

By trade, Fáni is an architect, but her workplace is presented as something of a boys’ club – so much so that, when a new employee joins the team, he’s immediately given a fist-bumping, dudebro welcome which Fáni finds quite disconcerting. The new guy is Mihály (Csaba Polgár) and of course they get tasked with working together; his presence triggers a ubiquitous death-vision, and if that wasn’t enough, it turns out he’s also going to be moving in to the apartment upstairs. Now, we have all the ingredients there for a perfectly fine romance, if that’s your thing, but there’s one more ingredient to follow, and it is by definition unexpected. As Mihály gets settled in, Fáni notices that he has brought a cat with him. This cat is unlike other cats, in that he instantly begins flirting with her. Yep, he can talk, and only she can hear him: first the death visions, and then a talking cat. What a way to see in your thirties.

They spend more time together when Mihály heads to Holland for a short excursion (this film is impressively pan-European, making mention of a fair few European destinations) and Fáni is tasked with cat-sitting. The human and the feline hit it off and we get to know each of them a little better, and in Fáni’s case the presence of deep-seated trauma which she needs to work through feels pretty self-evident (though to be fair, the cat’s desire to launch a career in gangster rap is less of a shoo-in).

Cat Call enjoys playing with the deep silliness of its central conceit, though it does so to gradually open up the character of Fáni, and it’s able to add in some humour as it goes. The talking cat motif, obviously, has its moments and the cat himself – given a sonorous, rather jaded personality which works – is an interesting addition. You have to hand it to Töröcsik and to…the cat, as they genuinely do seem to be acting together. That all being said, once this is established, the whole ‘she can hear him, no one else can’ shtick does get a little repetitive and the film begins to lag a little at the midway point: the gangster rap joke is extended as far as it possibly can be. It’s one of those things where less is more, or else, it’s at its most funny at first. In other respects, the trials and tribulations of a well-meaning, but floundering female feel very familiar; add in a few family issues, and a silly but still grounded Influencer friend to keep things current (Adél Csobot) and – Influencer thing aside – we’re somewhere between Ally McBeal and Sometimes I Think About Dying, especially given the growing importance of the workplace and colleagues to the unfolding plot.

Essentially, Cat Call has ‘quirky’ written through it, like Brighton rock: it’s an attractive film, colourful, a bit twee, with a running accompaniment of twinkly light-hearted music and an emphasis on the comic aspects of personal crises. It never allows itself to get particularly heavy, and just maybe its rather oblique treatment of some quite weighty themes won’t be for everyone. Still, and all in all, it’s a gentle sort of romantic farce, charming enough to sustain interest and with a gently dreamy style which is very visually appealing. It’s also a first-time feature from director Rozália Szeleczki, which promises good things.

Cat Call (2023) will screen as part of the Raindance Festival 2024 on 25th June. For more information, including tickets, please click here.

Tiger Stripes (2023)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

A blend of styles and themes but ultimately a body horror, Tiger Stripes is incredibly worthwhile: lively, evocative and multifaceted. Like the best of horror, it strikes a solid balance between humane and fantastical: the crazy things which happen here, happen to people who are completely plausible and likeable. This is a daring and darkly comic feature debut from director and co-writer Amanda Nell Eu.

We meet our key characters at school: it’s a fairly conservative establishment, but the three girls Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal), Farah (Deena Ezral) and Mariam (Piqa) find time to play. Being modern kids, this includes an obligatory dance routine or two, though it seems that Zaffan is a little more, to use the euphemism, ‘developed’ than her friends – she’s taken to wearing a bra, and this is appealing to the others, who – fascinated – ask if they can try it on. The girls soon get in trouble for messing about in the toilets, though, and get disciplined for it – they’re told they have no respect for their school, their peers, or even for Malaysia itself. This falls on deaf ears. The girls are seniors (so either eleven or twelve years old) and they’re full of the place. The girls may have the odd spat, but it seems like they’re a tight-knit friendship group.

What we soon work out is that this is Zaffan enjoying the last day of her childhood. The little squabble she has with her mother for walking home in her underwear (as she’d soaked her school uniform by jumping in a river) is probably their last squabble as mother and child, by a few measures at least. This is drawn into sharp and inimitable relief that night when Zaffan gets her first period. This is such a relatable horror for girls: the body you thought you knew suddenly reveals that it has its own agenda, and it’s a messy, bloody agenda too. You get used to it, because it’s where you live, but it’s the end of your old, carefree life. There’ll be no walking home half-dressed from here on in. Add to that cultural and religious beliefs which stigmatise you for menstruation, and it all gets even tougher: when Zaffan’s mother announces, “You’re dirty now,” she perhaps means it figuratively, as well as literally.

Zaffan is now excluded from certain things: she can’t take part in prayers, for instance, and has to sit it out. Her best friends, who – for now – are free from this stigma, begin to treat her differently too, peering in at her with an outsider’s interest. But there are other physical changes happening to Zaffan. Her sensory ability is beginning to change; other, inexplicable things are happening to her body. She becomes increasingly isolated, but she’s a resourceful girl, and does her best to claw (!) her way back into the good graces of her classmates. The problems really start, however, when it seems that her afflictions are starting to affect her peers too…

First things first: Tiger Stripes brilliantly captures the icky, disconcerting aspects of menstruation, and it films everything, even the bits no one tells you about: the washing, the blood, what happens to the blood. The smell. It’s not exciting, and it most cases you don’t end up with superhuman abilities, but getting your period is a kind of body horror, right? You know the old, sexist joke about never trusting a creature that can bleed for five days and not die? It would be interesting to know what the Malaysian film censors cut from the film before its local release (leading the director to publicly disown the version of the film screened to home audiences) but I wouldn’t mind betting some of the more open, bloodier, intimate material got taken out. Similarly, the ways in which Zaffan begins to carve a new identity for herself, striking a balance between growing pains and new freedoms, may well have fallen foul of the censorial scissors. What a bloody shame, if so.

It’s to do Tiger Stripes no disservice to point out its similarities to Ginger Snaps, made a (staggering) quarter of a century ago. Even if Ginger Snaps is very Western, even if its animalism and its folklore revolves around a different animal, then the extension of body to body horror is similar. Tiger Stripes differs in how it interweaves other folkloric ideas and entities, sure, but the female body is the locus. In fact, Tiger Stripes is an immensely female-centred film. That may be a strange thing to say, given that it’s a Malaysian film and Malaysia is generally more sex-segregated than, say, Western countries, but its focus on female environments, friendships and themes is unstinting. Men are, by design or decision, quite out of the loop. Zaffan’s dad and his levels of inertia are a wonder to behold. Dr Rahim (Shaheizy Sam), the live-streaming faith healer, really shouldn’t have bothered.

All of this, and set against a backdrop of a lush, beautiful rural Malaysia, a country relatively unknown and unseen, from a Western perspective. There are great performances here: it’s impossible not to love the sparky, sympathetic Zaffan and even Farah at her worst is still a recognisable, contested kid whom you hope can sort things out. It’s also worth saying that, as much as the film is rich with subtext, that it works perfectly well as just a supernatural movie, just as Ginger Snaps – that title again – works perfectly well as a werewolf movie. There’s plenty to enjoy, and lots of wit, humour and charm too. Check it out.

Tiger Stripes (2023) hits select cinemas on June 14th and VOD on July 9th.

Buying Time (2024)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Anxieties about illness, technology and the conspiracy theories which operate in between have proven a rich source for filmmakers post-Covid. You could even suggest that this has grown into a specific subgenre. Buying Time (2024) adds to this number: it’s a super low-budget outing, with all of the attendant challenges and issues that low budget can bring, but for the most part it’s a competent drama, with flashes of solid ideas and approaches which promise more to come.

The film is set in the future, but for all intents and purposes, it’s the here and now: never say never, but the world of 2028 is fully recognisable as our own, with just a few tweaks here and there. Nihilism is the order of the day, and we start with a voiceover which explains that most people are just too preoccupied with the everyday to notice how much their lives have changed. Our narrator, Daniel (Andy Blithe) has, at least early on in the film, chosen to withdraw – to drink, and to grieve the premature deaths of his partner and daughter. News programmes on in the background fill us in on a number of new, or mutated viruses which are currently afflicting humanity; luckily, big corporations like Lifeline have been working round the clock to develop new tech which aims to prolong people’s lives, rendering them immune to a whole host of diseases. Hmm, you might think. And you’d be right.

Daniel might easily have spent the whole film quietly fulminating in his bottle-strewn lounge, but for the efforts of his friend and colleague Shaun (Ryan Enever) who tries his best to drag Dan out of the house, since he’s not currently in work and needs some sort of routine. He’s dismayed by the state Daniel has got himself in, though to be fair, they’re both look of a type, stubble and all. The stubbled men talk: Daniel reveals that, since losing his loved ones, something hasn’t quite seemed right to him. He has started to see his flashbacks and dreams not as evidence of his trauma, but as something of a puzzle, a puzzle to solve.

Meanwhile, in the bigger picture, we begin to hear more about the much-vaunted new technology which is about to dispose of many human diseases. Lifeline has engineered a microchip which combats illness; this replaces an earlier, somewhat less effective version which had already been rolled out by the NHS free of charge, but the original plan is that the new Delta chip will cost money. Safety issues be damned, there are market forces at work here and politics is starting to rear its head, too. This is clearly where Daniel’s storyline is going to meet another, with a fairly tried-and-tested tale of an individual vs. a corporation. Is the chip to blame somehow for the sudden spate of premature deaths? And if so, what can be done?

Buying Time is very much of its time, and conflates two different strands of Covid discourse: firstly, that the technology exists to combat disease (i.e. the vaccines) and secondly, that the vaccines actually carried a secret microchip, so we get business greed, anxieties about health, and the Covid death count as clear sources of inspiration. Why not imagine that the chip idea is real, it’s got a purpose, and that it may showcase the worst behaviour of the wealthy and the powerful? It’s a decent idea, even if, despite this, things do feel rather predictable in places, with guessable plot points and even character arcs. Budget is a limiting factor in many key respects, from overreliance on affordable exposition (such as via the repeated use of news bulletins to backfill the story) to variability in performances: some actors are more overblown, and others more low-key. The Lifeline team just didn’t convey menace and power effectively; happily, though, Andy Blithe (who dominates the film’s screentime) commands audience attention very well.

The filmmaking team has also worked hard to add texture and detail to the film through a range of shots, particularly in the opening act, with aerial shots, long shots, fades, flashbacks and nightmares all making an appearance. That can’t have made for an easy edit, but it shows that a lot can be made of a little, and that the ingenuity is there. The push/pull between what can be imagined and what can be realistically achieved does affect the film throughout its runtime, and so whilst Buying Time might not reinvent the genre or throw in too many surprises, it certainly acts as an interesting calling card, and works through its key ideas with a decent pace via a technically solid film. These are important things, whatever the budget. It also seems that director Kris Smith is already working on a follow-up to Buying Time (working title: Killing Time) so it’ll be interesting to see how he expands this story, now that the groundwork has been done.

Buying Time will be released on July 12th, 2024.

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