In the tradition of updating the afterlife mythos – from Beetlejuice to The Lovely Bones – directors and writers the Butler Brothers have turned their hand to the ultimate hinterland in Purgatory Jack (2023), taking for a setting the place where souls wait to be cleansed of residual sin before getting into heaven. And they’ve done some interesting work with it; The Divine Comedy this ain’t, and instead their version of Purgatory is weirdly recognisable, a little ramshackle and in many ways, original and bizarre. This all unfolds to us with some early bridging shots, getting us from Earth to afterlife – firstly with a photo of what looks like a couple’s suicide pact, some time in the mid-twentieth century. This is what does for Jack: we see him, still wearing clothes in the style of his time on Earth, hiding away, alone, in a bar-cum-residence which is filled with clocks (to remind him that time is still passing, even if it doesn’t pass the same way where he is). We also see some paramedics desperately working on a young woman; it’s left to us to work out whether their efforts are successful, because the first time we get a good look at her, she’s materialising in a strange place, watched by a group of young women – one of whom is clutching a severed arm.
Okay. In short order, we also find out that Purgatory runs by certain rules. Blood – which turns to ashes if a person spends a long time there – is treated like a drug by older souls, which is of great peril to new arrivals, particularly if there’s still a question mark over whether they’re dead or alive, in a hinterland of their own. That seems to be the case with punk musician Viv Vacious (Alexandra Beaton), who is famous enough that the three muses sitting on the bench nearby are instantly starstruck. We also glean that body parts are interchangeable here, thanks to a black market in hacked-off limbs. Put people anywhere, living or dead, and it seems they’ll create some sort of godawful underground economy before too long. In any case, Viv is at risk and one of her fangirls tells her she needs to lay low, get off the streets: to help her to do just that, she is taken to Jack’s residence, and he’s able to fill her in on a few more relevant pieces of information.
They talk – or rather, Jack talks, Viv Vacious snarls and huffs (there are some issues with this character, who blows hot and cold at points, reverting to shouty feminist platitudes which are probably intended to make her relatable as an alt-rock pioneer, but can wind up keeping her at arm’s length). It turns out that Viv’s own mother committed suicide some twenty Earth years previously; Jack doesn’t really help himself here by pointing out that Purgatory is filled with suicides – maybe her mom is here, too. On hearing this, Viv quickly decides that she has to seek her out, talk to her one last time about what led her to leave a seven year old child behind. As a result, Jack decides he has to go along too as a kind of penance, perhaps, prompting an odyssey of sorts – which puts them both in danger, but also reveals a lot more about the machinations going on behind the scenes, and how the worlds of the living and the dead overlap.
How to define this film, in genre terms? Cyberpunk neo noir perhaps? There are definitely noir elements here, and not just because of Jack’s outfit: a flawed main character, the search for a covert truth, the use of flashback…but then, the majority of noirs weren’t hinged around ideas such as organised bloodletting and underground surgery, so the label won’t do on its own. Maybe that’s just fine. You really can’t fault the range of ideas initially at play here: the film is often funny, often thoughtful and occasionally profound. Microbudget or not, the film gets a lot out of its resources: it uses visual clues and touches to add to the strangeness; it lights and frames all of the interior shots very well, and also manages to make outside locations look suitably strange – all through relatively simple devices like the use of post-production cartoon panel colours, and/or framing things so that the place looks like the savage wasteland it should be. To come back to the idea of influences, it reminded me in places of the Clive Barker novella Mister B. Gone, which depicts hell as just a place where demons live, shop, socialise, cook, and live out almost humdrum lives, just in an extraordinary place.
The main issue with Purgatory Jack is that, after establishing an intriguing, creative take on its selected setting, it doesn’t quite have enough other surprises to carry it through an hour and forty minutes which, although by far not the longest runtime ever seen in an indie film, is long enough to need a solid narrative arc with a few questions and resolutions. Really speaking, the idea here is very simple, so once the initial impression made by this particular take on Purgatory settles, you’re left with quite a long wander through the landscape while the main characters look for someone, which can feel like it’s lagging in places. Yes, we do get some resolutions, but these are guessable to a point (alongside some other plot points which raise a few issues but don’t linger over those particulars, which can make things feel uneven by the end.) But nonetheless, the Butler Brothers’ dark humour, so prevalent in Unfriending (2023), is still here in enough measure to land with audiences, showing them to be filmmakers with plenty of ideas and promise, and happy to take on the big ideas along the way, even life and death.
Made in 1972 for Spanish TV, Antonio Mercero’s short film La Cabina (The Phone Booth) didn’t appear on British television for around a decade after that, but it was a case of once seen, never forgotten for those people who first saw it in the early Eighties, appearing as part of a suite of programmes on the-then new terrestrial arts channel, Channel 4. Now, in a post-analogue world which has, funnily enough, more or less dispensed with phone booths, it can be seen via YouTube – and it definitely should be seen.
Before reading the article, do yourselves a favour and check it out now, if you haven’t already done so. The article may contain spoilers.
First impressions reveal an oddity of a film which now functions as an interesting time capsule but, like so many other hitherto lost oddities, it’s so much more than that. It’s not just about the brief snapshot of 1970s Spain which it offers, or its now archaic technology. It leads the audience from one faintly silly, slapstick-adjacent situation into a barely understood, but frightening alternate reality where, just behind the scenes, strange forces are at work, able to act with impunity as life rolls merrily on around them. There is great cruelty here, rising to a dismal crescendo which suggests far, far more is at play. La Cabina is a masterclass in what can be achieved with the short film format -actually, thirty-five minutes here – given that, still, hundreds of brilliant short films are deprived a wider audience due to so little space being made for these films, in either television or cinema programming.
The film starts simply enough, capturing a brief and unremarkable moment in the everyday reality of the 70s: as the world is waking up, some men arrive with a flatbed truck to install a flashy new phone booth in a town square. Once done, they depart, and we meet a father and a young son: the father, a nameless businessman (and this is important) sees his son onto the school bus before hopping into the phone booth to make a quick call.
Flashy and new it may be, but the phone isn’t actually working. By the time the man (José Luis López Vázquez) realises this, the door has gently closed shut behind him – and it’s stuck. He tries and tries to get the door back open, but to no avail. As passers-by begin to take notice of his frankly daft predicament, they start trying to help: their efforts attract more people, and before too long there’s a minor stir in the town square, with people gathering to observe what’s going on. Attracted to the hustle and bustle, lottery ticket sellers and people carrying snacks arrive. An old lady is helped to prime position and given a chair. Meanwhile, inside the booth, the man cycles through a range of emotions, from annoyance to embarrassment, even displaying some awareness that yes, this is all a little ridiculous.
Finally, the police and fire service arrive: there’s a sense, when first watching the film, that this will be the clincher – the powers-that-be will be able to do something because that’s what they do, and it’s intriguing to be walked through that expectation at this point and then walked straight out the other side, because things don’t come to pass that way. Things take an unexpected turn when the same company – is it a company? – arrives and puts the booth on the back of the flatbed, trapped man and all. They look like they know what they’re doing. That’s more than the police or fire service did. The crowd cheers, then goes back to whatever it was that they were doing before the morning’s entertainment; Mercero has created an H G Wells-worthy crowd scene here, guilty of bystander apathy at best, or boorish, clueless and mean at worst. The film also plays with society’s tendency to just trust that ‘things will get sorted out’ somehow. The people who arrive in overalls with a suitable vehicle must surely be legitimate and organised, and perhaps they are, in a sense. But what looks like help, isn’t help at all; it’s a continuation of a pre-planned ordeal. Meanwhile, the man – who is completely ignored by the drivers, like a piece of cargo – gets transported out of the city, through an otherwise timeless and picturesque rural Spain. Beautiful, sure, but remote, unfamiliar and certainly not somewhere you’d associate with a quick fix or a specialist team of mechanics there to deal with this inconvenience. More to the point: they’re not stopping. The journey goes on.
Steadily, hopes for an expected resolution are being removed. You can feel the film’s firm foundations being eroded. Mercero does this oh-so artfully, but one moment, relatively early in the film’s runtime, is key, suggesting very briefly that elsewhere, this same farce has been taking place. Our protagonist glimpses another man, a man just like him, a businessman in a suit, also being transported somewhere. They are briefly able to lock eyes: the other man is already more downtrodden, but our protagonist is not far behind him, and this sequence is more intriguing for the way it raises new possibilities. So, is this a farce at all, then? It’s starting to seem otherwise. What is actually going on remains to be seen…
And, arguably, is never revealed. The rising horror of the film’s end sequences are so memorable because we are made to acknowledge a strange, organised process, the upshot of which remains ultimately mysterious to us. What we can say is that someone, somewhere clearly has a lot invested in what now appears to be a process of trapping and transporting lone men to a vast, remote plant of some kind. The clearest aspect of this horror is revealed in reverse: we see a number of empty booths, lined up and being cleansed by other workers. Then, where our journey finally comes to a stop, we see a large number of booths which are still occupied – by other businessmen, or rather: dead or dying businessmen.
These deaths serve no clear purpose. This isn’t Soylent Green (1973) – we don’t see anything like that process taking place, and this isn’t Phantasm (1979) either – there’s no supernaturalism or science fiction being suggested here. So why has this happened? Why have these men been killed by neglect; why are the booths being cleaned and reused, presumably to secure more people to kill in the same way? What is this all for?
From the moment we glimpse the second man who is being transported at the same time as our protagonist, we can glean that there may be something significant in two almost identical men being taken in this way. By the time the film ends, we can be confident, at least, that this is a factor. Apparel, age, sex and class: the men are more or less identikit. Much has been made of this, right down to interpreting the film as a coded critique of the last days of Franco’s Spain, but perhaps victimising a typically powerful and prestige group in this way – businessmen are more often villains than victims in the horror genre – is a reminder that everyone can be vulnerable, even the comparatively powerful.
It’s also possible to say that the man’s plight is seen as humorous by the watching crowd in ways which would not be the case if a little girl or a young woman with children were trapped in that booth. In fact, at first the businessman’s ordeal becomes a kind of alpha male contest, where passing males start to get competitive about who’s going to free this poor, helpless desk-job sap sweating uselessly in the phone booth, clearly unable to free himself. Is the film suggesting that these kinds of men are expendable? Replaceable? It certainly does suggest that, if so many of these men are disappearing, that society is continuing to function without them, but by focusing on one individual, La Cabina does not just become a simple or generalised commentary on the fate of the missing, or even a treatise about sex or class.
The man’s last clear remembrance of his now former life is a memory of his son, whom he loves: a child that he passes on the road, innocent to what is going on, waves to him as he passes. Perhaps it’s then that our businessman realises nothing about this situation is likely to be rectified in normal ways, and he seems to be genuinely sad and fearful here, not simply annoyed as previously. In some respects, the man is going through the stages of grief, grieving for himself and his loved ones. In many respects, the absence of dialogue enables this progression and enables us to follow it: it’s implied that the booths are soundproof, so the man’s only communication for the most part of the film is non-verbal. When it finally dawns on him that he will never escape, then the stages are complete, and he has also become an Everyman, suffering silently to the end.
Throughout this wordless journey, Mercero adds powerful visual symbols which underline and underpin the development of the narrative. From the knitting women reminiscent of les Tricoteuses, the women who calmly knitted as guillotined heads hit the baskets during the French Revolution, to the glass-sided coffin which mirrors the booth as it passes, death imagery dominates the film, though again, sometimes these pieces fall into place after the fact, as you find yourself emulating the businessman by casting your eye back over events so far, looking for clues, anything to justify what’s going on. There is also a strange parity drawn between the tragicomic elements in the film and the inclusion of circus performers at the film’s midpoint, with a group pausing their practice to observe the vehicle and the man as they pass. Finally, the film features an unconventional noose in the form of a strangulating phone cable; a man in a nearby booth, with his own untold story, has opted to end his own life. It’s one of the last things which our protagonist sees, and one last way in which Mercero equates the world of the booth, with its harried users, business calls and urgent matters to attend, with something horrifying and inescapable: it’s a particularly vicious, then-modern and everyday update on a timeless symbol. And this would be a particularly hideous place to end the film, but there’s more.
The film turns out to be cyclical, which in itself contributes to the eddying, unspoken darkness which dominates by the end credits. As things draw to a close, we see the process repeat: a pair of the equally faceless, unknown men are back, installing another phone booth in the square. Devoid of any real understanding, left adrift without answers, all we see clearly is that life apparently continues in everyday, modern urban Spain, where individuals can apparently be quickly forgotten and where equally faceless organisations veer between feckless and malign. They can be taken for granted and overlooked by the easily distracted masses; in the case of the people who remove the phone booth, this is what enables them.
Centred throughout – as if we’re likely to forget – is a simple phone booth: today the phone booth is a bit of an anachronism, true, but at the time it was an everyday, even humdrum facility, and part of normal life. To repurpose something so ordinary and overlooked (only the man’s son bothers to remark that the phone booth looks ‘new’) to make it one facet of an inscrutable, mysterious and harmful agency is the prime destabilising act of the film, however extreme and mysterious the outcome remains. We might like to wonder about equivalents today, or debate whether our increasingly connected and surveilled society has different, newer horrors of its own. But in any case, La Cabina, with its simple premise and execution, feels very timeless. It’s ultimately a sad, inexplicable story which allows us to witness our protagonist’s plight but not to make any further sense of it, although it tantalises that someone – someone powerful – could explain. The film has just enough of the strange, and just enough of the familiar, to ensure it still packs a genuine punch.
Occasionally, an indie film turns up which has an interesting backstory, and The Bench is one of those. Originally filmed in 2007 or thereabouts, the film has remained in limbo for seventeen years which, to give the heavily retro-style voiceover which opens the film its due, affords it some kind of a retro feel, even if not quite matching the 70s style it goes for in places – namely, during the brief introductory voiceover, and after the halfway point, when the filming style changes. It’s also interesting that the film feels it needs to open with a warning that social attitudes and language may have changed since 2007; 2007, really? Maybe there’s one sequence which might raise an eyebrow. But whether this warning is necessary is in the eye of the beholder and could, again, reflect the film’s clear love of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and a whole raft of other, early slashers, which really do showcase archaic attitudes.
For the most part, however, The Bench is much more dour, taking rural Scotland as its setting, and focusing on a group of actors who positively scream Noughties. So, after the voiceover, we meet two characters who are only really around to establish the dangers of being lost in remote Scotland by night; this scene also establishes something the film actually does rather well, which is to showcase natural dialogue and dialect. This couple we oh-so briefly meet are shocked out of their late night bickering about whether or not to switch on the Sat Nav by the sudden presence of a girl in the road. They hit her, so the guy, Ben, gets out to investigate and gets promptly whacked by a mysterious, maniacal stranger with a blade – who then turns his attention to the female passenger.
Cards on the table time, then, so far as the film is concerned, but we shift away from the slasher-by-night mode, at least for a short while, and catch up with a group of twentysomething friends on the road, heading off on a camping trip, which people strangely persist in doing. They pass a broken down car and stop to help the driver, a lone female called Alex (Jennifer Byrne): she proudly announces that she’s also on her way to the woods, because she has recently inherited a cabin out there. Again, as with the camping thing, visiting cabins in woods is something people persist in doing, but perhaps not everyone is as acquainted with horror films as this film’s audience are likely to be. Anyway, the group of friends drop off Alex’s vehicle at a garage, because it can’t be fixed straight away, and end up taking her out to the cabin, which someone fairly opines looks more ‘like a shed’. The British Isles are far more shed-orientated than cabin-orientated. They all decide to stay there with her nonetheless, though picking up with a few more pro-camping stragglers along the way.
Obviously, this isn’t going to turn out to be a lovely time because we already know that there’s a maniac out there somewhere given to mindless killings, and so things do turn out to be rather unpleasant in The Bench – echoing and downright emulating a number of the other slashers which have preceded it. Of course, one of the snags for many film fans is that slashers replicate slashers, right down to the paper-thin plot which nearly always utilises a backstory which reveals: a wronged and embittered madman out there somewhere, given to vengeance/re-enacting his own brutal treatment/driven by significant dates, days, phases of the moon etc. Like its forebears, The Bench is more about the indignity and the violence than it is about nuanced storytelling, which is fine – it won’t be for everyone, but nor were the films which influenced it. But plot issues aside, is this project worth seeing?
Yes, on the whole, it is. It’s clearly very low budget, even by indie filmmaking standards, with a largely (at the time) inexperienced cast and crew – but they deserve credit for doing their level best with what they have. There’s some decent, naturalistic dialogue, with normal people vibes (not easy to achieve, and far costlier projects than this have made a complete mess of it). There’s also some decent acting here more generally, complete with just the right amount of self reflection – such as referring to horror tropes, without only doing that – and humour, very Scottish humour. There are probably too many minor characters introduced, which serves as a warning that these people are there as slasher collateral, but even given that you know full well bad murders are on the way, those murders are pretty effective. Yes, they’re low key, but they still land well, coming across as nasty and gnarly with plenty of attention rightly paid to sound design. There’s also a range of shots and camerawork, with good use of natural light and, elsewhere, more stylised shots. The fact that this film sat on the proverbial shelf for so many years but has finally been released also speaks to the fact that, even if it’s not quite a passion project, The Bench is at least a triumph of the bloody minded, who share a sense that the film deserves to get done and out there.
Are there issues? Of course, some minor and some more serious. Filmmakers the world over struggle with party scenes – like tattoos, they seem impossible to fake for the camera – and some sequences feel like filler, which is one of the hardships of such a simplistic kind of plotline, where it can feel like you’re simply waiting for ‘things to kick off’. There are some odd edits and non sequiturs in places, likely due to the length of time which has expired between filming and final cut, and even given the genre, the backstory could have quite easily have been more strongly delineated, even with a comparatively brief runtime of seventy minutes. But for all these little tics and foibles, slasher fans (in particular) would likely still find some pleasure in this one, and overall the film does draw you in, toeing a strange line between unexceptional – for the reasons discussed above – and commendable – ditto. Some of the over-exuberant reviews popping up on IMDb may harm rather than help the film, quite frankly, as they’re a little too glowing and promise too much, but hey: to make a more measured assessment, I’d say that, even taking into account some of the issues which have beset The Bench, it is worthy of a look, and more than enough evidence that writer/director Sean Wilkie has ideas to bring to the table.
The Bench is available now on Prime Video and Tubi.
“Everything I have said and done has been in the hands of God”: a young woman, lying on her bed, intones this sentence over and over, like a mantra, as Saint Clare (2024) begins. This is apparently a Joan of Arc quotation, but it’s hopefully no spoiler to point that Joan figures but little in this film. Instead, Saint Clare comes off like a piece of young adult fiction brought to the screen (okay), but it is blended rather unconvincingly with a much darker subtext, even if largely through implication and suggestion. The tone is off. The film is more of a mystery than a horror, so the horror content which does feature may feel a little thin or derivative for the majority of viewers. It’s a visually very impressive film, but there are issues at hand.
The bedroom mantra-chanter is in fact our ‘Saint’ Clare (Belle Thorne), who has recently moved towns to live with her hippy grandma (a criminally-underused Rebecca De Mornay) after some recent personal tragedies sent her into a cycle of moving house, sofa hopping and boarding schools. But she has recently arrived in town, and seems to be settling well at what I think is also meant to be another school, despite Ms. Thorne herself being nearly 27. Or, hey, maybe it’s college. Whatever, the American tradition of casting older adults as young adults (or even children) is a long, noble one by this point – even with an Italian director. The setting is what counts.
But wherever Clare is being educated, all is not well with her. As she sits and waits for a bus after school/college one afternoon, she is intercepted by a clearly creepy man in a car who comes out with a daft excuse for her to get into his vehicle. If it seems a little strange that this clearly savvy girl, who asks him all the right questions, does in fact decide to get in is explained shortly afterwards, when she attacks and kills him. She is – and this is never particularly explored – a kind of vigilante, who gets visions of wrong ‘uns, and knows to dispatch them for the greater good.
Another facet of Clare’s strangeness is her occasional interaction with the ghost of a man who, although not a sex criminal – as in inferred in the other cases – did die as a result of an interaction with Clare: this would be Bob (Frank Whaley), who was once a mailman, and he appears here and there to either act as Clare’s conscience, or to offer plot-expedient details which move things along. All of this would be strange enough, but successfully killing criminals and sometimes chatting to a dead mailman probably wouldn’t make for a narrative arc, so we need something else: this comes in the form of a discovery.
It turns out that the man she recently killed was not acting alone, which could mean that Clare is at risk from those people who worked with him, if they find out who she is. The case also prompts an investigation, with police interviews taking place. Along the way, as Clare takes it more and more upon herself to find out what’s been going on in this town, she finds concrete evidence of a misogynistic conspiracy, reaching back for years. Now it’s her destiny to solve the mystery, putting herself at renewed risk as she does.
So there is some kind of movement and development here, but Saint Clare remains a simple story. It glosses over some of its potentially finer plot points – such as fully accounting for Clare’s supernatural abilities – and its determination to keep the camera fixed on Thorne at all costs means that it but rarely scans around for anything else to consider. Other characters are left resolutely one-dimensional, and male characters aren’t exactly characters at all: in places, they’re little more than caricatures, and Saint Clare‘s universe is certainly not kind to men more generally.
But for balance, let’s consider its treatment of its key protagonist: that’s not rich or detailed, either. People tell Clare that she is ‘hot’ and ‘pretty’, if ‘weird’: fair enough, but things don’t get much deeper than that. Clare is pretty but weird; no one tells her she’s complex. She gets through a series of unfortunate events with a pout-scowl and a monotone drawl which don’t really reflect the peril she’s meant to be in. Elsewhere, her peers provide some light relief, bringing the teen girl drama and petty rivalries (though it’s not abundantly clear whether we are meant to be laughing at them, or with them). Light relief dissipates by the time of the final act, though in its place comes frustration that the narrative gets increasingly scrappy, dodging clear answers. No one is strongly drawn enough to get us fully invested.
Nonetheless, there are strengths, and lots of the film’s key strengths relate to its strong production values and visuals. It’s an aesthetically very bold film, which highlights peril through its roving camerawork, close shots and choppy edits. The ‘fade to red’ motif is a simple, but appealing addition; director Mitzi Peirone goes quite heavy on the flashback and backfill, which, whilst not always adding that complexity, does nonetheless make for a more varied viewing experience, with artistic shot composition and a great accompanying soundtrack. To sum up, for some viewers this reasonably light-touch mystery will do enough to entertain, thanks to its star appeal and an aesthetic flair which carries well across (nearly) ninety minutes. For others, this reviewer included, the film alludes too much and explores too little, namechecking the notion of whole, complex, liberated female film characters but teasing us by not really including any.
Saint Clare (2024) received its UK Premiere at FrightFest 2024 and will be released on digital from 101 Films (date TBC).
How far can a person be pushed before they finally, irrevocably snap? It’s a question horror cinema has seemingly enjoyed mulling over for as long as it’s existed, pushing for ever more disturbing conclusions as the decades pass. And, as the intense focus on distressed and vulnerable individuals has increased, so the resolutions themselves have become more shocking, often drawing upon dream states, psychosis and burgeoning violence before drawing to a close. Recent films which have done just this include Saint Maud, Stopmotion and Censor – female-focused stories where the desire to just get on, to live, soon curdles into something unreasonable and unstoppable. But yet, in all of these stories, the female protagonist at least has a brief moment in the sun – a reason to hope – before things come crashing down. A new career, a new creative pursuit – something. There’s some worthy attempt to escape one’s demons, even if ultimately, this fails.
Cara (2024) in many respects belongs to the above group, but with an important proviso: from the first moments we meet Cara (Elle O’Hara) it’s clear that the ground beneath her feet has already started to slip, if she ever held any purchase on it whatsoever. The world she’s managed to build for herself is either dismissive of her, or openly hostile; she has little worth, or is barely understood. The big crisis – and the film feels full of emerging crises, long before they become clearer – already feels like it’s on its way, even by the time the opening credits roll; all we can do is observe what happens. Doomed to repeat old cycles, any grab for agency on Cara’s part is – in the true sense of the world – problematic. But Cara is, in many respects, agreeable and likeable – you want her to thrive, to have something good in her life. She’s no sacrificial lamb; this isn’t that type of film. As a result, Cara is singularly hard-hitting, and the more you think over its core elements (and you will), the bleaker and crueller it all seems.
The film opens with an array of pixelated male faces and certain close shots of our lead which quickly reveal that she is a cam girl, but not for your standard turn-up-and-stare channels; things are darker here, as she broadcasts on a site called RedRoomFans which demands a bit more – specialist entertainment for its punters, shall we say. Both Cara and her flatmate Ash (Michaela Longden) work in this potentially rather shady trade, but Ash doesn’t participate in the more niche stuff. That being said, neither of them are exactly rolling in money through their endeavours. Ash refers to it as “a marathon, not a sprint”: it’s just another version of hard graft, and just as thankless. Outside of her online sessions, Cara is in therapy: all of her reality seems to be refracted through technology, laptop or phone, but in that she’s not so unusual, and she is working hard to compartmentalise her life – therapy sessions, cam sessions – all by interacting with her mobile or computer. Overshadowing all of this is her shaky ‘recovery’, and her certainty that she is about to be returned to hospital. We can insinuate that she means a mental hospital; is her fear of this triggering her current mindset?
We see Cara begin to disassociate from reality rather frequently, hearing people say things about her which clearly reflect her deepest feelings of shame and revulsion; they’re not really saying it, but again, there’s that sense of slipping down, down, down. Demands on her time by a client from the website, who apparently has enough knowledge about her to intimidate and bully her, push her further. So, when a fellow recovery group member casually mentions that he’d have once used violence on the therapy group leader for her belittling language towards him, it’s as if Cara grabs onto that possibility – of using violence to reset the balance. As the steady, certain erosion of hope continues around her, she begins to channel her hopelessness into defiance, forging ahead with a bizarre plan which she believes will change all the equations.
Cara takes place on the fringes of the everyday world, but it’s nonetheless a recognisable place, one where women are not seen as fully human beings. We know it goes on; we may see it for ourselves; here it feels particularly brutal, though, because Cara is a vulnerable woman struggling so hard to get control, but she’s already reduced in the eyes of many by her sexuality – and she feels, or has felt, that she has little option but to operate in that world, too – the spectre of abuse is never far away here. With a limited hand to play, one coloured by her past and her experiences, she has thrown in her lot with people and situations which could only ever do her harm in the long run. Her dawning awareness of this, and her determination to fight back, are understandable, even if her methods are – shall we say, questionable? But because Cara is a character with real depth, the film avoids playing her as a pawn, and clearly never sets out to do so: it would be a real mistake to fail to see past the film’s more horrifying or exploitative context, because it has some real clout in how it explores its key bigger-picture themes: power and powerlessness. Its array of nasty or damaged people, grim places and transactional relationships all point towards the balance of power, and how limited power in society is carved up and distributed.
The chief style of horror in Cara – despite a few shocking, appalling moments of bloodshed – is psychological, interweaving fantasy, dreams and persecution mania into its story. It’s a singularly unpleasant experience, but a strangely mesmerising one, with a sharp British script (and plenty of British invective) plus a cast giving high quality, invested performances throughout. There’s even the odd moment of dark humour – but don’t get your hopes up. You’re not lifted out of the hideousness of human cruelty and hypocrisy for very long. In fact, the more I think about Cara, the more I’m impressed that a film with a limited budget, small cast and on first pass, seemingly recognisable plot elements could combine into something so monumentally unpleasant and unsparing. Some time after my initial viewing, I’m still pondering what I’ve seen: is anything as it seems? Nothing is true; everything is permitted?
Audiences will differ, and this is also to the film’s credit. Cara leaves you with a sense of deep unease, and it sticks around, too, kicking up the odd moment of crushing realisation, or the answer to a question you wish you’d never asked.
Cara (2024) received its premiere at this year’s FrightFest. The film now has a release date of 3rd Feb 2025 from Reel 2 Reel Films.
A wonderfully desolate beach and the surrounding countryside clash with a ramshackle nearby house and its sole occupant (Nick Searcy), whom we see frantically writing – against the clock, as some kind of supernatural phenomena seems to be goading him, making him hallucinate, fear for his sanity. So who is this letter for? We get a brief gap in the timeline, but we can quickly infer that it’s for the man’s son Tom (Tyler Q Rosen), who receives a call late at night to tell him the worst (though given the remoteness of his father’s house, who knows who makes the call; oh, wait. Is this part and parcel of the strange circumstances which ensue?)
Thus begins a troubled quest for knowledge which, it seems, Tom always knew was coming. But it’s not a straight path to get to this point: along the way, we pick up a few more characters. There’s counsellor Jess (Adriana Isabel), Tom’s sister-in-law, first seen facing down an angry ex-con who doesn’t buy into self reflection, sharing his feelings or the meditation prescribed as part of his probation. In fact, he hates it so much, he can barely restrain himself from launching at Jess, whether she has just decided to share her own story or otherwise. Jess is, by her own admission, damaged; she also has the double jeopardy of a bit of a doofus at home, her husband Mark (Oscar Wilson). Mark spends a lot of the screenplay pondering the functionality of his smartphone: it’s not a winning trait, especially when he and Jess end up taking his distraught sister Kathy (Sara Fletcher) to the lake house in pursuit of Tom, who headed there to clear up his father’s affairs and – hasn’t been heard of since. This is a worry, and not just because Marks’ phone won’t work out there…
We know that Tom received his father’s letter, and that it contained a fairly standard mea culpa about the breakdown in their relationship – but also more, information which is carefully withheld from the audience. It’s enough to precipitate some very erratic behaviour from Tom, though, which his family see when they track him down. He is angry they’re there, telling them they need to leave – the lake, he avows, is a strange and dangerous place, which calls to him.
In essentials, the plot here is familiar: there’s a dark, dangerous and supernatural generational burden, and to know it is to suffer it. However, the ways in which The Dæmon brings this to the screen is effective and in places, innovative. Tom, the first focus of this unfolding strangeness, is portrayed well as a man enduring a dark, lonely ordeal. There are no long speeches from him and no super-convenient backstory, save for a brutal and unexpected flashback, counterbalanced by increasingly unpleasant and bizarre pay-offs in the here and now: what we get is a man genuinely grieving for the life he wishes he could have lived.
The focus shifts and moves, however, with each member of the group undergoing their own lonely ordeal, or else suffering because of the loneliness they each brought with them. The film shifts from intense, questing and lingering long shots of each individual, to evocative shots of the nature around them: it’s an intriguing blend, and beautifully shot throughout. Scrub any notion of supernaturalism from the film, and you would still be left with a sense of forces older and stronger than us – the environment, the water itself. But of course, there is more going on here: as this comes to the fore, the film can boast some unsettling effects, a little hamstrung by the CGI used perhaps, but still effective. There’s no argument with the accompanying soundtrack, however, which builds and maintains a thrumming, uneasy level of tension throughout; lighting and framing are excellent, too.
If there’s one main issue with The Dæmon – which, come to think of it, is a mysterious and unexplored title – it’s that the eventual payoff is strongly reminiscent of…the work of a certain, seminal horror author, and were I to name him, it would likely give the game away (if you aren’t already guessing about what possible supernatural horrors could be lurking beneath the depths of the lake). That’s all fine, except it rather invites audiences familiar with this particular storyteller (most of us, at a guess) to fill the gaps for themselves, taking that honour away from directors/writers Matt Devino and David Michael Yohe, who are content to leave us to it after providing a couple of clear signposts. However, even allowing for this, this is an engaging and often creepy, disconcerting film which generally provides a colder, grimmer spin on its brand of cosmic horror – albeit with some incredible, contrasting flashes of colour, and a nerve strong enough to leave us with some manner of ambiguity.
The Dæmon (2024) features as part of this year’s Pigeon Shrine FrightFest.
If Broken Bird (2024) begins unusually literally, then it soon becomes something far more complex and symbolic than that: its depiction of the nervy, prim Sibyl (Rebecca Calder) suggests from the earliest moments that something about this character is barely restrained, and that we will discover more anon. But in getting there – despite a few dithers and issues at the midway point – the film is increasingly brilliant and artfully tense, an uneasy piece of modern Gothic which pries away at modern attitudes to death and grief.
Sibyl, it seems, is a taxidermist: we see her working carefully on a dead bird at the very start of the film, with close macro shots showing the care and skill needed to preserve its little body. We see the bird; we don’t see the taxidermist herself very closely yet. She’s a bundle of snippets – a glimpse here and there of eyes, hair, hands. Finally, we see a little more of her, and are introduced to some of her other hobbies. She’s into composition as well as decomposition, it seems – sorry for that, but it kinda works here. Sibyl writes and performs her own poetry. However, whilst she performs at a regular open mic night, we don’t really see her interacting with anyone there. It’s all rather singular; whenever she encounters someone, she seems to either emulate them, or weave them into fantasies which stand in for whatever is really taking place.
However, when she gets a professional opportunity to take on a new role in a funeral home, this seems to suit her well. Being nervy and prim isn’t such a big deal when your clients are deceased and the affable, if traumatised Mr. Thomas (James Fleet) is glad of the help: work is all that’s keeping him going since the loss of his beloved wife. Sibyl is able to bring her past working experience to bear on her new role, and things go well – from the perspective of Mr. Thomas, anyway. The more time we spend with Sibyl, the more we see hints of some buried trauma in her own life. She responds to this by seeing connections which aren’t there – such as with museum assistant Mark (Jay Taylor) – or fantasising conversations which never even happen.
Elsewhere, we meet a woman called Emma (Sacharissa Claxton). In one of the film’s crossover moments, just as Sibyl ostensibly seems to be finding her way with her new job, Emma is losing her grasp on her own. She works for the police, but three months prior, Emma lost her young son. This loss haunts her, making it almost impossible for her to perform properly, and threatens to drive a wedge between her and her colleagues. As this all happened locally, Emma’s police force is the one charged with investigating what happened to the little boy. Two lives, two ways of dealing with grief: as we are introduced to both women, we can infer that something will unite them, but for now, we can only guess at the connection. In the meantime, we spend most of our time with Sibyl.
On reflection, the thing which makes Broken Bird finally blossom is the very same thing which, at some points during its runtime, makes that kind of connection feel unlikely. By sticking closely with Sibyl, we see the world of the film unfolding through her. At times, this means quite unexpected quirky humour, albeit framed with a kind of dour British quality, a few ‘should we laugh?’ moments in amongst everything else. Sibyl initially seems a little like Fran from Sometimes I Think About Dying, a similarly sad, complex woman given to grandiose fantasies about the kind of life – or death – she imagines for herself. Since we’re talking about films with similar themes and/or approaches, a comparison with Mayis perhaps the most obvious one to make: there are arguably even some mirrored scenes here.
But there’s a lot of complexity involved in figuring Sibyl out, arguably more so than with May, whose loneliness is clearer earlier; we can’t trust what we see with Sibyl, whilst still knowing that this is a woman who has made an artform out of concealment. We never get openly told about her motivations; we’re simply faced with her increasingly oddball behaviours, made to act like observers with no insider knowledge, and there are no internal monologues or special explanations to tell us what’s what. Add to that a run of still-mysterious, fantasised scenes accompanied with lively, even lullaby-like music and it’s hard to know what to think. The shifts in tone and Sibyl’s long, sometimes light-hearted deviations into idealised scenarios are, without a doubt, challenging in places. At around the hour mark the film is spread thinnest, with a perhaps unclear mood which may alienate some viewers. Likewise, you need to wait to pick up Emma’s storyline, which may make you wonder how things will work out.
Stick with it. What director Joanne Mitchell is doing here is making us think like Sibyl. And, once we do that – really do that – the film is able to move into an almost unbearable, if always artistic finale which grows so unendurably intense that it makes your heart feel like it’s going to shatter. The ways in which Broken Bird loops back to resolve its narrative gaps are incredibly assured, and its novel approach to storytelling is worth the wait. It’s a jigsaw puzzle this, where – once you work out what you’re actually looking at – you recoil in fascinated horror. But as for the picture itself! It’s one of the most aesthetically-pleasing films I have ever had the pleasure to see, a strangely graceful nightmare and an impressive first feature from Joanne Mitchell.
Broken Bird (2024) both received its World Premiere and opened this year’s FrightFest 2024.
Ecocriticism looks at the relationships between humankind and nature; it reinterprets our place in the natural order of things, looking at how we live, where we live and how our decisions as a species impact upon the world around us. As such, science fiction and dystopia offers a rich source of ecocritical ideas: this seems particularly true of Fede Alvarez’s recent film Alien: Romulus (2024), coming as it does midway through the timeline of Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986), in a future where Earth – now a home planet in a network of other worlds – is often conspicuous by its absence. In terms of ecocriticism, this is key: if this critical perspective encourages us to consider our place on Earth, then the potential removal of humanity from Earth recontextualises that place, asking questions which are rarely directly addressed by the Aliens timeline, but remain important. Only Alien: Resurrection (1997) ever brings the audience anywhere near the home planet, and it remains a closed book, never seen other than from orbit, and never landed; it’s just another destination at risk during the xenomorph timeline. Other than that, its status has shifted and the implication seems to be that the broader universe offers new opportunities to start again – new opportunities, at least, for some.
Humanity has at least partly decamped, in this version of the universe, to a number of remote, inhospitable places which can only be accessed through the technology of hypersleep – in other words, being placed in a kind of stasis for periods of years while the craft makes its way to destinations light years away. But even so, the economic system being implemented throughout the universe is eminently recognisable. The Alien universe’s big hitter, the genuine antagonist which either deliberately or inadvertently drives all the events which unfold, is the pan-planetary Weyland-Yutani Corporation, a massive organisation which unfolds recognisable practices ones which we will recognise – only at a new scale. Its ideals are now age-old: to derive profit from the exploitation of resources on different worlds via the labour of indentured workers. It relies on the efforts of settlers, miners and soldiers; this hasn’t changed in centuries. Although the settler colonies are small, the implication seems to be that there are many of them, albeit all at incredible distance from one another, and therefore unable to leave, to organise or to easily communicate. These people are weak and vulnerable, living in places ill-fitted for human life. You could argue that the proliferation of the xenomorphs through Hadley’s Hope is possible because it is such a hostile environment for the settlers; dark, inhospitable, and clearly very poorly surveyed. The settlers do the terraforming, and take all the risks.
Jackson’s Star, the setting for Alien: Romulus, is another colony with a meagre population, wracked with industrial accidents, diseases and premature deaths. We discover that protagonist Rain’s parents have died because of conditions at the colony; one of the reasons she is willing to risk an escape is to avoid sharing their fate, when she finds out that she is about to be sent underground, too. But legitimate means of escape are denied, albeit in customarily soothing, customer-facing language. The Weyland-Yutani operative at the work office denies that Rain is coming to the end of her tenure, although Rain insists that she is. The very idea is a lie; Rain’s contract is updated whilst she is stood at the desk asking (and expecting) to be released. She, like all the others, is fully indentured and will never be permitted to leave. However, the woman thanks her in rehearsed language for her hard work on behalf of the company.
It’s hideously unfair – and only the tip of the iceberg, given what Weyland are doing with at least some of their profits and power. They are, and have always been, represented as cruel, corrupt overlords, framing ‘concern’ for their colonists as being about their welfare, when it is really an entirely economic concern, at least by this point in the Weyland universe timeline.
What Weyland is mining, what it is using these resources for, and/or to whom they sell their goods remain, for the most part, a mystery. But they certainly fund clandestine scientific research, getting past any human qualms about their operations by concealing the truth, outright lying, or using their own synthetics (or androids) to do the bulk of their dirty work, programming them with prime objectives which protect the interests of the company at any cost to expendable human life. It is presumably only because synthetics are costly to manufacture and maintain that Weyland bothers with human workers at all. In a game where the Queen takes all, we also get key synthetics in the timeline, as embodied by the coldly clinical Rook and later, by the more conscientiously-programmed Bishop, but the humans are always the pawns. Romulus is also interesting in how it brings us a flawed synthetic in Andy – an end-of-line model whose glitches come across like a cognitive impairment, and whose prime objective (to do what is best for Rain) makes him function like a loving big brother. However, with an ‘upgrade’, when he connects to the mainframe computer aboard the space station, his objective changes; he is a piece of Weyland kit after all, and this can – and does – override his usual state, shedding the tics and impairments to place Andy on a level with Rook, whose programming bids him to continue with the mission, even though the station’s fleeting encounter with the xenomorph life cycle has turned it literally inside out.
The work is valuable (to Weyland) for reasons other than pure curiosity. This raises a question which has hung over the Alien series since its inception. Rook, or more accurately, Ash was originally instructed to preserve the xenomorph; perhaps, at this point, there was no clear mission attached to this, only a desire to find out more. However, by the time Aliens unfolds (albeit we now understand this to be later than the events in Romulus) the implication seems to be that the xenomorph could be useful for a military or a defence purpose – Weyland wants to sneak two embryos past military quarantine, thereafter to examine their potential. You can infer a certain purpose here. But this has always seemed strange. Surely, there could be no conventional military purpose for this lifeform, a creature which cannot be ‘taught tricks’, as claimed in Alien: Resurrection – other than to display some rudimentary learning which it then uses to escape and to kill its supposed masters. Other questions occur: what sort of enemy would require the xenomorph to fight it? How could they be controlled in terms of their population? How do you fight with a bio-weapon you can’t turn off?
In Alvarez’s screenplay, Rook suggests a more plausible reason that Weyland is so keen to control the xenomorphs and will risk anything to preserve the specimens. In stating that its intensely resilient DNA is a malleable tool which can perhaps be used to reverse-engineer the colonists, making them into better producers and workers, less susceptible to illness and injury, Weyland reveals that its motivations are, again, purely economic. And again, Rook is prepared to sacrifice anything to fulfil his mission, including the manipulation of the few humans he encounters on the space station. Why not, if experimental models present themselves? Human life, always susceptible in environments like the ones selected by Weyland to best generate profitable materials, is also fodder for scientific method, come what may.
In ecocritical terms, the xenomorphs themselves generate big questions about the relationship between species and environment. The xenomorph is a lifeform in many respects like any other lifeform: reproducing, nesting, responding to stimuli, attacking perceived threats. However, with a lifecycle which destroys its host organisms in days (or far quicker, even implausibly so, in Romulus) it would leave itself with no further means to reproduce (or presumably, feed itself either) after a comparatively short amount of time. Perhaps humans just provide particularly tantalising hosts, even if the xenomorphs are adaptable – any mammalian life seems suitable – though Romulus seems to suggest that the creature can even hibernate in space and be resurrected later. Whatever else the xenomorph is, it’s resilient and it is adaptable. It also thrives on the kinds of interplanetary travel and colonisation promoted by Weyland to find its new hosts and habitats; the corporation facilitates the proliferation of xenomorphs, whether wittingly or otherwise. But it is very telling that, whatever this organism is, whatever it does and however harmful it is, Weyland see in it a higher purpose which serves them. They are only interested in restricting the creature’s progress where it sees a reason for this – where it can be categorised, stored and examined, and then exploited, so that (we now glean) human workers may be exploited further.
Rain and her friends, with all of their flaws, their desperation and their ambitions are a foil to this higher purpose. In seeking to survive and to progress beyond the remit of Weyland’s control, seeking a planet more amenable to their own manner of existence, they fight back against the corporate control being exerted. They are individuals, working against a hostile organism and a conglomerate seeking to exploit that organism, too, to further the mistreatment of humans, though ostensibly to ‘help’ them, using obfuscation and weasel words to conceal their actions.
It is interesting that Rain’s escape is symbolised by the simple idea of watching the sun rise. The desire to ‘see the sun’ is a key driver behind her risky, almost fatal attempts to escape. Arguably, given the human requirement for exposure to the sun to remain healthy (such as through the manufacture of Vitamin D) the planet which hosts Jackson’s Star is wholly inappropriate for human life. This doesn’t deter Weyland-Yutani. Rain is prepared to risk everything to see the sun; she wishes to travel to a remote world where the sun does rise. She doesn’t expect to be free from labour when she gets there; she just harbours this simple wish, one which has a long literary precedent as a symbol of really ‘seeing’, or engaging with nature, as Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests when he says “most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child” (1). The sun – a sun – maybe any sun – represents natural order, natural rhythm, normality and beauty – even if, as is totally possible in Rain’s case, she has never experienced that natural order as part of her own life.
But she is human after all; she has been encultured to believe in this natural order and in how beautiful it is – finally seeing a tantalising glimpse of this sun when she first travels in the ersatz mining vessel to a point above the atmosphere. It has a key emotional impact on her, staying with her throughout the narrative arc, even if – thanks to the sci-fi framework of the film – she will be looking at a different sun, if she finally reaches her destination. Other characters, too, share her motivation. It’s poignant in its simplicity, and shows what they lack (and what we, as an audience, perhaps fail to appreciate). There is much within Alien: Romulus which, fantastical or not, seems cautionary, with its continuing story of over-powerful corporations which devalue people and worlds, but at the end of the film, we may hope that Rain finally gets her wish to see the sun rise every day, and perhaps we may see our own circumstances – and our own place on our planet – in a different way, too.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Random House, 1968), 6.
Getting a new Aliens film? Great, but after a few misfires (you can decide which were misfires, but I bet you think there were some) it can feel like a mixed blessing, perhaps. Wars have very nearly been fought over these movies, because the first two instalments set the bar so extraordinarily high; if the xenomorphs are ‘perfect organisms’, then so are the films which introduced us to them. Arguably, there have been diminishing returns since Aliens (1986) and for the remainder of the Ripley story arc, before different writers and directors took us through some offshoots and prequels to the main story.
Alien: Romulus (2024) positions itself between the events of Alien (1979) and Aliens, i.e. between the fate of the Nostromo and then the fate of the colony at Hadley’s Hope, and those sent to investigate. Ripley herself is never named in Romulus; she’s in deep space somewhere, yet to share her knowledge of the singular new organism which is of such interest to the pan-planetary corporation, Weyland-Yutani. Instead, in a mining colony called Jackson’s Star, we meet Rain (played by the very Elite Dangerous-sounding Cailee Spaeny). Rain is a worker, living a thankless life where – thanks to planetary environmental conditions – the sun never shines. She hangs onto the simple dream of seeing a sunrise – but gaining access to a planet where she stands a chance of getting her wish is impossible to come by. The company won’t release her from her contract; in fact, her life is set to get darker and more dangerous, as they want to send her into the mines, a deathtrap of lung damage and disease and an almost certain ticket to an early, sunless grave.
Alongside her ‘brother’ Andy – actually a defective end-of-line synthetic rescued by her late father – she agrees to participate in a scheme hatched by a group of her friends. They have detected an abandoned Weyland vessel, floating in orbit above their heads: if it has hypersleep pods, as they suspect, then they stand a chance of escape, sleeping the nine years it will take to get to a world called Yvaga (meaning ‘paradise’ – heh). To do it, they need Andy: he’s a piece of Weyland tech, and will be able to grant them access through the various security systems and doors. Reluctantly, but desperate to escape the mines which killed her parents, Rain agrees, and Andy agrees because his prime objective is to do what’s best for her. They take off in the small mining vessel they have (somehow) occupied for themselves, finding not just an abandoned ship, but an entire space station, now rolling perilously close to the frozen planetary rings.
Rescuing expensive, complex and company-owned hypersleep technology from a derelict space station before it wrecks itself on these rings is one thing, but there’s an even bigger problem, one which only the audience understands – for now. Just as the opening credits rolled, we saw a team of people picking through the wreckage of the Nostromo, ostensibly for salvage – but they were particularly interested in what looked like a fossilised lifeform, which they excitedly hauled aboard. Uh-oh. So where are those people now? And what exactly might they have done with the strange salvage they went to such great pains to capture?
What ensues is – with a few minor and a couple of major peeves regarding plot expediency – a tightly-wrought nightmare, which feels eerily familiar, but yet different enough to demand attention, with a few brilliant, blood-curdling flourishes. There are also some unexpected boons in terms of explaining just what Weyland-Yutani actually want with the xenomorphs; it certainly makes more theoretical sense than the idea, vaunted in Aliens, that these creatures could ever really be useful to the military. Director Fede Alvarez – who has cut his teeth on some of the best horror films of the past decade – really brings his horror experience to bear here, albeit without sacrificing the high-action feel of Aliens. It’s midway between Alien and Aliens in the timeline; it’s very much between those two films in terms of atmosphere and plot, too, with a lot of character-focused, slow burn trauma balanced against much faster paced, bloodier exploits. There’s plenty of darkness, peril and panic: it’s grisly, but also unnerving in turn. It’s a good balance overall. Additionally, the aesthetics are bang on, wholly in keeping with the timeline for Alien/Aliens and there is so, so much love for H.R. Giger here: the practical sets and SFX are key.
But the film’s greatest strength, and where it excels where some entrants in the franchise have floundered (can you genuinely name a single person from Alien: Covenant without looking them up?) is in its characterisation. For starters, inserting a young female character into a timeline which has had Ellen Ripley in it, and which we know has her still, is bold – and risky. Overplaying the dialogue with an unwieldly ‘please give a shit about me’ backstory would have been the wrong way to go; Alvarez, alongside his co-writers Rodo Sayagues know how to pare it down (Dan O’Bannon is also, very fairly, credited). They trust the audience: isn’t that a nice feeling? You see enough of Rain to sense the desperation and pain she feels, and she plays it well, with a plausible verve and drive to survive the horrors which unfold. Rain also embodies our erring human instincts, our distrust, our issues with hard logic, but most of all our frustration with corporate agendas which override the interests of the little people, repositioning money and power as new kings with new, unwitting armies.
But the real tour de force in this film is Andy (David Jonsson). He’s one of the most fascinating characters in the franchise to date: the idea of a synthetic which is flawed, obsolete, but beloved of a human family unit, which takes him in and works with those flaws? That in itself speaks volumes on the kinds of questions which we authentically have, and have now, about A.I: we’re a lot closer to this now than we were in ’79 or ’86. Andy is initially played like a human being with a cognitive impairment; this makes him a perfect target for the abused, downtrodden people who like to kick downwards, or who blame all synths for their very human tales of loss (and one scene which deals with this kind of abuse made me cry; not ashamed to say it). And yet, Andy is a Weyland synth after all; he can patch in to their systems, interact with their key objectives. The anxiety that technology now answers to different masters is dealt with highly effectively in Romulus, and Jonsson is more than equal to it: in fact, he’s fantastic. Not human, but humane, turning in an assured, varied, engrossing performance.
The only issue, really, is that filmmakers struggle to end Aliens films. Having introduced a lifeform which can even hibernate in the void of space, how do you get rid of them? Like, ever? The answer to that question is a little limited by setting, means and that strange obligation to pay respect to previous films by repeating key plot points (I will always argue that there’s no need to pay fan service; a good Aliens film is the fan service, and better than even brief do-overs and forced nods to old lines and set pieces). The film also plays fast and loose with getting us to a point where – voila – we are overrun with xenomorphs, despite knowing what we know (or thought we did) about their life cycle. But this isn’t enough of an issue to spoil the film, not for this reviewer at least, and no one can argue with that horrific twist and denouement in terms of spectacle, which is certainly a big step up even from, ahem, something similar which has also occurred in a previous film. There are familiar game pieces, sure, but Alien: Romulus has strong acting, strong visuals and enough deeply repellent ideas to still add something fresh to the franchise. It’s an eminently worthwhile addition.
In 1814, a group of French soldiers fighting for Napoleon are lost in bleak Serbian territory. Exhausted, starving and on unfamiliar ground, matters are looking desperate for them until they encounter a local woman who offers them a tasty looking horse. The soldiers have no plans to lead it to water in order to make it drink; all they want is to make it their dinner. Unfortunately, their planned evening of alfresco Cordon Bleu cuisine is curtailed drastically when the horse unexpectedly goes kablooey.
Fast forward to the modern day, where the area is apparently free from de-atomising dressage contestants but now plays host to an exploratory fracking operation, overseen by the no-nonsense Emily (Toby Poser). In addition to fellow Americans John (John Adams) and Emily’s nephew Teddy (Max Portman), a group of locals is on hand to assist with the drilling operation and to provide security. To satisfy any ecological concerns, environmentalists/academics Nikola (Alexsandar Trmčić) and Sofija (Olivera Peruničić) are also along for the ride.
When the initial test finds something a lot weirder than a gas pocket, and with bad weather hindering the group’s escape, the ill-matched workmates find themselves in an on-site face off with a parasitic presence that is looking for the ideal host. Yes, it’s an updated version of Auf Wiedersehen Pet meets The Thing as the Adams Family turn their attention to the monster movie, and it’s every bit as wild and distinctive as I hoped it would be.
This time out, it’s less of a family affair, with no Zelda Adams to be found and Lulu Adams on co-writing duties only. Shot far, far away from their usual stomping ground, that feeling of Toby and John stepping into an unfamiliar arena in which their usual filmmaking compadres have been replaced by strangers translates fascinatingly from the production to the onscreen action, with all of the awkwardness, cultural differences and communication issues that kind of project can bring, along with an ultimate need to pull together to resolve the larger problems afoot.
For anyone who thought Where The Devil Roams was a little too oblique and grisly, I can assure you that Hell Hole has a huge amount of fun with its premise and there are plentiful laughs to be enjoyed. Yes, some of the humour is of the type marked “I’m really not sure I should be finding this amusing” and the workplace comedy is downplayed to the point that most mumblecore flicks wish they were that deadpan. However, take a couple of minutes to tap into the vibe and you’ll be chuckling at weird office banter one moment and guffawing at the most dreadful things the next.
Of course, it’s not just gross out body horror and running gags about tagine. Within the confines of an increasingly splattery creature pic, the screenplay makes sharp observations and opens up discussions about big themes: bodily autonomy; American involvement in the affairs of foreign countries; profiteering from an increasingly unstable planet; and, because we’re talking The Thing – and, by extension, Alien – the male fear of pregnancy. As is the case with previous films from the Adams stable, the subtext is not that of the finger wagging lecture variety, it’s just a little extra to chew on which you wouldn’t normally find in a film about a many-tentacled varmint causing unfortunate folks to explode in gorehound-pleasing showers of blood and guts.
Considering the limited budget, the creature work by Masters FX Inc. is impressive, with the monster’s appearance riding the line between disgusting and hilarious, especially when it’s slobbering over its next target. For me, the digital effects from regular collaborator Trey Lindsay don’t quite match up to the practical stuff, but I grew up watching 1980s horror on VHS so maybe I’m showing my bias. Having said that, there’s still something undeniably gross about seeing an animated feeler emerging from a character’s eye.
With a slightly larger set of characters on which to focus, the Serbian drilling team, each one clad in orange overalls, gets a little lost in the shuffle. Their members, although not interchangeable cast offs, are more often than not ushered in as critter fodder but there’s a sneaky through line in the story which suggests, in this particular situation, the local employees are the ones which will be chucked in front of the threat first. And they are.
Poser and Adams are on reliably good form here, the former’s reluctant den mother also coming to terms with an ethical 180 in her career after her solar power business failed, the latter’s laid back cool coming under severe – and, it has to be said, comedic – stress. Trmčić’s and Peruničić’s characters entertain in diverting supporting roles as haughty intellectual and smart/klutzy science babe respectively, which allows them – and the script – to take at least some time out from the entrail spilling to consider the moral and scientific issues. This also gives the audience a breather or two before the next poor sod finds themselves either forcefully entered by a determined, parasitic presence or blasted into bloody chunks. Or both.
The score is great, too, with Adams’ chunky, fuzzy guitar blasts sometimes acting as the heartbeat of the increasingly frazzled protagonists as they creep or blunder around, wondering what’s around the next corner, sometimes serving as an exclamation point to the latest pile of rank-looking viscera or the realisation that the ongoing plight has somehow turned even more grim. It’s the perfect accompaniment to the family’s skewed, punk rock approach to familiar subgenres.
So, given the differing production circumstances of this latest opus and taking the plot synopsis at face value, is Hell Hole a glimpse of the Adams family embracing the mainstream? Absolutely not. Even with the drastic change of scenery, the overall feel remains satisfyingly offbeat and the European settings are imbued with the same sense of foreboding as their previous American counterparts, whether it’s the shabby, towering, industrial complex or the surrounding forests, where everyone can hear you scream but finds they’re not in much shape to do anything about it.
The overriding ethos of getting maximum bang for the buck is still firmly in place. Some of the narrative decisions made along the way would only be found in an Adams Family movie. If you were worrying that this was somehow going to degenerate into something more akin to a gun for hire job, worry not. Hell Hole is different yet – in terms of style, wit and regular ventures into the oddest of territories – it’s more of the strangely comforting same. Fans will miss Lulu and Zelda, no doubt, but there’s still so much to savour. The tale may be as old as time (or it’s at least clocked up a couple of centuries in this case) but there’s an uncommon freshness to the way it’s related here. Hell Hole? Hell, yes!
Hell Hole (2024) will be released on Shudder on August 23rd.
Before getting into this review of Duchess (2024), I’d like to draw attention to the film’s poster art. Tell you what, let’s have a look at it now.
Does that look right to you?
The proportions are all off; at first glance it looks passable, but then perhaps something catches your eye and you notice that a woman’s shoulder can’t be there, far less her bust. Her arms can’t be there either. The poster makes no sense, but it does all it needs to do: it showcases Charlotte Kirk, showing that this project is all about her. As such, the poster’s honest, even if it’s totally warped and in dire need of sorting out. It functions nicely as a microcosm for the film itself: it doesn’t sit right, it doesn’t bear close examination, but it’ll do.
The film begins as no doubt the entire project began: with an idea about getting Kirk in lingerie, and then some notion of filling in around that with a story. She’s in lingerie because she has somehow set up a honey trap for a gangster type who has wronged her; the use of a voiceover and freeze frames (as per Guy Ritchie) tell is that this is payback. We then zip back in time to examine how we got to this point, and what it’s payback for: again as per Guy Ritchie, we begin with the film’s habit of displaying a large number of character names on screen, but because we have barely anything to do with most of these people, you will forget them. Turns out that Scarlett starts out as a pickpocket working in nightclubs (though wearing the sorts of slinky dresses which presumably make it very hard to conceal what you’ve stolen) – whilst doing this, she’s spotted by a charming American called Rob (Philip Winchester) and there’s a big manly fight over Scarlett, because of course! Rob takes a shine to her and tracks her down to her boxing club (!) where she breaks off from a practice to dismiss him utterly. Some time passes, but he persists, rescuing her shortly after a vicious beating at the hands of the boyfriend from the club which, as is now traditional, apparently breaks her bones, but leaves her with nothing more disfiguring than a few dabs of blood on her face, and broken ribs which magically heal just prior to getting shagged by Rob, otherwise all that getting slammed against a wardrobe door would really hurt.
So they fall in love: it turns out he’s a diamond dealer (albeit one who is under the impression that people mine them from ditches) and, as the diamond trade is full of wrong ‘uns, some stuff goes down, including a cameo from Stephanie Beacham as a gangland doyenne, who has been tasked with the most awkward swearing ever committed to film. It’s slow, slow, slow, but we get to the point where plenty of double dealing takes place, Scarlett gets the exorbitant nickname ‘Duchess’ (though at least she doesn’t pick it herself, as it has that ring to it) and then eventually it all turns into a vengeance epic, with ‘Duchess’ aiming to set up on her own.
Never certain if it’s sending itself up or pushing the envelope in terms of gritty crime fare, Duchess fluctuates between the two until the last half an hour or so, when it finally opts for the latter. To give it some credit, it’s not a bad looking film at all: there’s money coming from somewhere, regardless of the audience responses to Marshall-Kirk projects to date, and this means a budget for locations, interiors, lighting, framing and the incidental music, which does a reasonable job of weaving things together. Sean Pertwee, though cast very much in a supporting role, is a welcome addition, and though Beacham is given short shrift from the script, it’s always good to see her.
But once again, Neil Marshall and Charlotte Kirk have taken it upon themselves to write the script together, and once again, it’s disastrous. Is it as bad as The Lair (2022)? Well, we’re not taking any ridiculous shortcuts like announcing the lead character has a photographic memory in order to justify an equally ridiculous plot point, but nonetheless we’re stuck with the same casual biases, logical gaps, weird puffery, childish ideas, non-sequiturs and as mentioned above, amateur swearing. The swearing is an important point, actually: it’s a bit like asking someone if they know the price of a pint of milk to find out whether they understand what life is like for most people. Don’t know where and how someone would swear in a sentence? Then leave it out: get it wrong and it’s a massive shibboleth which gives you away as immensely naïve and out of touch, which is bad news when you’re trying to spin a yarn about gang warfare. Equally, purloining so many elements from Guy Ritchie is an error not just because it’s lazy, but because the cockney accent and dialect used by his characters in the 90s is on its way out now: someone born in 1995, as ‘Duchess’ is, would in all likelihood be using MLE, or Estuary. Attention to detail.
But the accent thing…that’s one thing. The real problem with this film is its treatment of Kirk. It’s that which really marks it out as a thinly-plotted game of Dolly Dress Up, and endless yammering about whether or not Duchess has ‘balls’, or needs ‘balls’, or can kick men in the balls, doesn’t create the gloss of feminism which the film apparently believes it does. In fact, let’s go further: the strong and uncomfortable sense that these films begin with storyboards of Kirk in various sexy outfits, which are then used as the basis for stringing the outfits together with a plot. That is the cardinal sin of the film. How a once-renowned director like Neil Marshall could be so wrapped up in his personal life as to traduce his own reputation like this is bizarre, and who knows? One day, it might all feel like a bizarre fever dream. It’s actually heartening to see that Kirk is working with other directors and other writers on upcoming projects at the moment: I hope they can bear to push her a bit more, because as much as she has benefitted by being elevated to leading lady status by dint of her relationship status, she may have reached the top of that learning curve. And she’s no script writer, but the blame is not hers alone, is it?
Duchess (2024) is yet another exercise in frustration, a film with money and means which nonetheless scuppers all potential with its daft decision-making and blinkered priorities. Same as the historical horror, same as the sci-fi, and now a crime movie. How long can this go on? Realistically? Do audiences matter? Who are these films even for?
