It’s one of the most seminal bad science horror movies of all time, it has some of the best lines of all time…and thanks to Second Sight, there’s a brand new version of Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator on its way.
Releasing on 15th December (perfect for dispersing the family at Christmas) this new version will be a presented in a rigid slipcase with new artwork by Krishna Shenoi and a fascinating essay filled 120-page book. It includes a dual format three-disc edition including one UHD and two Blu-rays, with main feature and bonus features on both discs. Special features include The Integral Version in HD, a new audio commentary and a slew of archive commentaries, interviews and features.
Sound good? We have one copy of the boxset to give away, so if you’d like to be in with a chance (UK readers only, sorry) then please drop the site an email with Re-Animator as your subject title. The competition will be drawn on Sunday evening (7pm GST) on the 14th December, and the winner will be informed shortly after that. As ever, contact details will be securely stored for the duration of the competition and then deleted. Get cracking!
Here we are again, then. The year is 1480: Wallachian marital bliss (which seems to involve assaulting lots of cushions) gets rudely interrupted by the prospect of holy war. So off goes Prince Dracula (who keeps referring to himself as ‘Dracul’), campaigning against the invading Turks. However all his thoughts remain with his beloved Elisabeta (Zoë Bleu), whom he plans to send off to a different castle for safety. Bad idea: there are Muslim soldiers waiting in the woods, and she’s pursued. Dracula (Caleb Landry-Jones) does his best to wing it there in time, but actually ends up bringing about his beloved wife’s death anyway.
You know full well where this is going if you’ve seen Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992), and this film is, strangely, more of an homage to that film than a fresh retelling of Bram Stoker’s story. The whole ‘I renounce God’ thing isn’t present in the novel, but it’s a key element in the ’92 film and it is here too; arguably, providing a reason for Dracula’s malign eternal life has always been a good call. So Dracula the undead nobleman is born, and we move on, the film tells us, 400 years, to Paris. Well, 400 years-ish: the Eiffel Tower is already up. Doctors at a local sanitorium have a quandary, so having reached the limits of their professional expertise, they’ve reached out to a priest (Christoph Waltz) who knows a thing or two about these mysterious cases.
Their issue? They have a deranged society bride on their hands, a woman who, as they work out, is rather youthful-looking for her actual age: she is also lascivious, hates holy men, and caused a bit of a scene at her wedding breakfast, which seems to be the worst crime of all. The woman, Maria (Matilda De Angelis) presents an intriguing possibility for the priest, who has spent most of his life trying to track down the original source for all of the vampires running about in fin-de-siecle Europe, of which Maria is now one. The priest, who more accurately calls Dracul ‘Dracula’ throughout, is tantalisingly close to his goal.
Meanwhile, there’s the usual irresistible name-shuffling, plot-tinkering behaviour from director and writer Luc Besson, who here joins the ranks of filmmakers who want to do Dracula, but want to change the key characters and so forth. If you want a crack at Dracula and you haven’t changed things around, have you even written a Dracula screenplay? So here we have a Maria rather than a Lucy; we have a French estate rather than Carfax Abbey; we do have a Jonathan Harker though (Ewens Abid), though he seems to rock up in Wallachia on his own errand to get Dracula to part ways with some of his French property. Eventually, when pressed, we segue into the expected Mina/Elisabeta story arc, though it never feels like part of a cogent piece of storytelling. That’s the thing. The film is over two hours long, but it all feels strangely thin.
The past is a foreign country, and filmmakers always leave themselves open to comment whenever they try to blend imagination with verisimilitude: as such, the film’s own attempt to align its Prince Dracul with Vlad Dracula, dates permitting, impressive armour and all, feels a little clunky and budget-stretching with limited impact. Where the film settles more into its own mode of high camp, it actually feels more comfortable – there are moments where you feel welcome to laugh – but unfortunately, the brilliant Caleb Landry-Jones never really settles into his role here. Camp doesn’t come very easily to him – or at least, this particular variety of camp does not. Whilst he attacks the part with his usual relish, and looks rather dapper in select scenes, he’s hamstrung by all the limits to script, costume and development. The sense that so much of this film is a do-over doesn’t help matters. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but there are better ways. There are scenes which look to be verbatim copies from Coppola’s film, meaning they provide a sense of déjà vu, rather than an impression of their own. Even the portraits on the castle walls look more like Gary Oldman than Caleb Landry Jones. And, when Besson does add his own touches, they’re just too ludicrous, even for camp: a cute gargoyle army? Perhaps Besson likes a bit of What We Do in the Shadows. Oh, and then there’s the girlbait perfume motif…
This film has its visual charms; unmistakeably, there are some beautiful visuals, and equally unmistakeably, there are some interesting ideas. It’s just such a shame that despite the film’s unnecessarily bloated runtime and determination to head off on its own tantalising side quests, none of this really benefits the film as a whole. At its worst, this Dracula feels like a school play version of Coppola’s film: it just can’t match the older movie’s innovation or grandiloquence. Or budget; consider the wigs as proof of that. It was, to be fair, originally titled Dracula: a Love Tale, and that’s all it really is, or at least aims to be: the vampirism feels tangential overall, and as such, key players and plot points feel tacked on, secondary considerations and little more. It’s all watchable enough, it has its diverting moments, but this isn’t a great entrant into the vampire genre and on the whole it’s far more Argento than Coppola, which in this case is not intended as a compliment.
Dracula (2025) is available on Digital HD on December 1st and on DVD & Blu-ray from December 22nd.
Haunters of the Silence (2025) is avowedly experimental; this is not a narrative piece of filmmaking in any recognisable way, so this review opens with a proviso: it will not be for everyone, and in fact it will probably appeal to a very select band of film fans. If you are interested in the experimental filmmaking process, then there is plenty here to admire, given how it’s geared towards being a sensory experience as much as anything else. It has themes but no plot, people but no characters (in a conventional sense at least). This makes it rather challenging to review, though its strong visual ideas and auditory overload provide an interesting atmosphere.
So what’s it about? If it can be summed up, then I guess Haunters of the Silence is all about searching – for lost loved ones, or family members, or a sense of personal peace. We start with a man scattering ashes at a lake; back at home, grief seems to shape the time he spends, as he strives to fill the space and the hours with light, voices and other distractions. When he tries to sleep that night he is repeatedly woken by his video doorbell; restless wildlife, perhaps, or is that something else on the periphery of the shot? Under normal circumstances, the man would probably just have switched off his phone, but something prompts him to go outside and take a look. This seems to prompt a raft of phenomena which now begin to afflict him when inside his home too, culminating in the appearance of a strange entity which seems to drain and oppress him, sending him fleeing.
The rest of the film follows the man through various dreamlike states, interspliced with external references to objects and ideas; there are some panels from what seems to be a comic-book version of the Du Maurier novel Trilby, the book which gifted the term ‘Svengali’ to the English language, and the ways these begin to utilise stopmotion animation is very skilfully done. There are also books, including a covetable edition of Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, with one in particular on the role of drumming in ritual magic recurring several times until it seems to be a motif of sorts. Really, this is a film which doesn’t need (or really reward) rapt attention; you can just as easily get something from it by half watching it, sort of letting it wash over you; it could oh-so easily be played as a video accompaniment for an avant-garde black metal set, by the by, and feel for all the world like it was designed for that purpose.
The film is at its weakest when it seems to threaten a bit of Skinamarinkemulation, but thankfully, this is very brief – and could relate more to this reviewer’s post-Skinamarink terror of cinematic grain than any deliberate decision on the part of filmmakers/writers Tatu Heikkinen and Veleda Thorsson-Heikkinen. Elsewhere, in its blurring, segueing but often very attractively framed and lit camerawork, it occasionally resembles work by Alex Bakshaev and Grant McPhee, though each of these directors, despite their arthouse leanings, tend to start off with a narrative framework before moving more towards impressions and ideas. Haunters of the Silence never consciously offers this, and keeps up the same, exploratory approach from the very opening scenes. A slightly clunkily-worded intertitle aside, it’s a film which does what it sets out to do very smoothly and with some undeniable ingenuity. It’s more immersive than informative, and will be best admired by viewers who are okay with that.
Haunters of the Silence (2025) was awarded ‘Best Experimental Film’ at the Paris Film Awards in October.
Is it me, or do even the most improbable dystopian situations feel a whisker away these days? Perhaps The Running Man (2025) feels oh-so close at hand because the novel on which it’s based, with its novel-contemporary analogue tech and big budget gameshow format blends so nicely with our world, billionaire media conglomerates with their snazzy, surveilling screens included. Whatever it is, The Running Man – a new adaptation, rather than strictly a remake – feels very discomfiting in many places. Since Stephen King wrote the book in ’82 (and faster still since the 1987 movie version was made), the world of reality TV has kicked into top gear; you feel uneasily sure that if Netflix could only perfect the world’s most watertight waiver, they’d think about making a show like this. Oh, they would. They’d almost certainly make Speed the Wheel, one of the other shows we glimpse during The Running Man, except for the fact that we’ve already had The Biggest Loser and it would be a bit passé now. One of director Edgar Wright’s biggest successes here is understanding you don’t need to embellish 2025 all that much to create an engaging backdrop for your own big event. The film’s frequent refrain of, “Stop filming me!” could be spoken almost anywhere in our brave new world.
It does take a little while to feel like an Edgar Wright film, though: perhaps he was conscious of wanting or needing to do a lot with this project, given how long he’d wanted to make it. In places, the film can feel uncomfortably stretched between sci-fi, action and moments of slightly tonally odd humour, even though humour has often been an integral ingredient in his films. Or, and it would be ironic if so, perhaps he was constrained by financiers who wanted a say in some of the film’s inclusions and changes, if there are more influences at play here than Wright himself.
But anyway: Ben Richards (Glen Powell) lives in a world of stacked decks. Whilst he’s been fortunate enough to father a daughter with his wife despite the radioactive dust allowed to settle, consequence free, on the working poor, he’s been unfortunate in terms of his career: he’s been essentially blacklisted from gainful employment due to once ‘damaging a company harness’ (actually saving a colleague). His daughter is sickly and needs medical care; little wonder, then, that Ben is a very angry man – in fact, he’s pissed off enough for us to believe he’d take the desperate step of auditioning to take part in the new season of The Running Man, a show which relies on a steady stream of shuffling desperados to entertain the masses. By the by, that part of his screen test where he responds to trigger words in his own inimitable way? One of an already (to this reviewer’s mind) strong script’s most successful moments.
The show itself is very different here to the gameshow version dreamed up for Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Eighties, in a film which has now cemented itself as ‘one of those classics’ from the decade (although praise wasn’t immediate, or unequivocal for that one). Here, as in the book, it’s survival out in the community which is key. Run, hide, avoid, prove you’re still alive by mailing video diaries to the network, and keep going for the duration: thirty days. This is a tough call, given that every flat surface in this version of the modern world has a screen displaying Richards’ face, phoning him in carries a cash incentive, and there’s a crack team of trained hunters on his tail.
The Running Man has an illustrious history: it’s long been a huge success for the Network (hmm, that’s a prominent ‘N’ they use – where have we seen that before?). In this universe, the Network has a stake in everything, operating as a de facto system of government, policing and surveillance. Key to the show’s success is the Network’s shadowy executive, Dan Killian (Josh Brolin) – a smooth, omniscient character, 100% confident of his format and his reach. Brolin is good in this role; it always feels like a plus when he turns up in anything, so having something decently engaging for him to do here is a boon. He can and does offer Richards everything he needs; there are cash bonuses peppered throughout the game – more than enough to set the Richards family up for life – if Richards will only play the crowd-pleasing role Killian expects.
The Running Man initially comes out fighting in a way which belies its two hours plus runtime, offering up a really punchy opening act, establishing its own rigged system with plentiful, neat plot additions to suggest it. The balance between the dull, grey-washed drudgery of the downtrodden and the high-colour, high-end schmaltz of the Network itself works well, with enough characterisation along the way, and the first throes of the chase are compelling. Although in some paces the cat and mouse pursuit can feel a little repetitive, the film’s biggest slabs of action reliably come along to rev things up (if in doubt, add an explosion. It worked in the Eighties and it works now.) But perhaps The Running Man‘s best quality is its zeal for presenting TV as the final frontier of corruption, making this point by presenting only-just sharper versions of AI and surveillance technology, employed by the Network to ‘control the narrative’, another very real concept which has filtered down to us.
The film cycles through pursuit, paranoia and violence in turns, leading into a finale which feels like a good payoff even if – and this is a key criticism – it can’t quite trust itself to just tell the original tale, without some needless fourth-wall hijinks and a surprise dip in faith. It’s also odd that a film of this length still feels a little rushed at the end, with the slightly clunky addition of a new character at a point where it can’t quite bed in. But The Running Man is an exuberant and arresting spin on the source material nonetheless, made with enough lavish love and care to pull through in the end: it’s disappointing that it’s only recouped a fraction of its budget so far, but give it some time. Thirty days would be nice and neat, but realistically it may take longer than that, and some viewers will find that they halt for good at some of the film’s more challenging tonal and timing shifts. For this reviewer, though, there’s a lot to enjoy and incidentally, it’s also great to see the steps to Wembley Stadium being given new life as a setting here. This is a solid film which deserves a lot of praise.
Ah, here we go then. An older man who seems to be living and bill-dodging at a hotel on the French Riviera (Fabio Testi) becomes fixated by a young woman on the beach; the diamond jewellery in her nipple (!) prompts him on a fractured and somewhat looping trip down Memory Lane, as he recollects his heyday as a secret agent. An array of improbable James Bond-style gadgets and suave villains shift Reflection in a Dead Diamond somewhat away from giallo homage, the usual visual style favoured by directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, but arguably not all the way elsewhere; there’s still some Argento and still some Bava in here, alongside the newer spy thriller and eurocrime references. Anyway, what at first seems to be the memory of the investigation of a crime kingpin gradually turns into an array of double dealings and investigations united by the hunt for a leather-clad murderess known as Serpentik. That is, this is all in the past: it takes a while to realise it, but the other suave guy we encounter in the early part of the film is the same man we meet at the hotel in his older years – one John Diman.
I think that’s what’s going on, but I’m already reaching here: the hardest part of writing any review of these directors’ work is identifying the smattering of plot which they usually decide to provide, sifting it from the visuals and the mood pieces, which are and have always been their priority. There’s perhaps more dialogue in this film than in previous titles, echoing its cinematic influences perhaps, but also to an extent misrepresenting the film as having more meaningful narrative elements than it does. You naturally spend longer pondering what is being said if it’s in there, before you’re made to acknowledge that there’s still little meaningful to guide you. The layering of timelines in this film makes it near impossible to follow, too, which altogether feels more challenging than having no discernible plot elements at all. You feel that, if the filmmakers have put it in, then it must mean something, so you endeavour to follow it – but you wind up following it nowhere. Reflection in a Dead Diamond is another sumptuous but tedious melee of femmes fatales, funky macros and might-be symbolism. Surely not yet another metafilm made for critics to decode, rather than for audiences? Another issue: is it meant to be comedic? A table football massacre? Who’s laughing at who here, and should they be?
Look, I get it: Cattet and Forzani have spent years developing an unusually painterly cinematic style which offers tribute to their formative cinema favourites in an unorthodox way, endeavouring to blend retro genres with a very singular arthouse vibe. And as usual, Reflection in a Dead Diamond is a visual wonder, every shot seemingly composed by an artist (and here, given the film’s links to comic books, in a way which could – and does – fit specifically into comic book panels). The film has stacks of the requisite otherworldly charm, with an array of close-ups, landscapes and shots which spin, solarise, shimmer and blur. There are brilliant ideas everywhere, things like explorations of ideas about crime, duplicity and artifice through silhouettes, blasting wounds into one another which erupt into cascades of diamonds. It’s pretty. The film’s tableaux are, in their own way, totally absorbing. The multilingual approach, the ways the film largely resists being grounded in a specific time and place, the occasional (and surprising) breaking of the fourth wall and the gradual segue into film-as-comic all reveal a creative and ambitious zeal for the art of cinematography. It’s possible to acknowledge all of that, and still feel disappointed.
Despite their passionate advocacy of an impressive line-up of genre titles, Cattet and Forzani persist in emptying their favourite titles of any meaning, paying a compliment by disposing of even the fractured coherence of, say, a Schivazappa title, which feels like no compliment at all. And it has happened over and over; that continuation, in a world where people struggle to get films made, feels as engaging as anything actually contained in the films. What is it about these wholly visual paeans that keep them coming? Perhaps we can forgive the presence of an idiot at the party if they’re really, really, really good looking? The directors are clearly having fun, true, and having more fun here than they’ve had in their previous titles, arguably – but by making it so difficult for their audiences to feel the same unless they, too, give up on understanding any of it, ultimately it doesn’t feel very clever or respectful at all.
Reflection in a Dead Diamond receives a limited theatrical release on 21st November 2025.
As Dangerous Animals gets going, we first observe tourists and sightseers Greg (Liam Greinke) and Heather (Ella Newton) popping up on a Queensland quayside, hoping for a ‘marine experience’ with a local: they’ve just missed their organised tour doing something similar. The gaffer, Tucker (Jai Courtney) is straightaway signposted as a bit of a wildcard, but Greg and Heather are keen enough for said experience to ignore this; by the way, what they propose to do is go swimming with sharks. Tucker’s specialism – and business – stem from personal experience, as he survived a shark encounter (and a hell of a bite) as a kid. This hasn’t put him off; if anything, it’s triggered a strange, spiritual deference for the predators, which can only add to the red bunting which could already be flying from his boat.
Anyway, the boat heads out, Greg and Heather get in the shark cage, and down they go: to be fair, the underwater scenes in this film are very beautiful and tranquil. Sharks, of course, have two modes: serene giants of the sea, and eyes rolling, thrashing about in viscera, fearsome death machines. Come to think of it, Tucker is not too dissimilar, even if there’s a self-described method in his madness. he has a plan for his guests; he has a plan for all his guests, of which Greg and Heather only number two.
Next up, we meet a free spirit chick-with-a-van, Zephyr (Hassie Harrison). She begrudgingly agrees to give a lift to a guy whose own vehicle has broken down; after a guarded start with Moses (Josh Heuston), they do in fact hit it off. Yep, they’re quite clearly framed as a) cute enough to care about and b) Next, which is potentially a snag for the film to get past. You know full well that Tucker is about to hove into view, and that Zephyr is going to be the feisty riposte to whatever mad shit he has in store. So, it’d better be good.
Well, it is, mainly because Dangerous Animals has one killer idea at its core. This notion of shark-as-murder-weapon for a psychopath obsessed with his own brush with a shark-related death is a solid one, referencing other, older horrors and genres without feeling like a simple rehash, and do you know what else is great? The sharks here are…just sharks. They’re not genetically-modified sharks, surprise megalodons or inexplicably smart, vengeful sharks. Instead, the sharks here just do what sharks oh-so occasionally do (to humans, at least), and only then with some heavy encouragement from shark fanboy Tucker. Similarly, the character of Tucker doesn’t get (or need) an overly busy backstory. We learn a little, but he’s still kind of a closed book, a man tinged with de rigueur misogyny, but otherwise a seemingly affable, music loving, down to earth bloke. It’s hard not to see him in similar terms to Mick Taylor from 2005’s Wolf Creek: these two share the same instinct for picking off vulnerable, itinerant tourists by seeming like the salt of the earth, even if Tucker feels more like some sort of Discovery Channel-spawned monster, and Mick’s more SBS.
Once all the key pieces are in play though, Dangerous Animals essentially becomes a tense survival thriller – one with enough about it to make you shout advice at the screen, and one which feels in some respects like a Noughties horror film, back when all people seemed to do for a few years was survive (or not) various torturous situations. All in all, it works very well, although the rise and fall of adrenaline-inducing beats and subsequent lulls can feel a rather bedraggling experience for the viewer. However, this is a well shot, soundtracked and acted film, in equal parts clear on its influences and keen to do its own thing. And, although in its title and basic premise it may sound like it shares a lot of ground with the heyday of ‘animals gone rogue’ exploitation flicks, the proponent of all the horror here is very much human. As the poster suggests, you’re safer – kinda – in the water.
Director Sean Byrne earned his forever chops with his debut feature The Loved Ones, though he’s not been particularly prolific since that time, with only one interim feature-length before this newest one. Dangerous Animals does feel more akin to The Loved Ones – a realist film with some arguably fantasy touches – than The Devil’s Candy, a fantasy conceit with some aspects of realism, like its family dynamic. But is it helpful to force a comparison? Perhaps not, given that Byrne has, so far, opted for something quite different in each feature he’s made; he’s skilled and he’s confident, showing more and more knowledge each time, as well as showing willingness to play with ideas from the horror genre in a nicely self-referential way. He also knows a thing or two about how to dole out those killer scenes, and Dangerous Animals has a few beauties. All in all, even if the Australian Tourist Board might be tearing out their hair (again) over this film, the Australian Film Board ought to be throwing money and opportunities at Mr. Byrne; three features in sixteen years feels like far too few.
Dangerous Animals (2025) is available to stream now.
A dog lies sleeping the sleep of the righteous before being awoken by …something. It could be the mobile phone buzzing away on the arm of the chair – or it could be something far more ominous. Todd, the human at Indy’s side, is unconscious and unresponsive. The room seems odd, too – there’s weird interference with the TV, the lights flicker. Thankfully, the caller, Vera (Todd’s sister) comes in just in time to revive Todd, but as we gradually gather what’s been going on here, we discover that Todd has been, and is, seriously ill.
Next, we see man and dog travelling out in the boonies (much to Vera’s horror, given Todd’s condition), where Todd plans to take up residence in his grandfather’s old house, which has been bequeathed to him. Talk about pathetic fallacy: the gloomy skies and torrential rain don’t exactly scream good tidings, and the dismal, cluttered space they arrive into doesn’t, either. Todd has a lot going on, but all he notices about the new place is that it’s unkempt; Indy, however, whom we’ve already seen is quite a sensitive dog, is soon responding to things unperceived by his best friend. Indy wouldn’t know this, but Vera agrees with him; on the phone, we hear her declare to Todd that the house is “haunted”. So we have a familiar horror film idea – a haunted house, a potentially hexed family line (Todd walks Indy through a nearby burial ground which is choc-full of his gone-too-soon relatives) – only, here, it’s unfolding through Indy’s perspective. It’s Indy who is faced with the biggest share of supernatural phenomena, and this seems to worsen in line with Todd’s rapidly worsening condition. Can Indy protect his beloved best friend from the sinister forces encroaching on this place?
One of the biggest heart-wrenchers in Good Boy is being made to believe that this beautiful dog is afraid and at risk; coming in a close second is understanding that Todd has run out of road, and is reduced to begging to be a medical test subject, or trying folk medicine cures, things which are clearly not going to be up to the (nameless, but dreadfully guessable) condition he has. Pain and desperation makes Todd mean at times, too, which combines both of the film’s most heart-wrenching elements into one; all Indy wants to do is to protect Todd, but he’s just a dog – he can’t interpret what’s going on here, and god knows he can’t face down Todd’s diagnosis. Indy is actually director Ben Leonberg’s own dog, so he’s able to bring in his old video footage of Indy as a puppy – adorable, and genuinely moving, given the film’s storyline. It’s also probably worth saying that if you hate any kind of animal peril, even suggested animal peril, then go careful with this film. I had to watch all the way to the end of the credits to be sure I knew what had happened and could cope with it.
Good Boy‘s choice of ‘dog’s eye view’ for many of its scenes is an engaging one, though we’re never quite kept on Indy’s wavelength, given that we can read text messages, understand the dialogue and infer other elements of the plot, although some of the dialogue is slightly muffled because we always stay with the dog, who often wanders off or goes to investigate something, meaning it’s occasionally a stretch to hear what’s being said. But, steadily, the film pieces together enough of its backstory to lend weight to the ongoing action and substance to the threat at the house, through making good use of VHS video diaries (of course, it’s an indie horror) where grandpa is briefly played by Larry Fessenden (ditto). The set and location are both solid, full of impenetrable darkness which often tricks the eye, or shots cluttered with the detritus of a life passed, which also often threaten to take on human faces and forms. This effect is possibly exaggerated in Good Boy, given that this is a film almost devoid of human faces; this, again, stems from the dog’s eye view motif, so we spend most of the film at not far off ground level, seeing more of people’s feet than faces. Perhaps this brings on a touch of pareidolia. It also almost certainly calls to mind some other things. from cartoons to Skinamarink (2022), though unlike Skinamarink, Leonberg knows when to call time: Good Boy comes in at an economical seventy minutes, which works.
That this film took years to make is testament to how hard Leonberg worked to get it right, and of course to treat his canine star and buddy fairly. He does this so well that it’s hard not to commend the film for being well acted; of course what we mean is well directed. Good Boy is a quietly creepy tale with a genuinely involving and emotionally affecting central premise, and it’s that which really sets it apart from similar films, particularly by the end. Its moments of vulnerability and mystery are very well-handled indeed.
Amber (Sharlene Cruz) is woken in the early hours of the morning to an upset call from her boyfriend, Justin (Dario Vazquez), but what is he ‘so sorry’ about exactly? We don’t discover that immediately, but we can soon glean that he’s not hurt or sick or anything like that: judging from Amber’s furious response (the couple take their quarrel out into the desert the following day), he’s been playing away.
Is this all real? The stress is maybe making Amber confused, but what does seem to be real is that she catches her hand on a cactus, puncturing her skin with a splinter. Something else is real, too: this relationship is over. Done.
So Amber gets back to her life – work, friends, apartment – but that injury on her hand looks like it’s getting worse. She can’t get the splinter out, and the wound is becoming irritated. Worse, she seems to be disassociating from her surroundings: day and night is snapping by in a heartbeat, or she’s zoning in and out of what’s going on around her. Amber also starts to hyper-fixate on little things around the apartment which have clearly bugged her for a while. Most of these are linked to Justin – who seems to have been very much an Ask Aubry kind of boyfriend – a man who thought nothing of trashing the place because hey, it won’t be him cleaning it up. Amber’s memories of her last relationship all seem to hinge on Justin’s selfish bullshit around the apartment, and the physical marks he made while there.
Hand offers a wealth of great details, starting with its big shift from Amber’s dark apartment to the bright, richly coloured desert scenes (shot in Phoenix), and it’s a surprisingly auditory horror too: lots of significant moments stem from seemingly innocuous sources, revealing Amber’s heightened state as she tries to navigate normal, everyday life (I’ve never been more on edge hearing someone chop an onion). There are great macro shots, too, providing additional texture and interest. These elements all conspire with clever writing to make our key character very likeable and sympathetic from the very outset. It’s an earnest, skilled performance from Sharlene Cruz, who gels really well with the fairly low key amounts of dialogue used in the film, bringing a lot to the role.
Essentially, what we have here is a woman who is working hard to reclaim her home and her space, and by proxy, her sense of self, gradually excising the memory of a crappy partner. The issue with her hand is a symbol of how much Justin got under her skin and hung on in there: the idea is used well, creating a snappy body horror out of a miserable and recognisable situation. There’s a confidence here which does great things with the horror elements. Writer/director Jennifer Winterbotham, who recently had her feature script Birthright selected for the 2025 Sundance Producers Lab Fellowship, is a director to watch moving forwards, and it’ll be great to see what she does next.
Horror cinema teaches us many things including caution and recently, there have been more than a few lessons about the dangers of going up into the mountains – and not just for the usual reasons, such as (mainly) the risk of falling to your death from a great height. In Confession (2024) (aka Kokuhaku Confession), the regular perils of exposure and injury are all present and correct but, as is so often the case, there’s the human aspect to consider, too. Old friends Asai (Tôma Ikuta) and Jiyong (Yang Ik-joon) have been undertaking a yearly mountain trek in order to respect the memory of their friend Sayuri, who tragically died on a climb sixteen years previously. As I’ve said previously, the idea of honouring a miserable death at a great height by repeating the activity which brought about that death will never make absolute sense to me, but there we go: we meet both men on their yearly pilgrimage.
Except this year, there’s a snag. A sudden storm has come in, cutting them off and making them fear for their lives: we come in on this situation in medias res, at which point we realise that Jiyong is already seriously injured and unable to walk. Asai is devastated, but his devastation turns into horror when Jiyong, believing his death to be imminent, makes a startling confession to his friend, hoping to clear his conscience before the inevitable. This would be one thing, but when Asai is able to discern the shape of a mountain rescue cabin within reach – even if he has to carry Jiyong there – it creates a moral quandary. Does Asai pretend he never heard the confession? Or does he address it?
The problem is set aside for the very short term, as the two men struggle to the relative safety of the cabin: Asai busies himself lighting a fire and getting them both as comfortable as possible, still talking about the hope of rescue. But the fact of the confession hangs in the air between them, and before very long it begins to drive a wedge between them. Jiyong is more than remorseful for what he said; he’s actively beginning to suspect that Asai will now hand him over to the authorities. As for Asai, he’s growing steadily more concerned that his old pal is going to harm him; after all, couldn’t he just say that there was only one survivor?
It’s a decent set-up for a tense situation and Confession makes good use of its central premise: you do get a sense that these two men are genuinely cut off, left to their own devices and vulnerable not just to the elements, but to each other. Smaller plot additions – such as the loss of their only working mobile phone (or is it lost?) and the ways in which the film steadily opens up other spaces and possibilities, even within the confined environment of the cabin, all work together well. Whilst you will perhaps find yourself wondering why the men don’t get straight into it and address the confession head on, you also remember that there are some cultural and societal expectations at play here too – nationality, class, gender – which are revealed. It’s probably fair to say, however, that ‘things escalate quickly’: Jiyong, as the man with the most to potentially lose, goes from quiet and thoughtful to maniacal in what feels like a few easy moves, though he inhabits the role fully, and makes for a good, frightening presence. If the film seems to be setting up Asai as a guiltless victim, then the film has more to offer than that thankfully, revealing new information about this character in such a way that it casts doubt on his good guy persona, giving the film more of a middle act than it might otherwise have had.
However, to render the improbable probable, Confession does play fast and loose with some of its plot points – to the extent that, on occasion, and even allowing for some of the more overblown content and the film’s style overall, it’s less convincing. Jiyong’s leg injury, for example, sometimes seems to be wholly incapacitating and yet, in the midst of this, he seems able to suddenly and silently manoeuvre himself around the cabin; yes, this allows a few killer set-ups, true, but then in other instances, he struggles to get anywhere at all, and in those instances it’s plot relevant that he can’t. The film wants it both ways, perhaps. But perhaps the film’s biggest and most obvious offence is where it makes such ample use of the ‘but it was all a dream’ get-out clause, building up to a crescendo which – if you know the film’s runtime – would probably mean the film running out of ground early, except that it then backpedals on the deed, revealing that it didn’t happen like that anyway. This can make the action feel repetitive. This, most likely, is an example of where basing a film on a popular manga leads to a few potential issues. What works as drawn sometimes presents the odd problem when it’s turned into live action cinema; the issues of how you get from one panel to another, for instance, work a little differently when filmed as they require more of a clear transition between key moments, and this is probably the one most obvious sticking point in Confession.
If you can set this aside, though, then there’s lots to love here: it becomes more and more intense, offers up some ingenious scenes and ideas and never sacrifices the near-stifling claustrophobia which it’s at pains to establish from the very earliest scenes. It all gets rather bloody and nasty, too, which comes as a bit of a surprise from director Nobuhiro Yamashita, better known so far for his comedies and buddy movies (though, after a fashion, I suppose that’s what this is). Could Sayuri (Nao Honda) have been given more to do in this script? Sure. But the film’s economical runtime (just over seventy minutes) excuses some of the film’s weaker elements, keeping things taught and focused enough to shine.
Confession (2024) featured at this year’s Celluloid Screams.
God bless Netflix money. In common with the similarly vast, similarly monolithic Disney, whatever the complaints and concerns about this level of power and influence may be, there’s at least the comfort that, when they pull in one direction, they can support eminently worthwhile projects – just like Frankenstein, or in Disney’s case, like their recent, excellent Aliens TV spin-off, Aliens: Earth. Guillermo del Toro has been trying and – for various reasons – failing to make his own select version of Frankenstein for years, some of which stems from his own creative reluctance, but also from various creative obstacles to do with things like his Universal collaboration, issues around casting and around scheduling. Finally, after several issues (particularly around casting the Creature) and around eighteen years after Del Toro first expressed his interest in adapting Mary Shelley’s novel, here we are, and the finished product is very good indeed. The clear presence of Netflix money, that evident ‘no expense has been spared’ feel to each and every one of the scenes is very welcome, but more than that, there’s a clear sense of balance here between deference to pre-existing adaptations and a sharp, incisive and individual spin on the source material. Many of the changes to the original story are inspired, though never dispensing with Shelley’s original vision of a man elevated by his own arrogance to play with the forces of life and death, to the destructive detriment of his life and loves.
This review is briefly going to stop talking about Frankenstein and start talking about Dracula before going back to the film at hand. There are reasons for this, and not just that the first filmed scenes from Frankenstein (2025), which showed at a Netflix taster event in September of this year, were first scored to Wojciech Kilar’s Dracula (1992) score. Frankenstein has also been bumped ahead a few decades here too, turning it into a Victorian-era story – again, in common with several high-profile and influential adaptations of both of these seminal horror novels. The aesthetic style of this film is also in so many ways similar to the Coppola take on Dracula that the earlier film frequently pops into mind when watching. The clothes, the sets, the style of the script – all very Dracula (1992), just as painterly and just as Romantic Gothic, something which works just as well when you consider some of Del Toro’s nods to the Hammer film The Curse ofFrankenstein (1957), also here in abundance, and not just in the Creature design itself. Something else which seems to correspond not just to the Coppola Dracula, but to however many adaptations of Dracula you’d like to count, is the ways in which key characters from the novel are reshuffled and altered for the film.
Whilst retaining a fairly faithful take on the novel’s framing narrative, Del Toro does something similar to a lot of Dracula films here, shifting the dynamics in the Frankenstein family, with Victor now the alienated, unloved and bereaved elder son and William – who reaches adulthood here – held up as the model son by Frankenstein Sr (Charles Dance). Frankenstein Sr’s determination to coach his elder son into medical brilliance leads him into being a monomaniacal, arrogant and emotionally chilly rabble-rouser, barred from the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh for reanimating a corpse (in a sequence, by the by, worthy of Return of the Living Dead). Victor (Oscar Isaac) threatens to slump into a self-pitying fugue state because no one wants to acknowledge the importance of his work, but luckily an interested bystander comes along in the form of Henrich Harlander, a wealthy industrialist who offers him silly money to continue fulfilling his scientific vision. A man with unending wealth, throwing money at someone to help them fulfil a seemingly impossible creative project? Imagine that.
Harlander (Christophe Waltz, who’s also in the brand new Luc Besson Dracula, another Dracula link) is an arms dealer, so he’s particularly unsqueamish about about mass casualties – in fact, his livelihood depends on it, and permits him a ceaseless supply of body parts, which he offers to Frankenstein via the current and ongoing Crimean War in Europe (as well as the more usual array of hanged criminals). He sets Frankenstein up in an abandoned water tower in the middle of nowhere, which clearly comes from an era when people cared about aesthetics in building design, because it could just as easily have been an abandoned medieval keep of some kind. Frankenstein moves in, and his work – now centred on the lymphatic system as the key to conveying energy through the proposed experimental ‘man’ – progresses. But Victor is reliant on his younger brother William (Felix Kammerer) to help him set everything up, and as thanks, he develops an obsession with William’s new fiancée – Harlander’s niece – Elizabeth (Mia Goth).
The work soon reaching its near-conclusion, Victor is horrified to learn that Harlander’s interest in his work turns out to be self-interest: he wants more involvement with the newly-designed Creature, let’s say, than he originally let on. In the chaos of Victor’s key moment, his creative relationship with Harlander gets severed – and the Creature (Jacob Elordi), at first, disappears. But Victor has not failed in his design and soon the Creature comes to find him, acting like a newborn – a newborn which unfit father Frankenstein soon grows bored with, given the Creature’s slow progress at learning language. Boredom quickly becomes cruelty; when William and Elizabeth discover Victor’s work and his mistreatment of the rather beautiful Creature, chained up in the bowels of the tower, they are horrified, the gentle Elizabeth in particular using kindness towards the Creature, not cruelty. But Victor is unassuaged, and tries to end his experiment forever with fire, assuming that his project would burn to death and he could – what? Steal his devoted brother’s wife-to-be? Start over? Not a bit of it: the Creature of course escapes, and key elements of the story then go on to unfold as per the novel, with the Creature learning language, understanding humanity – and requiring more than he’s received from his cruel, and here potentially murderous Creator.
The film’s pretty Gothic has already been mentioned; where Del Toro’s Frankenstein offers up sharp contrast to this is in the brief, but particularly grisly moments of gore it also includes. These feel like a surprise, but they work brilliantly well. Just as Kenneth Branagh’s Frankenstein (1994) added in its own uncompromising moments of gore (using amniotic fluid in a particularly lavish but unpleasant plot development) so Del Toro peppers his film with body parts; from the disciplinary hearing at the Royal College of Surgeons to the floor in the tower, which ends up literally awash in blood and limbs, there’s no scrimping on the kinds of details which must have been there lurking in Mary Shelley’s imagination, given her descriptions of a protagonist who “dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave”. But there’s another contrast in the Creature himself, who starts life here as a Christopher Lee-esque, shaven-headed creation, but eventually morphs into a brooding, Gothic wanderer, long flowing hair and all: in each incarnation, he is unusually beautiful, clearly envisioned as the Rousseau-era tabula rasa, an innocent newborn who just so happens to be a fully grown curious and essentially (at first) harmless boy; it’s also clear that Frankenstein looked around for just the right set of cheekbones, by the way. Frankenstein’s contemptuous treatment of this harmless being surely establishes Isaac’s Frankenstein as one of the most openly loathsome Frankensteins ever committed to film. He’s just dreadful. That mocking tone he uses as his creation struggles to grapple with vocabulary, or fails to develop at a pace which holds his interest; if anything, this Victor could have suffered a hell of a lot more, and it would have been even more satisfying.
As it stands, the film shifts into the Creature’s own account of his ordeal and the film spends a good deal of its time with him, following him through the ‘spirit of the forest’ sequence (again, grislier than in the novel but just as heart-wrenching) and providing enough of an account for the ways he becomes cruel; it’s clear how and why he understands that his only hope of happiness would come from his deadbeat dad creating another Creature for a companion, but, as in the novel, Victor grows a conscience just in time to deny the Creature this favour, though this new film uses an interesting bridge between the request, the denial and the end of the story. Throughout, Isaac’s jagged arrogance is balanced by Elordi’s sensitive portrayal, which comes across very well despite him being swathed in prosthetics. In another Dracula parallel, his Creature with his modded lymphatic system seemingly can’t die, i.e. like a vampire, despite some serious attempts on his life – by himself and by his maker. Elsewhere, the supporting cast feels much more front-and-centre than perhaps expected, with Waltz doing a great turn as a new character and an interested party, and Mia Goth offering a suitably gentle and humane spin on this film’s rendition of Elizabeth. Despite some misgivings about William Frankenstein making it in this version of the story, it works well because we need to believe that there’s at least one son in the family with his ego in check.
This is a long film – just shy of two and a half hours – but it doesn’t feel padded out and it doesn’t ever feel like it loses its way; this is a good piece of storytelling, and – with apologies for bringing up a version of Dracula one more time – it thrives where Nosferatu (2024) begins to struggle in its own second hour, under the dual burden of the weight of expectation and, worse, a sudden, unexpected shift in tone toward – arguably – camp. Frankenstein never feels like that: it allows its key elements the time and space to flourish, but it stays focused on the tale itself, offering up a sumptuous, assured piece of period Gothic, aware of its place in a long legacy, but equally clear on what it wants to achieve. It’s been a long time in the making but it’s worth the wait, and it’s a genuine pleasure to have Del Toro back at the top of his game here as a live action filmmaker, finally delivering his take on a story which still retains so much potential as a horror-tinged, cautionary tale.
Frankenstein (2025) is available in cinemas now and will release on Netflix from November 7th.
Whilst director Julia Ducournau has made just three features to date (taking roughly a decade to do so), it’s a case of quality over quantity. Any minor quibbles with her work aside, the films she’s produced so far have offered intriguing takes on what could, in other hands, be quite simplistic body horrors. But in her hands, her style of world-building has made her films into something more complex and satisfying. This is a preface to wondering what in the hell was eating the critics at Cannes this year: what exactly is it about Alpha (2025) that has triggered such a dismissive, even scathing response from so many of them? As much as the new film is less tethered to a linear narrative style than its predecessors, it’s in many other respects another rock-solid Ducournau feature: an interesting and outlandish vision, laser-focused on a physicality which links the ick to something more profound, using sensitive characterisation to explore a hyperreal version of modern(ish) France. So far, so Ducournau. But what it most certainly isn’t is Titane all over again, which seems to have aggrieved a few people. Or, perhaps its exploration of addiction and disease is too much, both a bit too close to home and a bit too much of a fantasy to hit the right notes. Whatever; calling the film ‘drab’, ‘cowardly’ or even ‘a turkey’ seem like oddly disproportionate responses to a film which unfolds so many of its ideas superbly well. Perhaps those free seats were a bit lumpy this year.
When the film starts, we encounter a much younger version of Alpha than the teenager we stick with for most of the rest of the film. As a five year old (Ambrine Trigo Ouaked), which is how she appears in the very first scene, Alpha seems to be in the care of an intravenous drug user. Innocently, she has taken a marker pen and she’s joining up his track marks like they’re a map: he, whoever he is – though we could perhaps infer he’s a relative, because how in the name of god else? – lets her do this, though struggling not to nod out as she does. When he tells her, ‘I’ve caught something,’ it’s our first hint that his physical condition could be hiding something more ominous. But in this part of the film, it’s a double meaning: he opens his fist to reveal a ladybird, traditionally symbolic of resilience. The little girl squeals with delight as she takes it from him; the ladybird motif will recur throughout the rest of the film, with a poster of a ladybird hanging on Alpha’s bedroom wall, in a room which becomes first a contested space, then a space for an unlikely reunion and the formation of a strange, formative bond.
Perhaps it’s on some level due to her early exposure to drug use, or perhaps it’s just due to the vicissitudes of being a teenager, but when we next pick up with Alpha (now played by Mélissa Boros), she’s whacked out of her mind at a house party: whatever has put her in this hole, it’s probably something more than cheap cider. She gets tattooed by someone who probably hasn’t passed an environmental health qualification: surrounded by squalor, using a needle and a punctured ink cartridge, the nameless tattooist handpicks a large letter ‘A’ into the child’s arm. Alpha lets him do his thing, ink and blood running out of her arm in rivulets. This scarlet letter is of course still there when her mother (Golshifteh Farahani) is at hand to help clean her up when she gets home. She’s horrified: as a medic, she is well aware that there’s a new, fatal bloodborne infection doing the rounds. She deals with it every day. I don’t know if anyone has mentioned the similarity to the ‘stone men’ from Game of Thrones, but in Alpha, the new disease does something similar – turning its victims into beautiful marble. It’s fatal, but along the way, it makes people into strange works of art, ‘like Apollo’, as Alpha innocently describes someone later in the film. Maman insists that her daughter gets tested for the infection right away, as well as vaccinated against tetanus and other precautions we might recognise.
Steadily, the world of the film unfolds as a nearly-France, or France’s shadow perhaps: in some respects it seems modern, but in others, either entirely timeless, or more recognisably anchored to a point in time a few decades ago. If this was France exactly, then we might be a little surprised by how dishevelled everything seems to be. Hospitals groan under the strain of a new epidemic; nurses and doctors provide all the care they can, but bafflingly, without taking adequate steps to safeguard themselves from the infection, like some sort of version of medieval healthcare, part practice and part faith-based. Elsewhere, Alpha’s school is in a state of functional disrepair, with her only lessons seeming to comprise physical education, or snippets of Edgar Allan Poe, whose ‘dream within a dream’ message is disrupted by some casual student homophobia and a failure to appreciate the poem’s chimerical message. Perhaps this is Ducournau, acknowledging how more worldly concerns may impact upon the type of world-building she’s doing here. Or, perhaps it’s simply there to establish the school’s combative environment. As soon as the other students catch a glimpse of Alpha’s suppurating, swollen arm, which with the amount of Phys Ed going on, they inevitably do, they begin to actively ostracise her, believing her to be a carrier for the new infection.
This withdrawn and already alienated girl then has a new problem. Arriving home one day, she’s horrified to find what she at first believes to be an intruder. Actually, it’s the man once tasked with looking after her. This is her mother’s brother, Uncle Amin (Tahar Ramin, who lost 20kg to play this role, close to what Christian Bale went through to star in The Machinist). Alpha had forgotten him; she’s now scared to death of him. Her mother’s love for her brother has perhaps overridden her common sense, as she’s decided Amin can sleep in Alpha’s room while he detoxes and gets his life together; as above, it’d have to be a relative to get these types of special dispensations, as most parents wouldn’t particularly want a rattling addict sweating it out on their thirteen year old daughter’s floor, but the love between brother and sister is one of the film’s most unshakeable, even if irrational threads, something which pulls the entire two-hour film together, uniting two separate timelines, a then and a now which combine to impact upon Alpha, shifting her forward into young adulthood.
But a strange thing happens; the more Alpha is made to come to terms with the possibility that she, despite her attested youth, may be carrying an infection which will kill her, the more sympathy she begins to feel for the dissolute, complex Amin, who is able to offer her the kinds of coming-of-age blowouts she seems to need as well as a new, dark, pithy respect for living and dying on one’s own terms. He’s also in many respects her guide to understanding the flawed but resolute nature of unconditional love: whatever else is in store for her, we see very clearly that the film’s journey is part of her by the time the end credits roll. If the film is offering a magical realist spin on the AIDS epidemic (with its rampant accompanying homophobia) and on the more recent global pandemic (with its own panic and unreason, as well as devastating loss), then it’s also looking in a more complex way at the nature of that loss, offering a world where people become their own memorial monuments, where junkies with their wounded veins and emaciated limbs, or ostracised queer people who are unable to kiss their partners in public, transform into something ghastly – but timeless.
You might not ultimately be able to ‘grasp/Them with a tighter clasp’, but the relationship between the living and the dead is transformed here, as is the whole coming of age saga as we might know it. On the outskirts of all of this, there are generational and cultural differences to sift: a little girl unable to speak to her Berber kin, a family riven by addiction, milestones obscured by pitfalls. It’s imaginative, provocative stuff, and if it eschews narrative conventions just too much for some audiences, then so be it: there’s more than enough here, in terms of themes, script and performances, to render Alpha one of the most immersive and provocative films of the year.
Alpha (2025) was the closing film at this year’s Celluloid Screams.
