A grim history lesson kicks off Round the Decay: pay attention, because it matters later on. We start in, I’m assuming, the 19th Century: a pursuit through woodland leads to the capture of a Native American woman, who is then brought to the tent of a white settler – who it seems is expecting her. He has plans, and not just for the land. Nor is his vendetta against indigenous people the full story: he has more than conventional means at his disposal, including what looks like the ability to resurrect the dead. But he needs sacrifices. Something monstrous, dependent in some way upon a place and its people: that’s pretty much all you need to keep hold of with this film, as it’s a fairly old school monster movie, using the familiar tropes and tricks of the genre to weave together a decent, if not always ground-breaking horror narrative.
Sticking with the small community of Newport’s Valley, we move into the modern day, and meet – a lot of people. In fact, even discounting the historical prequel, I think we link up with around twelve different characters in the first twenty minutes, and more as we go: it can feel like quite a lot of characters and threads. We meet Kenzie (Victoria Mirrer) and her fiancé Zack (Topher Hansson); Bart (Cary Hite), new owner of the local inn; single mother Ros (Sienna Hubert-Ross), new employee of the inn; some community spokespeople, a hiking party, a mysterious outsider called Munroe (Black Eyed Susan star Damian Maffei)…it’s busy. In terms of plot, we get some local discussion of the town’s economic situation and need to attract more tourists – which it can ostensibly do, given the great natural beauty all around, with attractions such as Whelan’s Pass – named for the town founder – an appealing hike, but the for the fact that there’s a fenced-off, foul-smelling cave at the bottom of the trail. That all aside, the people come, and this route seems to have particular importance for Kenzie, for reasons which become more apparent.
It soon becomes clear that there’s more going wrong at Newport’s Valley than just an economic downturn. As different bands of people in turn begin to suspect that there’s something weird in that cave things kick up a gear, doing so via some nicely-handled moments of practical SFX (take a bow, Makeup Department). And, whatever was in there, is now out – following the survivors back to town.
Round the Decay is a decent indie horror, but be aware that it follows a tried-and-tested route, sticking to what works and has worked rather than risking – if that’s the right term – any surprises. For some, that may mean that it falls rather flat. It plays its narrative reasonably straight, too: there are no big aesthetic decisions, no designs on being a period piece (as much as the plotline and the monster FX feel like a big callback to a lot of straight-to-video 80s horror); there’s nothing trippy, no interruptions to the timeline, nothing of that kind. However, its performances are good, neither hamming it up nor playing it totally po-faced i.e. striking the right sort of balance for the subject matter and style. There’s enough confidence to break the tension with a few moments of humour, which work fine, and although things begin to get a little slower after the one hour mark, for the most part the film ticks along at a reasonable pace.
There’s some attempt at world-building, too. On that subject, there’s some difficulty with understanding what the monster is actually saying in the current edit of the film, though I understand that this is getting fixed ahead of the theatrical release. Monsters always have the same speaking voice, have you noticed? Their intonation can suffer as a result.
Coming across very much as a passion project and content with being in many places an affectionate homage to other films, Round the Decay will be on select big screens (US) from January 31st. This feels like a good environment for it, so if this sounds like your kind of thing, why not take a look to see if it’s coming to your area? Tickets can be purchased ahead of time by clicking on the link…
There are a couple of things to say ahead of this review of Rampo Noir. The first is that, assuming you have read some Edogawa Ranpo and always longed to see more of his work brought to the screen, that you should be careful what you wish for: this anthology film’s scattergun selection of tales, styles and directors makes it in many respects a hard sell. The second thing to say is that, if you haven’t read any Edogawa Ranpo but fancy some lesser-seen J-horror from the same decade which brought us the likes of Ju-On (2002), then absolutely forget it. Whilst there are some elements of horror, and in places some quite abhorrent horror, these often drift out of left-field, in a film which does encompass many different styles, but still comes across as much more arthouse than horror. Rampo Noir will pop a bit of limb amputation on the screen – or at least heavily signpost it – and then idle away into pretty shots of the landscape, or some surreal, kaleidoscopic moments, apropos of very little. In essence, Rampo Noir is not for everyone, and I’m pretty sure it’s not for me, either, as much as it has interesting material dotted throughout its two hours+ runtime.
Two hours of artistically rotting corpses, pretty male psychopaths and auditory overload feels like a lot in any case, so perhaps it’s no bad thing that the first segment – Mars’s Canal – is silent. It features a naked man staggering through a barely-Earthlike landscape as he seems to reflect on the horrors of his past conduct – assuming he has some regret for the bout of sex-or-maybe-violence we see interspersed with his later wanderings. What’s it all about? No idea, but it at least operates as an hors d’oeuvre for what is to follow.
The next segment is the longest, and probably the most linear: Mirror Hell starts out at a tea ceremony lesson in a very traditional, even reactionarily so, small town in rural Japan. We are soon shown that for all the decorum integral to the ceremony itself, there’s some bad blood between some of these women. When the instructress falls dead after a surreal and head-frying experience with a small hand mirror, we learn that there’s a common denominator here: the mirror maker, Toru Itsuki (Hiroki Narimiya), whose work with the traditional skills of mirror-making have exposed him to the traditional mythology of the mirror – something which has taken over his psyche. There’s an engaging push-pull between supernaturalism and practical science here, as the investigating detective Mr Akechi accounts for the dangerous nature of the (very beautiful) mirrors by rational means. As we ponder which account is the right one, there’s plenty of visuals to enjoy. This is quite a long film, given that it’s one of four, but it seems justified in taking its time over its themes, idling over aspects of traditional Japanese practices and arts – translations of ancient texts, crafts, tea ceremonies. Rampo Noir is a bit of a misleading title overall: an alternative title is Rampo Jigoku – where ‘Jigoku’ approximately translates as ‘Hell’. However, Mirror Hell does have some identifiable noir-ish qualities, even if by coincidence. The shadows, the framing, the mysterious deaths, the hard-bitten private eye…I doubt you’d get Toru’s, erm, unusual sexual proclivities in a Hays Code noir, but it’s another reminder of where and when we actually are. This is the most successful segment by far.
The next one, Caterpillar, is based on one of Ranpo’s most unseemly short stories. Indeed, ‘The Caterpillar’ was banned by the Japanese authorities during the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 for its potentially harmful impact on morale. I’ll give them that: perhaps the time wasn’t right for the Japanese reading public to encounter a once-renowned Army veteran, a so-called and celebrated ‘war god’, bereft of his limbs and trapped in his body, little more than a ‘human caterpillar’. But the story itself is a mood piece – a dark, dark mood piece – and unlikely to be an easy story to film, although it has been done, and successfully, since Rampo Noir was made. Here, the film sticks fairly closely to the story, and is no less gruelling – a kind of Lady Chatterley’s Lover recast as a Guinea Pig film, with added arthouse stylistics. But who is watching the wife as she goads and torments her husband? Adding some of its own ideas and proclivities, Caterpillar is partly sickening and partly alienating. Its sickly sexuality is horrible to watch and its slow pace makes it all feel horribly unnecessary – in the sense that this is torture, made worse by almost rolling to a halt or pausing to overlay avant-garde flummery.
Finally, Crawling Bugs returns us to some more obviously noir-ish elements as a young actress, keen on the odd romantic tryst, becomes the object of obsession of her ostensibly ‘nice guy’ chauffeur – a man tormented by a terror of bugs, afraid to touch anyone. So he decides to kidnap her, and there’s no brilliant way out of a scenario like this for a pretty woman, so you can perhaps guess the rest. Yet, this feels lighter in tone that what has just unfolded; perhaps this is partly because there are moments of deliberate humour here, and things skip along at more of a pace. It feels absurd to feel grateful for an equally repellent story – which Crawling Bugs definitely is, in its own way – but that’s how it goes, this happens at not far off two hours in, and everything’s relative. I mean, it’d be nice if fewer women ended up with melted brains, burns, welts, limbs being chopped off or indeed a playground for maggots, but here we are. We do get a final girl, but only in the sense that she’s the final girl who’s going to have a protracted ordeal set to piano music.
Having been through all of the segments, it feels to this reviewer that there are just too many structural and tonal misfires here for things to work effectively. Nonetheless, arthouse cinema fans willing to be pushed into more unseemly terrain than usual may find enough here to love. Rampo Noir has some moments of artistic brilliance, with beautiful shots, inspired framing and striking visual flair. It certainly explores Ranpo’s fiction in radical ways, and that in itself may be enough to get it over the line for many viewers, keen to see something done with the source material which stretches beyond straightforward horror. Personally, some more sense of an overarching scheme, style and aim would have improved the overall experience, as the films feel mismatched, or else united only by sexual elements which are jarring and unpleasant, together with themes which feel simultaneously repetitive and overwhelming, especially after such a long runtime. Coming back to the original proviso: it is not for everyone, and for me will probably be hereafter filed as an interesting but defective cinematic experiment, one which has perhaps remained lesser-known for the twenty years for some of the reasons given above. If you want to make your own minds up, then the film is available now on Arrow.
Is Nina (Nahéma Ricci) on her own in the wilderness? That’s the first question in the provocative and left-field horror-thriller Hunting Daze, a film which offers rather subtle moral questions in amidst its much more brutal, alarming developments. Nina, then, is at first framed as though she’s alone; actually, she’s part of a group, and her and her companions have broken down on a remote road somewhere in Quebec, where they’re waiting on a friend, or rather an acquaintance, to arrive to give them some fuel. It’s just as well he arrives when he does, because tempers are frayed: after a spiteful discussion about who is or isn’t a ‘whore’ and a fierce fightback by Nina, her friends abandon her, leaving her in a place where there may well be no passers-by or public transport for days. Kevin, the rescuer (Frédéric Millaire-Zouvi) only knows Nina from her work as a stripper, but he’s her only hope – as much as he isn’t too keen on taking her with him to the hunting cabin/stag weekend he’s on. He acquiesces, though; he can’t just leave her there. Relieved, she accompanies him.
My heart initially sank when the film’s script began loading up on gendered epithets, with ‘whore’, ‘stripper’, ‘virgin’, ‘damsel in distress’ and ‘witch’ arriving in quick succession, but this isn’t simply a cautionary tale about what could happen to a woman in the woods with a testosterone-jacked hunting party (as per the poster, actually). Nonetheless, the film does feel like tension is steadily brewing: true to the film’s well-chosen English language title, the film does feel like a ‘daze’, with its aerial shots and dreamy music overlaying the more expected boorish bachelor party behaviour. But, woman or not, the men seem to accept Nina, so long as she agrees to live like one of them, hunting with them, eating and drinking with them, and agreeing to whatever bonding activities they come up with along the way, replete with philosophical chit-chat about life, death and destiny. Nina seems equal to it. She’s no pushover; we’ve seen that already. And, perhaps, her profession has taught her coping skills for dealing with rambunctious male groups: for now, she’s one of the boys, and she seems to take to it very well.
As one of them, she goes off hunting the next day and it’s a successful outing, but this tentative and newly-formed social group is a delicate ecosystem, and things get more complicated when Kevin returns with another waif and stray, Dudos (Noubi Ndiaye). A gang of people, some of them strangers, all under the influence, brandishing guns and hanging out on the distant outskirts of society itself: things are about to go wrong, but again, not according to expected parameters.
To reiterate, because it’s important, Hunting Daze is a lot more thoughtful and thought-provoking than the initial sum of its parts suggests. This is a very heady film and a looping, fragmenting and hallucinatory experience, even before any substances pop up. There’s lots of napping and dreaming, too. I think it works well not only because it avoids simply travelling down familiar routes, but also because, at heart, none of these people are simply bad or very obviously flawed. There are no supervillains or sudden revelations of dark, dangerous pasts. The men and woman here are the sum of lives which may well have been, for the most part, pretty normal. Perhaps Nina’s familiarity with people’s failings has been honed by sex work, whereby she has had to fight or develop a tough skin in order to survive, but once she’s shown she’s equal to the men’s edict that she be part of their pack, she does what she said she would do. For the biggest part of its running time, the film achieves an interesting blend of dreamy camaraderie and more jagged, in places simpler commentary and symbolism, like an existential frat party – but it works, and the film’s precipitous atmosphere is well sustained.
Performances are excellent from everyone here. There’s not much dialogue, but the character development is plausible and engaging, and the physicality of the roles is really well handled by director Annick Blanc. Whilst gender (and race) do figure in this situation, it’s superseded by something even bigger, I’d argue. The film is all about the horrors of finding – and potentially being excluded from – your tribe, in an alienating and unforgiving world. The Canadian wilderness, genuinely vast and largely empty of people, serves as a fascinating backdrop for all of this, allowing the hunting party to operate as a microcosm of alienation, in a film which is provocative and nasty in carefully selective ways.
Hunting Daze (2024) will be released on 14th January 2025.
As Immaculate opens, we are shown a young woman, ardently praying to the Virgin before packing a bag and attempting to leave – though pausing to steal a substantial bunch of keys from an elderly woman’s bedside cabinet. She’s trying to escape from a convent, as revealed by the ominous group of nuns who intercept her before she can – entirely – get out through the gates. It’s a cruel, alarming sequence and as such, an honest introduction to the film; it also bodes ill for new novice Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney), newly arrived in Italy and excited to take her vows. America, she frets, just isn’t able to give her the kind of spiritual succour which she craves. Well, as with everything, be careful what you wish for.
The convent itself is beautiful; it houses a hardworking group of Sisters, all of whom seem proud of the Order’s long history, even those who are – as the supremely unimpressed Sister Isabelle has it – about to ‘meet God’. Perhaps surprisingly, there are a lot of younger nuns here: I’m reminded of one of my favourite search histories, whereby someone visited this site based on the search term ‘hot nuns surely they exist’ [sic]. However, these young girls are ‘broken birds’: runaways, unstable, or a bit of both. Despite this, and despite a few misgivings creeping in, Cecilia is resolute, taking her vow as planned. The ceremony is beautiful too: this is, on the whole, a very picturesque film. It also starts gently showing to us that much of this devout faith could be characterised as hypocritical: vows of poverty and chastity take place against a backdrop of moribund finery. Even if the chastity element is safe in this remote spot, then the charity part looks a little more problematic, at least in some respects. There’s plenty of finery here. And there are other, more acute discrepancies too: Cecilia begins to espy private rituals, isolated supplicants; there are odd sights, sounds, odd dreams. By day, the very real charity and care work performed by the women serves as quite a contrast, but there is clearly more to this place.
Things change, shall we say, a lot more significantly when Cecilia is confronted by a… change in her circumstances, shifting both her relationship with her Order and with the Order’s personable young priest, Father Sal (Álvaro Morte), who seems to take an especial interest in this resolute, if traumatised young woman. Reconfiguring both her role and her future in the convent, Cecilia is by turns alienated, celebrated – and confined. And that’s just the start. Oh really, it is.
This is such a fun – fun? – film to unpack. There’s the supercharged patriarchy of the Catholic Church, the intersection of science and faith, and the way that things which can’t be, must somehow be. At the centre of it all is the female body, and its persistent, pesky calls for autonomy – here, played out in a bizarre microcosm where the powers that be do not want to give up their prize. There’s no space to relax in Immaculate, which works in its favour: its at-first charming domestic sphere turns out to be terrifying, less a haven and more a trap. Sydney Sweeney plays it perfectly as Cecilia, too, never overplaying her part (and, thankfully, she’s given the right amounts of silence and space. There’s more to a performance than dialogue, which both actors and filmmaker appreciate here).
It’s hard, at this point, not to mention a certain…other film, a film where a young woman gets systematically isolated and lied to by a group which is exploiting her and her body. It’s almost a shame not to be able to talk about this other film without absolutely spoiling Immaculate, as in many ways Michael Mohan’s vision feels like a stylish update on that particular seminal horror. But even…the film I’m not going to mention for fear of spoilers never musters quite this level of escalating, engrossing batshittery. That’s a compliment, by the way. Immaculate is much more grisly, more overtly cruel and more expansive, whilst just as thought-provoking. I also very much enjoyed its dark, witty use of symbolism, its touches of deft humour and its boldness.
Whilst it could be dispiriting to think that, well over half a century since the film which must not be mentioned was made, we’re still imagining horror narratives whereby women’s rights over their own flesh are taken from them, there’s a kind of riotous comfort in the redemptive fightback on offer here, as the film goes where I did not expect it to go. It makes you inwardly cheer some rather grim behaviour – because you are so totally on side with Sweeney’s character by the end that there feels like no other sensible reaction, and that’s quite something. Immaculate is an incredibly strong and assured film, offering a deftly paced blend of brutality and smarts. I hope Mohan makes more horror.
Well, Robert Eggers has done it again; whether you think he should have or not very much depends on your level of affection for his work to date. His spin on Nosferatu has been tantalising audiences for what seems like forever, but certainly ever since it was announced as an alternative Christmas 2024 movie. As with other, high-profile horror films of the past year, a strong promotional campaign can be a mixed blessing, but certainly the grim Gothic splendour suggested by the trailer looked very promising. And it’s great: this is, all else aside, a beautiful, stark, visually impeccable film. But, sadly, there are also a hell of a lot of issues, many of which become fully clear as the film runs out of ground in its second hour.
Oh, come on. Deep down, you know it too.
Weaving together elements of Murnau’s 1922 classic and Herzog’s 1979 masterpiece – a film which, cards on the table, I consider to be one of the finest horrors ever made – this newest rendering of the same not-Dracula storyline stays more or less faithful to the name changes, relocations etc. used by Murnau. As such, we follow a young solicitor called Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult). Thomas, recently married, gets packed off to remote Transylvania to broker a property purchase being made by an elderly aristocrat, who is strangely keen to settle in Germany (or what would become Germany, a generation later). Thomas sees this as a sound career move, assuring him and his wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) of a comfortably genteel life together. Of course, as soon as he heads off, he’s beset by horse thieves, gypsies (not in cahoots with the Undead here, but not exactly helpful either), a surly innkeeper and guests, all of whom warn him off making the rest of the trip to the castle. As he deals with a version of Count Orlok he can barely see but knows well enough to fear, at home, his nervy wife – now in the care of friends of theirs – begins to experience old nightmares of a monstrous figure, hellbent on claiming her as its own. Thomas is trapped abroad, Ellen is detaching from reality – and to make it all worse, Orlok is soon on his way. His vessel arrives in Wisborg and brings with it a ‘plague’ which can only be stopped by somehow breaking the Orlok curse.
There are lots of great features here, and the film does set up a number of interesting elements which, as it moves its pieces into play, suggest great things. However, the film casts its spell chiefly through its visual details, meaning that once you have taken the time to enjoy and appreciate these, you may want more of the other things which matter: a script, characterisation, pace. Before that moment comes, though, the costumes, set design and cinematography are all outstanding, showcasing Eggers’ long and fruitful years as a production designer. Perhaps he moved the film back into the mid-19th Century for purely aesthetic reasons, but if so, it’s a good call. This is a dark, gloomy vision, and probably the most Gothic piece of work to make it to the screens in quite some time. The sound design is effective, and by retaining characters from the 1922 film – such as Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) – Eggers can use the familiar, so to speak, to take things further, adding in bigger, nastier and more grisly sequences. So far, so good: who could find fault in that?
As things progress, it seems that there are two key issues with the film. The first is that modern screenwriters seem to have a problem with subtext, despite the interest and entertainment which stem from the careful, multi-layered readings this can offer. They’d rather plump for TEXT. A cynic might suspect that, on occasion, it’s because they don’t trust us to understand subtext. Whatever the reason, though, it means that a decision was made during the writing of Nosferatu (2024) to move away from the sexual subtext of Dracula and many of its subsequent on-screen versions, by making things a hell of a lot more overt. Here, it involves making the plot all about a psychic sex pact, in a film full of pleading, pawing, tearful and sometimes laughable quickies. This drags us away from the suggestion and subtlety of the previous versions of Nosferatu, at some cost to the film as a whole. The sets are a lot more plausibly intimate than the sex. Yet, this isn’t the chief problem here. Well, actually it contributes, but it’s linked to a bigger issue.
Once the first of a few ripples of laughter broke out amongst the audience in my screening, it became clear that Nosferatu hadn’t really decided on whether it wanted to be camp or not. It seems torn, somehow, between its sombre, monochrome nightmarishness and, say, the gurning misdelivery of some seriously bad dialogue which cannot do anything but generate laughter. Only Willem Dafoe, who himself played Schreck/Orlok in the fantastic Shadow of the Vampire (2000), can really pitch it correctly (and, by the by, he is such a welcome addition here). Perhaps Eggers would say of course his Nosferatu is intended to be camp, but I’m not so sure that was his aim. There’s a sense that filmmakers will always claim that was their intent, even if it patently wasn’t; it suggests an affinity with the audience, rather than gross misjudgement. Script errors, mistakes over how people in this period may have spoken – these detach you from the horror itself. After the third wave of giggles, I started to wonder if people giggled through Nosferatu The Vampyre in the late Seventies. It seems hard to imagine – even though Kinski’s Orlok is, by quite a few measures, definitively camp. Bill Skarsgård’s Orlok, with his moustache and his maggots, is too swaddled in prosthetics and too barely-seen to be properly camp; the rest of the cast, though putting in decent enough turns, feel young and flimsy and they aren’t developed enough to allow us to really know them. Lily-Rose Depp does what she can with some rum lines, but her ‘present absence’ style of performance isn’t quite substantial enough in the end, especially given that she’s doing what’s already been done, with the same ending – bare flesh excepted – that we’ve come to expect.
Nosferatu (2024) is a triumph of design, with a genuine early sense that it is building up to something spectacular. It is beautiful, mesmerising and promising. However, despite its mastery of atmosphere and aesthetics, it lacks the necessary substance and impetus to deliver on its promises, and it gets bogged down, tonally and thematically. By the close, it has lost a lot of its strength, and becomes instead – nudity or not – a fairly safe re-tread of what has come before.
The menacing blue of distant, jagged mountains opens The Damned (2024), revealing an inhospitable, if still beautiful Icelandic landscape. It immediately looks like an environment ill-fitted for human habitation, and so it turns out to be. The female narrator who speaks briefly to us espouses a similar sentiment, walking through what is left of the winter food store and wondering how she and her small group are going to survive. The narration ceases, but we keep our focus on the woman – Eva, a widow whose husband died doing the work she now oversees. As owner of this fishing station, she is determined to make a go of it for his sake, as well as her own. She has nothing else left.
Indoors, the small gathering is a bit more cheerful – as tough as things are, they still have hopes of a good profit come Spring. They pass the time as best as they can: storytelling, toasting and singing. They are also optimistic enough to start thinking of ways to spend those coming wages. It’s the sort of optimism which you know is going to get pummelled out of them. As such, the next day, their precarious existence is further complicated when Eva spots a foundering ship out on the rocks. The small community is horrified, but it’s regarded as a tragedy best contemplated from afar: any talk of a rescue is silenced. How can they safely rescue these strangers? With barely enough food for themselves?
With regret, Eva agrees to ignore the ship, and by the next day, the ship has disappeared beneath the waterline. But there is useful salvage; a barrel washes ashore which contains food, to the delight and relief of the group. Hungrier than they are humane, this prompts the group to investigate further, now willing to risk a small boat to see if anything else of use has floated up from the wreck.
They find far more than that. They find men – cold, desperate men, clinging to the rocks. When these men see the boat approaching, they risk leaping into the icy water to try to reach it. Panic ensues: if they get into the vessel, then they could overload or even sink it. The fishermen fight desperately with the strangers, and the situation grows violent. This is a moment of reckoning: it’s now gone far beyond simple non-intervention.
Wracked with remorse, the small community begins to debate their role in the fates of the outsiders. One of their number, Helga (Siobhan Finneran) – who often entertains the group with ghost stories – now turns to stories of a darker note, warning them of supernatural repercussions for their actions. Stranded in an Icelandic winter, where every creak or sound now resonates with potential meaning, the group begins to turn on itself. Or is there someone – something – out there?
The film offers an intriguing look at folklore as a defence against straitened times, and as a means of asserting order over the disorderly. Likewise, the supernatural can represent fears and feelings too large and complex to contemplate – an externalisation, albeit one which whips around and terrifies the believers. Are the dead vengeful? The Damned sustains a brooding ambiguity throughout, doing enough to keep us wondering. That said, it’s audiences with a love for the kind of stark, semi-historical content who will find most to love here: this film is the very definition of slow burn, carrying a formidable psychological weight which has little truck with jump scares, or more anticipated horror genre features.
The film’s production values speak in its favour, too. Granted, it’d be hard to point a camera at any part of the Icelandic shore and somehow mess it up, but the film still looks exemplary – cold, stark, sharp outlines, contrasted with warm, candlelit interiors. The house is too sparse to be genuinely cosy, but it still symbolises some kind of hope of survival. Darkness and shadow are used very cleverly, too. All in all, the setting is a vital and well-realised part of the whole. A stellar cast also helps: old hands like Rory McCann and Francis Magee do a solid job of looking and acting as if they have a lifetime of hard living behind them, whilst the younger cast look like they’re getting there fast. Eva probably spends too much time gazing at a distance, but she is in an unfolding series of strange situations – a young widow, ostensibly in charge, but not fitted for the physical or emotional rigours of the job. If all the passivity looks a little samey, then it’s understandable at least.
Another criticism: The Damned’s slow-burn approach electively sacrifices much in the way of surprise, sticking to its brooding, barely-there forward motion throughout. It’s clear by the one-hour mark that the film is more about mood and spectacle than vast narrative developments: most of what it offers is potentially imagined or fantasised, and feels imagined, even when it is resolving some of its plot points. But its key strength is in how it presents the terrible impact of human emotion. It’s a gruelling study of guilt, one which can feel challenging in places, but at all times it’s an artistic and sensory experience – a well-sustained and well-presented ordeal, if you like.
The Damned (2024) is available on digital and VOD from 3rd January, 2025and will be in UK and Irish cinemas from January 10th.
Everyone likes a bit of data and, as a change, I thought it would be interesting to check in with the most popular posts on the site this year. It’s often interesting to keep half an eye on this – not least because, on occasion, it can be quite surprising – but I’ve not been in the habit of running more detailed analysis, though as the site has more than doubled its readership this year (thank you!) now’s as good a time as any. The first thing to say is that on occasion, it can be quite dispiriting when you have worked on a detailed review and no one seems much engaged by it, but it happens a lot, and always will: there are a lot of sources and sites out there, and it can be quite tricky to navigate the vagaries of Google (though being a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic has helped a lot). The other side of this is that sometimes you write a piece with no expectations and it just takes off somehow – a mention on Reddit, a positive comment, and less frequently, a repost by Bruce Campbell (which I recommend, if you can get it).
Interestingly, this year, all the most popular posts were actually written in 2024: past years have seen slow burners from years previous taking responsibility for the vast share of visitors. Not so this year. Articles where both myself and Darren have found some fault (or a lot of fault) with films have also done very well; people clearly don’t come here for puff pieces or unquestioning positivity, which is as it should be. In fact, the tenth most read article of 2024 was me taking issue with the newest Neil Marshall/Charlotte Kirk vehicle Duchess, though it’s certainly not just me: at the time of writing, this baffling project is standing at 14% approval on RT and has the honour of being Neil Marshall’s worst-rated film. The poster alone set the bar, as I discuss in the article. The ninth most-read piece, though, felt rather more like it was just me, when I reviewed one of this year’s biggest horror hits – Longlegs, finding it to be “a patchwork of piecemeal squares, rarely scary and barely sequential”. It’ll be interesting to see whether director Oz Perkins can make more of a cogent narrative out of his next feature The Monkey, a film already starting to land in the site inbox in the same sorts of small, tantalising mini-trailers as Longlegs did. Hey, it might be great. Cynicism – begone!
DogMan
In eighth place is my review of All You Need Is Death, a piece I really enjoyed writing. The film’s an interesting kind of music-specific folk horror which really didn’t need that jokey-sounding title, but has a lot of ideas and means to blend genres together. In seventh place, it’s Darren’s detailed and balanced review of DogMan, another film full of ideas, some of which struggle to find their place, but come together with enough clarity to make for a decent and original film. Then in sixth place – quite surprisingly, actually – is my piece on George Miller’s Fury Road prequel (and one of my favourite films of the year)Furiosa – A Mad Max Saga. The bigger release reviews can go one of two ways – either obscurity (because the big sites see the big films first and write them up first) or – surprising popularity. The Furiosa review is happily in the latter camp…
The fifth most popular piece this year is another film I didn’t take to at all:Pandemonium. The more I think of the opening scenes versus what follows, the more frustrated the rest of the film makes me feel, even now, at a remove of some months (though it’s worth adding that Warped Perspective contributor Darren loved it, and put it on his Top 10 films of 2023). Well, in my own case, a lot of people stopped by to check out my detailed frustrations. A piece on the oh-so slow, zombie-adjacent mood pieceHandling The Undeaddrew people in their thousands, too, as the fourth most popular post: this is one of those pieces mentioned above which just ‘takes off’, for reasons unknown, but it’s a hopefully fairly-balanced review of an unusual spin on the ‘undead’ idea.
So we come to the top three…
The third most popular piece on the site this year was claustrophobic ordeal horror Cold Meat, a film which throws a number of potential threats into the mix: will it be people, or the environment – or even something else – which destroys our protagonist? I saw this very early on in 2024 just prior to its February Netflix release, which perhaps explains its popularity (people often want to read up on a title before they commit to streaming it, particularly if it’s not a huge budget project). Well, if anyone went for it on the strength of my very favourable review – I hope you enjoyed it!
The second most-read piece I’ve written this year continues to clock up hundreds of hits every week, and has been read several thousand times overall. When I saw Late Night with the Devil, as much as I loved it, I decided not to just write a conventional review: I was more drawn to the wealth of references and ideas which the film uses, so I did a deep dive on these which has proven very successful, spreading far and wide. Everything from the anti-magic sceptic, to the cult leader, to the secret sylvan meeting place of the rich and famous – all of these have real precedents, and I really enjoyed putting the pieces together. In fact, given its immediate popularity, I was absolutely sure that it would be the site’s most-read feature in 2024 – but I was wrong.
Clocking up over 25,000 hits this year, my review of supernatural horror Baghead has turned out to be the most successful piece the site has run in 2024. Part of this, surely, has to come from the fact that many viewers unfairly dismissed the film outright because they assumed it had borrowed heavily from the surprise hit Talk To Me. As I confirmed in my interview with the director of Baghead, Alberto Corredor, the short film upon which Baghead was based pre-dated Talk To Me by over five years. It’s just that Talk To Me‘s greater reach suggested to those who (let’s be honest) hadn’t looked into things properly that Baghead was a bit of a rip-off. How frustrating for the team behind Baghead, a film which, in its own right, is an effective ghostly horror with some fantastic ideas. I saw a lot of positives in it, and it’s rewarded the site in turn by being an incredibly popular feature; I only hope that it helped some people go into a viewing of Baghead with a fairer idea of that film’s origins.
Baghead
Still to come before the end of the year: Darren’s own Top Ten films, which I look forward to posting very soon!
Aside from that, though, that’s a wrap from Warped Perspective this year, so for all of those of you who come here and read the articles, whether once in a while or regularly – thank you so much. I know that some of you have been following the site for many years and please know that your support is genuinely invaluable. Likewise to all the filmmakers and promoters, thank you for your hard work. Whilst the site can’t be as active as I’d like it to be due to other commitments – a full-time job leaves very little mental and physical energy – new material will always be posted as regularly as possible. There will also be more special features, more interviews and more competitions in 2025, so keep looking for those! For those of you who have supported my Lucio Fulci book so far – and they’ve been sent all over the world, which is amazing – a special thank you: I am hopeful of completing another personal print media project in 2025, which had to be side-lined this year as I worked an immense amount of hours/collaborated on other projects, some of which have now been released (such as the amazing Hellebore special) and some of which are in the pipeline for a 2025 release…watch this space.
In the meantime, please feel free to reach out via email or via social media: Warped Perspective is only on Twitter/X and Instagram in any regular fashion at the moment, but we’ll see what the New Year may bring!
You’d better get used to the discordant screeching soundtrack to Cuckoo (2024), because it starts early and man, it keeps on going. It accompanies the opening scenes, where we witness a young woman fleeing both a family fight and, it seems, the weird noise in her head which quickly afflicts us, too. As she runs into the night, her disappearance is discussed on the telephone: apparently, the loss of this ‘adolescent’ is bad news (well, yeah) as this will make it tougher to keep the ‘mother’ around, but happily, more adolescents will follow. That’s encouraging, then. It’s fairly heavily signposted that Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) might just be one of the adolescents in question. Gretchen has just arrived at an Alpine resort, a little ahead of her father and his new family. They’re regular visitors, it seems, but this time they have come to the resort to live permanently while dad Luis works on building an extension, and Gretchen – newly arrived from the States – will be living with them. Already, everything feels ‘off’ and oddball. How so? Something about the aesthetics perhaps, or the décor, the macros, the characters – everything here is reaching for Lynchian, but perhaps landing at Osgood Perkins, which makes a lot of sense in this, the hallowed year of Longlegs (2024). Perhaps Perkinsian will one day be a thing.
In amongst all of this, we have a young woman who misses home and struggles to adjust, despite being offered a fairly cushy job by resort owner Herr König (Dan Stevens) to help her settle. It’s a quiet role, if (whilst I’m no expert in running an Alpine resort) it seems unusually beset with vomiting women. Perhaps it’s the altitude. Elsewhere, Gretchen tries to get used to living with her dad’s new wife and daughter, which is made more difficult by the fact that little Alma (Mila Lieu) is non-verbal. Trickier still, Alma’s also apparently affected by the mysterious shrieking noise which troubled the runaway girl at the start of the film. Clearly this little sanctuary in the mountains is not all it seems; even Herr König wants the whole resort locked down by 10pm every night, and distinctly forbids Gretchen from cycling home at the end of her shift, which of course she does anyway. Still, this grants us one of the standout creepy scenes in the entire film, so she was right to do it. A maniacal woman gives chase; as Gretchen starts the committed process of collecting head injuries, it seems no one wants to believe that she got these, directly or indirectly, because of the mystery woman. No one, that is, except for a down-at-heel detective who wants Gretchen’s help to crack a case, once and for all.
There’s very little objective normality here, but even that is only offered up as something to deliberately unspool, particularly when the film begins to toy around with linear time – zipping back and forth by just a few seconds, but making it clear that rules are not respected in this universe. The strong impression is that, if you told director/writer Tilman Singer that his film was bizarre, he’d say, ‘thanks’. It’s very much of that school where everything looks a bit 80s, and all the tech is analogue with the exception of a modern, slimline mobile phone to break the spell (and, oh, a plug on a tape player sent from America with a big CE mark on it). Aside from that, the abundant wood panelling, the furniture, the lighting, even the very brown wardrobe choices – all look very 80s. People didn’t, or don’t always wear bright colours – this film abundantly makes that point. Even the film’s use of code-switching contributes to the film’s ingrained oddness, with German, French and English being used in succession in ways which don’t always make a lot of sense, given who is speaking to whom. Add to this that we’re on the Italian border and have characters using ASL, and it’s a very pan-European, pan-linguistic horror film. That all adds to the film’s layering.
Yet for all that, when stripped down to its basic elements, Cuckoo‘s tale is in many respects a tale as old as time: an unfamiliar place, a remote community with its own schemes, ideas and rules, and a bunch of unwitting outsiders who get trapped there. Add in the idea of remote or absent parents, and a young woman trying to navigate early adulthood bereft of support and love, and voila – this could be any number of horrors. It goes quite heavy on the whole ‘nest’, ‘cuckoo’, ‘nesting instinct’ ideas too, but actually this all leads to a rather unsatisfying final act, and the theme of parenting doesn’t really hold up. If you love a peculiar, if carefully curated atmosphere and can suspend both your disbelief and your need for narrative closure, then it’s possible, or even likely that you’ll love Cuckoo. For this reviewer – and please skip the rest of this sentence, if you want to avoid a very minor spoiler – I couldn’t quite get past the unbelievable amounts of faff taking place, purely to wind up with some offspring. Similar faff in Rosemary’s Baby, as a counterexample, makes sense, because they were literally trying to birth Satan’s child and quite clearly needed to do that in secret. I have no idea why or how the net gain of one or two screeching children in the Alps was worth the clear effort and secrecy it took, or what you could do with them once procured. Does humanity need a tiny number of screeching, fitting children for some unknown reason? Do they need ‘conservation’? Are these better somehow? I have no idea.
That aside, the film does a great deal to craft sensory overload and atmospherics, making particularly good use of soundscape, and could be enjoyed as a purely immersive experience, even if the plot dwindles away to something rather meagre. Despite feeling a little personally underwhelmed by the end of the film’s 100 minutes, I still enjoyed this experience more than Cuckoo’s NEON cousin, Longlegs, which chronically underdelivered; Cuckoo has issues, sure, but more charm overall, and kudos to Hunter Schafer for doing nearly the whole thing with a massive bandage on her head, Basil Fawlty style; it’s nice when glamour goes out of the window for a bit.
Well, here we are again. As Warped Perspective is about to enter its tenth year – and that coming off the back of the old Brutal as Hell days, too – I’ve racked up quite a few editions of these Top Tens, and every year I search for some kind of summative comment to make about the year that’s just departing. To start with, 2024 has been a very good year for cinema. Along the way, it has seen perhaps a surprising number of sequels and prequels which seemed unlikely to ever appear; the fact that both Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Furiosa made it to our screens this year is pleasantly surprising, and the arrival of a Gladiator sequel (arguably a kind of remake) is another generally pleasant surprise, even if only one of those films makes it onto this particular list. If we’re thinking about bigger trends and signifiers, then the Beetlejuice sequel, whilst perfectly enjoyable, didn’t really need to happen: it’s just further evidence that nostalgia is now such a key driver in bigger budget decision-making of late, something maybe amplified by the post-Covid years. Speaking of Covid – was that really five years ago? – the independent film scene has probably, finally got through its slew of titles ‘made during Covid with a skeleton crew and cast’, which nearly always relied quite heavily on some kind of space/time disruption, handily accounting for the lack of people or any measurable sense of normality. Unfortunately, this has now matured into a burgeoning subgenre of space/time-themed sci-fi and horror, much of which is very thin gruel, using the notion of quantum physics to bypass cogent screenwriting in favour of an ‘anything goes’ approach, which almost never makes for a decent film. So…no more time travel please – unless you’re Moorhead and Benson, where it is still allowed. Thanks.
Elsewhere, newer obsessions and developments have been turned to much greater effect, particularly (and inevitably) around the impact of technology and AI on our lives. Several titles taking technology as a theme are represented on this list. It’s also been great to note some fantastic examples of body horror, particularly where the female body is specifically concerned – and, just ahead of the much-anticipated Robert Eggers rendition of Nosferatu (which may well have been on this list, were it not for the fact that UK audiences have to wait until New Year’s Day 2025) that someone has made vampires good and repellent again. A title doing just this takes its place amongst an array of other monstrous projects, as well as a couple of films where concealing the dead turns out to be a pivotal plot point. In a nutshell then: AI and modern technology can be pivotal alienating factors, bodily breakdown is back, bloodsuckers are virulent parasites – and death is not the end, even if this is because someone decides it isn’t.
Let’s get on with it, then.
10: The Dead Thing
One of a number of titles I covered for the consistently great Fantasia Film Festival in Canada, The Dead Thing is an unseemly, uncomfortable blend of anxieties over modern technologies and a much more established terror of the supernatural. Hook-up addict Alex (Blu Hunt) passes her evenings on Tinder (or a mirror-image equivalent) and bed-hops to get away from a larger, recognisable existential crisis. When she’s ghosted by the one guy she actually feels a connection with, it disrupts something in her, she’s emotionally affected enough to try to track him down; after seeing him on a date with someone else, but also after being handed a funeral notice for Kyle when she tries to find him at his workplace, she is confused and intrigued enough to (shock) uninstall and reinstall the app, at which point she gets another match with Kyle. Kyle, the same nice guy, who seemingly can’t remember her at all. Is he alive and in hiding? Dead and a ghost in the machine? Playing with her? This tentative existential modern horror has plenty within it to get a hold on its audience, feeling both bang up to date and also part of a grand tradition of supernatural tales which co-opt elements of modern life to land their scares. You can check out my full review here.
9: Cara
Cara doesn’t spend much time dallying with redemption; what it does suggest is redemptive is reframed as being part of the same, sordid, exploitative puzzle we’ve seen throughout the film and as such, it is emphatically not a film for everyone. It’s unpleasant. It’s unkind. Its well-meaning characters become monsters in the imagination of the titular heroine Cara (Elle O’Hara), and/or they meet a miserable end, and/or they were never really there (perhaps). Such is the way of things when your film follows a young woman with a legacy of abuse and mistreatment, reaching adulthood only to succumb to profound mental illness, whilst trying to eke out an existence beyond the walls of the secure hospital. This existence pushes her into the fringes of the sex industry, which would be a tough break for even the most balanced person, and – well. Cara is already on a very slippery slope before we even encounter her and what we observe is her obsessive pursuit of freedom from all those who have, stood by or worse, contributed to her ordeal. Warped Perspective wrote one of the very first reviews for this title, by the by, and we even get a mention on the end credits: here’s a link to the review, and watch out for a wider release of this film in 2025.
8: Tiger Stripes
I haven’t seen very many Malay horror films, so Tiger Stripes was a pleasant surprise with its tale of a young girl reaching adolescence, with all of the attendant horrors of bodily changes, particularly menstruation – which is still seen as ‘unclean’ in Malay society, but let’s not feel too superior about this, as it’s only in 2025 that I’ve ever heard the word ‘blood’ in an advert for period products. Menstruation is only the start, however. Zaffan, the girl in question, isn’t simply getting used to blood and new issues around cleanliness: her period has arrived with other bodily changes, some of which seem to grant her… superhuman abilities. Hey, if she’s going to be excluded from old friendship groups and activities, she may as well get something out of it. But equally, if she’s now seen as ‘unclean’ simply for menstruating, then how is a small, religiously-devout community going to take to these other, rather more extreme changes? A smart, well-paced film with plausible family and friend relationships, a gleeful sense of humour and a great lens with which to examine attitudes to the female body, Tiger Stripes is well worth a watch. Here’s a link to my full review.
7: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
That we even got another film in the Mad Max pantheon from George Miller is a marvellous thing; hey, we may yet get more. But if he ends on Furiosa, with its stellar cast, strong visuals, fantastic high action scenes and sustained storytelling, then it’ll be a great place to part company. If some of the CGI is a little eye-twitch-inducing – to acknowledge a few minor faults – then for the most part it blends well into the film’s gritty, colourful aesthetic. Best of all, though, is getting to spend more time with the War Boys, drivers, Immortan Joe and his crew – and of course, with the brilliant Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, as an easy-on-the-eye upcoming warlord with a hinted backstory and an emotional life of his own). As I said at the time, the whole film is basically what happens when people get overpromoted and then break the fragile infrastructure which has been built up – just imagine such a thing! Anya Taylor-Joy is remarkably good, too, and if it’s a little annoying that Furiosa got recast by a much younger actor when the likes of De Niro get the whole de-ageing treatment – another minor eye-twitch – then at least Taylor-Joy takes on the role with serious panache, doing it justice. Like its predecessor Fury Road, it’s a simply enough yarn, but done very well. My full review is here.
6: Black Eyed Susan
Surprise, surprise, it’s another title which I feel I need to say is ‘not for everyone’. Given that nothing is ever ‘for everyone’, what I really mean is that Black Eyed Susan is, like Cara, an intentional and unpleasant study of humanity, frequently at its worst, but always complicated, with its moral lines placed under a microscope. But there’s more: here, notions of consent, sex, violence and modern life are refocused by the film’s use of a key plot point, a brand-new, trainable sex doll. Nicknamed Black Eyed Susan by the crew working on ‘her’, Susan is designed to act as a pressure valve for stressed, frustrated men who want to hurt the women they’re intimate with – the doll’s creator expresses this as if it’s just a truism. Writing all of this in light of the recent Dominique Pelicot case and his mass facilitation of rape, it all feels even more sordid and unpalatable even than it did, but clearly the morals being eroded in the film are all too often being eroded in the real world, out there, often just out of sight. Susan’s original trainer takes his own life – why, you might wonder? – so step up, lonely but otherwise all-too normal Derek (Damian Maffei) who agrees to the job because he is at his lowest ebb, financially, socially and emotionally. But he doesn’t want to hit and hurt the realistic doll, and doesn’t seem to care that she can develop a strikingly lifelike black eye…so, in response to his far more humane treatment, Susan begins to show revulsion at the idea of violence, too. She wants to be a different sort of companion. Great, right? That should be fine. Well… this intimate. queasy, questioning film is a challenging watch which escalates its questions and its quandaries as it goes. At the heart of all of this is the brave and unflinching performance by Yvonne Emilie Thälker as Susan: few actors could take this on, but she does it superbly. My full review can be found here, and again, be warned: this augmented reality is unpleasant, and the worse for its encroaching proximity.
5: Broken Bird
Whilst it would be nice to move onto this write-up of Broken Bird and note that we actually get some effective female agency here, that wouldn’t quite be true – or straightforwardly true, at least. It’s a tragic story about a woman unable to relate to others normally, or to form relationships in a healthy way. In many respects, the story of Sibyl (Rebecca Calder) subverts expectations: it’s not normally women we see behaving in this way, if you think of colder, more clinical true crime cases and the films about them. But Sibyl has a compelling, horrifying backstory which is only oh-so slowly parcelled out to the audience; along the way, we see her determination to craft the perfect family for herself, in a way. If it takes some time for Sibyl’s story to properly mesh with an accompanying story, that of Emma (Sacharissa Claxton), a policewoman grieving the disappearance of her young son – then it is oh-so worthwhile when it comes. This is a ghastly, richly Gothic story which matches intricate detail against shocking revelation, with a horror denouement which is both shocking and aesthetically brilliant. Tell you what, take a look at my full review to get more of a sense of all of this…
4: The Vourdalak
The Vourdalak was an unexpected delight, a period piece which very clearly channels the horror cinema of yesteryear with its lush colours, archetypes, setting, music and script. Then there’s the use of celluloid, of course: the film looks like an unearthed gem, a lost project found intact somewhere after a limited run in the late 70s, which in and of itself makes the film charming and interesting. Based on a 19th Century short story by Anton Chekov, director Adrien Beau (who also co-wrote the film with Hadrien Bouvier) has, however, opted for a much darker spin on this tale which was also used by Mario Bava in his portmanteau classic, Black Sabbath (1963). However, the Beau/Bouvier take on The Family of the Vourdalak renders the revenant father a true monster – realised through puppetry, a marionette which can’t but trigger some kind of visceral reaction. This is only the beginning of a far more fatalistic, gruelling vision of vampirism, too. A sensory, aesthetic triumph and a grim story of contagion and conquest, I liked The Vourdalak enough to write this special feature on it, as well as a more conventional review.
3: Late Night with the Devil
Only in a particularly strong year for film could The Vourdalak ever find itself in fourth place, but 2024 was also the year which brought us the clever, note-perfect charms of faux documentary horror, Late Night with the Devil. What a fantastic, well-researched occult horror: this was another title which had me writing a special feature, this time to explore the many clues, nods and references contained within it. It’s a smart and engaging hyperreal experience, but at its heart it’s a Faustian pact spelled out in a lurid 70s colour palette, with knock-out, entirely fitting performances and a great grasp on the hokum and trends of the era. It’s just that, here, they’re given license to move onto a great ‘what if?’, by considering what might happen if there was an occult force out there, waiting to break through and to grab its side of the bargain.
2: The Coffee Table
I’m still mulling The Coffee Table over. Months after watching it. I think it may be one of the darkest things I have ever seen. Now and again, my mind returns to some element, or some scene in particular; for someone who routinely watches a hell of a lot of films, that in itself is to the film’s credit, but the reason this is still happening is because it is such a momentous, significant, utterly grim experience – and it does it with no splatter, no torture, no ordeal – the chief ordeal here is in one man’s mind, and in how he chooses to carry it, until he can’t carry it any longer. It all starts, as some of the darkest days no doubt do, with the utterly banal – accepting, of course, the simmering discontent in the lives of new, and late-life parents Jesus and Maria. For Maria, this is her dream finally come true. For Jesus, he is miserable; he doesn’t love being a dad, he’s aggrieved by the child’s given name, even, and he feels utterly powerless in his relationship so that, when given the chance at some brief moment of agency, he puts his foot down. Where does he do this? At a furniture store, where he demands a new coffee table for their apartment – a garish, outdated, lumpen item which the shop assistant is suspiciously keen on. Maria thinks it’s hideous, but Jesus’s mind is made up. So he gets his coffee table, though it gets delivered with a part missing. Jesus is left holding the baby while he waits for the part to be dropped off, so he can finish putting it together and – well. Here we part company with the normal. Let’s just say he’s not able to do it very well. I’ll hand over to Darren here, whose review was initially going to be one single word: ‘fuck’. If you’ve see The Coffee Table, you can only nod sagely at this.
1: The Substance
2024, without a shadow of a doubt, is the year of The Substance. There’s now a meme which says, ‘Please don’t make The Substance your entire thing’. Too late, of course; you can even buy the yellow coat, if you like. Coming out of left-field with a huge Hollywood star being given the full body horror treatment, it was always going to make a huge impact – particularly, might I add, on regular audiences, who probably just wanted to see the new Demi Moore film and got treated to something unlike anything else they had ever experienced before. For all those audiences who’d never heard of Brian Yuzna, god bless ’em and you’re welcome.
But what a fun, clever film, riffing on the horrors of ageing and a culture which derides any woman over the age of, ooh, fortysomething, which is interesting, as director Coralie Fargeat is at that age herself, as almost certainly are many of the film’s biggest fans, myself included. The film follows a relatable start point with an increasingly outrageous, fantastical conclusion which never feels entirely untethered from very real feelings and situations. It captures not just the entitled brat behaviour of an industry and of men who can never seem to turn that critical eye on their own ageing physiques, but also on how women will quite readily fuck each other over, too: Elisabeth and Sue, despite being ‘one’, never behave towards one another like there’s some inviolable sisterhood between them. Their whole relationship turns into one of ‘divide and conquer’, with increasingly grisly results. Maybe this, too, is ‘the patriarchy’, but it’s never a film of feminine passivity, at least. It’s icky, uproariously funny and well-realised, and a creative force majeure from Fargeat. You can check out my full review of this year’s film of the year here. Now, I need a new coat…
Notable mentions:
Here are some other great films which didn’t quite make the Top Ten, but definitely deserve a mention anyway:
Alien: Romulus. A decent return to a much-beloved universe, which, even if it leaned too heavy on the fan-‘pleasing’ references and toyed with what was plausible within its confines, was still an enjoyable piece of sci-fi, with a phenomenal performance from David Jonsson.
Cold Meat: a potential Xmas movie, perhaps? Sure, if you’re deranged and love human misery. But this surprising, tightly-wrought wintry ordeal horror deserves a lot of love.
Property: A thoughtful, thought-provoking tale of wealth, inequality and people fighting the good fight under extreme duress in rural Brazil. This is a political film, for sure, but one which never lectures anyone, and that in itself is to its great credit. It’s a gripping piece of tragedy.
In Our Blood: another interesting take on a certain stalwart supernatural genre, combined with a mockmentary format which is used very well, handing down surprise after surprise.
MadS: hallelujah, New French Extremity has popped back to deliver a fresh spin on contagion horror. Where have you been all these years? We’ve missed you…
Making good use of its drone shots – as many films do – Oddity (2024) opens on a remote, grand old house in rural Ireland which is being renovated by a woman named Dani (Carolyn Bracken). It’s one of those houses which no one you know ever lives in – all open plan, stone walls, natural light and minimalism (though to be fair, most houses being renovated go through a minimalist phase). Her husband Ted (Gwilym Lee) is a psychiatrist who mostly works the night shift, meaning Dani is doing a lot of this work alone. By the by, all that natural light gives way quite quickly to large expanses of darkness after sundown. So it’s by torch and by lamplight that creepy, unwieldy things start to happen.
In the dark, a man arrives, begging admittance. He tells Dani that he’s just seen someone sneak into the house while she was getting something from her car; it seems he’s ‘professionally familiar’ with her husband, Dr Timmis, which together with his shall we say, rather striking glass eye doesn’t exactly fill a person with confidence, but Dani still finds herself wondering if this stranger is in earnest. We see her open the door – and then we’re back at the psychiatric unit which is clearly so integral to the film, given that a grotesque murder takes place here shortly after we get another good look at the place. It’s not the most forward-thinking mental health facility ever seen: it’s positioned much more closely to some kind of nightmare Victorian asylum, truth be told, right down to the tumbledown cells, the use of restraints, the autopsy wall art…the Channard Institute looks positively modern compared to this.
If this is not enough of an…oddity, then witness our next stop: an antiques shop stuffed with possibly haunted curios, if we’re to believe the proprietor of the shop – Dani’s blind twin sister, Darcy. Ted pops by, to drop off a glass eye which belonged to the man who – ah – apparently murdered Dani on that fateful night, very nearly one year previously. Darcy, a psychic, wants to ‘read’ the item. Given Ted’s strictly rational mindset, it’s strange that he’s been so accommodating, but then he’s an accommodating man: less than a year after his wife’s passing, he already has a new live-in girlfriend. Did Darcy already know about his through her faculty of second sight? It’s unknown, but she certainly seems surprised. They make a loose plan for Darcy to visit the house, seeking some kind of closure for the loss of her twin – and Ted leaves her with the glass eye to ponder.
By just twenty minutes in, Oddity is so packed with Shudder-friendly plot points and elements that it feels positively busy, if not also strangely familiar, with everything filtered through that equally familiar stylish visual flair. That Darcy, who arrives essentially uninvited at the house soon after chatting with Ted, wants to perform a psychic experiment which for some reason involves a man-sized, golem-like heirloom feels unusually normal. Ted’s new girlfriend Yana (Caroline Menton), an unwitting host, has also dug out Dani’s old camera and guess what? It’s heaving with ghostly pictures. But having whisked the audience through a Generation Game-like run of supernatural plot points, the film gears up as a kind of psychic whodunnit, and – it works. Using flashback and recast, Darcy offers alternative explanations for what happened to Dani; creepy glass eye or not, she doesn’t believe that the eye-owner was guilty. She has other ideas…
There are points where you begin to guess at the involvement of other parties: Ted’s cut-glass English RP in amongst the Irish lilts, plus his remarkable ability to hurdle over the impact of his wife’s recent murder differentiate him quite markedly from the others. However, there’s still enough going on here to keep the film engaging and often unsettling. The film trips, traipses and sometimes hurtles through a melee of ideas, points and set pieces with the kind of stylish frenetic activity you’d get in a lot of classic gialli: I kept thinking of Four Flies on Grey Velvet, and Fulci’s Sette note in nero. Same vibe. There’s also a similar kind of push-pull between rationalism and supernaturalism, with cold rationalism often coming off far, far worse, in the grand scheme of things. Oddity turns out to be a pleasing, lean, mean supernatural horror which makes all of its artefacts and ideas count, and you find yourself rooting for all of its moments of bloody comeuppance, even if the camera often looks away and leaves you to it.
2073, despite initial appearances, is not a narrative film. It certainly enjoys playing up to that appearance, though, with its big, dystopian-style movie poster, its big star (Samantha Morton) and its opening scenes, which tease that it is set in 2073 – 37 years after ‘the event’. Don’t be fooled, however. There’s no key ‘event’ revealed, because that would require the kind of clarity and vision bereft this film. A few, thin minutes of this future-set storytelling aside, we’re thrust into an agitated, unfocused documentary about how current world events – pretty much all of them, it feels like – will one day lead us to such a future. It’s a hectoring, unworthy mess without nuance, clarity or focus.
Anyway, let’s gloss over the narrative frame in much the same way that director and writer Asif Kapadia does – which is strange, all told, as when on his game, he’s amazing. He can tell a story; his short film Laika is one of the best I’ve seen in years. Here, however, we meet Morton’s character, living in a sepia-tinged hellscape (actually what’s left of a shopping mall). She’s mute, but this just means she has opportunity, via a voiceover, to speak to us in platitudes. Trips outside are rare – we are shown people in a vast CCTV hub monitoring people for discussing ‘democracy’. Hmm. A little clunky, that. As for Morton’s character, she ekes out an existence by dumpster-diving, which is actually very encouraging: even in a dystopian hellscape, even in a place where we are told there are strict curfews and street militias, people are still putting things in bins. The people of the mall trade in what they can find in said bins, though what they can possibly find to actually do with things like analogue telephones is a puzzler. We’re also briefly told that one of the mall people is ‘AI’, which seems unrelated to anything whatsoever, as he – like most of the extras – is not written as a character, just someone whose eyes briefly glow red.
So far, so predictable. But I would sooner face an eternity traipsing around in the obligatory dust with Morton and her mates in this lackadaisical dystopia than what follows: now, via the simple line, “How did we get here?” we’re apparently about to be told. Well, we’re about to be told a great deal, but you won’t come away with a satisfying answer to the question. The film morphs into a fast-rolling montage of recent world events, with real journalists’ names flashing up on screen as they each take a turn at explaining why everything is wrong and bad. Some of the conflations here are absolutely dizzying. Whilst people in the UK and Europe may well still be angry over the outcome of the Brexit vote, perishingly few of those people would lump it in with Rodrigo Duterte’s desire to execute three million of his own people, but here in the film, they’re handled in the same breath. Remarkable.
Of course, the lion’s share of footage shown belongs to right-wing protests, and not to make light of these whatsoever, but it’s a tried-and-tested, even dangerously partial picture. The point has been made elsewhere that this kind of blinkered approach can be harmful in its own right, but why attempt to bring reason to this bonkers, simplistic collage? Just at the point that fatigue kicks in, we’re whizzed back into the future and back into the narrative bit, which by now is positioned as the likely outcome of the many, varied issues which will be placed before us before the credits roll.
So we’ve had Brexit; we also get through facial recognition software, the impact of the War on Terror, Mark Zuckerberg and his techbros, algorithms, Hindu atrocities against Muslims, social media, climate change, Palestine, health data ownership…these bad things will lead to people sleeping in malls, maybe, or definitely, it’s not clear. The date on-screen flings to and fro from 2073 to other, past-tense dates, hopping from past to future to past, flashing up an incessant array of dates, places, names, events, voices, maps. There is no debate. There are only monologues from people Kapadia rather likes. Even when sharing many of the concerns being aired, you will still feel demeaned by this scattergun, querulous ordeal. Add to all of this moments which, breaking through the rickety tension, will have you hollering with laughter (the Malcolm X autobiography in the bin; lines like “The news disappeared – just like grandma”) and it’s fair to say that 2073 has rather missed its mark.
There’s a lot to get angry about in this world, and well-pitched documentaries are a phenomenal tool in expressing this righteous anger; this ain’t it. Perhaps 2073 was just too big a project for Kapadia, or certainly the wrong project, given this is someone whose best-received work has tended to be on individual public figures, rather than the end of the world as we know it. Here, with only the haziest ‘it might not be too late’ sentiment to counter all the footage from the past which otherwise suggests that it is, in fact, too late, the end result only provides a dash of confusion to add to the frustration. This is thin gruel, too random to be a polemic, and too piecemeal to really feel like a successful piece of film, let alone a serviceable dystopia. This is a warning, indeed.
