After the actor went missing earlier this year whilst hiking in the San Gabriel mountains, it was always a slim-to-none chance that Julian Sands was going to turn up unharmed. Now, sadly, remains recently found in the area have been confirmed as him; whilst not a surprise, it also feels greatly sad to receive that confirmation, as if Sands was somehow still with us in some kind of boundary-defining sense until that moment – not here, not gone.
Sands was never an actor who conformed to the norms and expectations of a man of his acting pedigree or longevity. It’s one of many damn good reasons people liked his work so much, and also spoke highly of him as a man. His career always deviated from the usual progression expected of an actor – to come up through the ranks of genre film, but then to disavow it, as greater opportunities present themselves. Sands never did so: not only did he bring the same mellifluous dignity to every role he ever played, but he also made a career out of taking on the wildcard roles, the jobs more tentative, uncertain actors would baulk at.
He played immensely popular roles – he is particularly well known for his performance in A Room With a View (1985) – but he also played his heart out in a personal favourite, Warlock (1989) as a black magician come to wreak suave havoc on modern America. Like many of his peers, Sands instinctively knew that you need to play such a role with full honesty, never deliberately hamming it up: to do so would break the bond between audience and actor; let the events of the film suspend the disbelief, not the performances. It’s a bond he understood perfectly. He also did sterling work in many other favourites: he was in Naked Lunch, of course, the wildcard to end all wildcards; he played a note-perfect Percy Bysshe Shelley under Ken Russell’s tutelage in Gothic (1986), surely the only film which has ever come close to capturing the creative chaos of that meeting of minds; he took on the incredibly brave (and much contested) role of surgeon Dr Nick Cavanaugh in Boxing Helena (1992), a queasy, if weirdly mesmerising film which essentially comes down to issues of control, patriarchy and power, all played out in a nightmare. Think what you like of Boxing Helena – people have never exactly been reticent – but it takes immense bravery to see a contentious project like that through (and many of the original cast did not). And of course Sands starred in one of the best ‘werewolf’ films of the past thirty years, and an underrated one too – Romasanta (2004) gets closer to the notion of lycanthropy as a descriptor of aberrant human behaviour than anything more supernatural; it’s as strikingly beautiful as it is horrific. Sands is wonderful in it.
Sands, a prolific grafter – if you can excuse some UK slang he’d no doubt recognise – continued to rack up TV, movie and voiceover work right up until the year of his disappearance, but kept horror and darker dramas close to his heart throughout his life; it’s a horror film which makes for his final acting credit. Budget and profile mattered far less to him than a genuine interest in, and a belief in, the project itself. It’s also gratifying that one of his last projects saw him work alongside old friend, John Malkovich.
Sands was a superb, distinctive actor and an enthusiastic supporter of the arts throughout his long and respected career; we are indebted to him, and we will miss him very much.
Irreversible does, at least, warn us of what is coming.
In its first few minutes, with its hammering soundtrack, its almost infrasonic hum, its extraordinary, pinballing camerawork and its first pitstop with two odious, broken men who warn us that ‘time destroys all things’, the film instils a kind of sensory fight-or-flight response. It sets up the audience as either helpless accomplices, or unwitting witnesses. How are we to deal with this? Stick with it; try to get one’s balance; try to follow whatever is happening here? It is, without doubt, a challenging film. Even after years of the New French Extremity and ‘torture porn’ which followed in its wake, it hasn’t lost any of its capacity to appal; how could it? With its blend of horrific, plausible violence and threat together with a start/end point which is calm, hopeful and refreshingly mundane, it shows us that these two states of being are irretrievably one and the same. It is frightening, and it is depressing. The feeling, come the end, is a kind of affronted despair.
‘You know Le Tenia?’
We are almost immediately thrown into a world of sirens and police lights: a man on a stretcher, a man being escorted by police. Dysphemism and venom punctuate the script; whatever has happened in this nightclub, the plainly-named Club Rectum (oh come on) it speaks of violence, secrecy, voyeurism. But whatever shake of the rattlesnake’s tail we get in these opening minutes, it’s as yet only a brief warning. Taken as a whole, the theatrical cut of this film is assault after assault after assault. It ditches conventional structure, plot and format, but it’s more than that. The overriding feeling, by the end of this film (dropping the expected, safe-distance of a set of end credits, as Noé prefers) is that we have been forced to be complicit. .
The theatrical version of Irreversible tells a rape/revenge story in reverse; under a barrage of homophobic abuse, the two men getting dragged in various states of disarray from Club Rectum are Marcus (Vincent Cassel) and Pierre (Albert Dupontel). Pierre is on his feet, but under arrest; Marcus is badly hurt. We then shift back to an earlier episode, watching the men arriving at the club, earnestly searching for a man nicknamed Le Tenia, or ‘tapeworm’ in English; if this is a Noé joke, then bravo, as it’s a bad one. Marcus is a threatening presence here – wired, volatile and hurling around the kind of language we have just heard being hurled at him – and this is Cassel honing his skills as an imposing, irrational character, speaking here from some primordial fug of rage. That the conversation throughout the film is quite so naturalistic makes the words hit harder; Pierre is, or at least seems to be, more rational, along in some kind of companion capacity, but gradually a new name begins to appear. The name is ‘Alex’; Alex is Marcus’s girlfriend, Pierre’s friend and former lover. She is as yet conspicuous by her absence, but the next episodes introduce her, or what is left of her, to the film.
We are around halfway through Irreversible before we see Alex (Monica Belucci), although the after-effects of her rape by Le Tenia overshadow the whole film. Either because we have seen what happens, or because we are forced into the role of knowing, even as we are transported back to a point when she does not know what is going to happen. Due to its savagery, much has already been written about the rape itself – hideous, unflinching and a point when the spinning camera, which has thus far made an artform out of nausea, finally elects to stay completely still. It is certainly not to ignore this aspect of Alex’s ordeal, but perhaps to look somewhat past it – at what this ordeal says to us and about us, as an audience and as people who are more than just audience members.
First the camera makes us feel that we are somehow unwelcome in this story – we can’t focus, it’s hard to follow, we are not granted the luxury of a range of well-framed, static shots. And then, when we are, it’s for a nine-minute rape scene, something we would rather not be made to see. As Alexandra Heller-Nicholas points out in the interesting video essay which accompanies this release of the film(s), many of us would, however we might rationalise it to ourselves, sooner take the role of the peripheral figure we see move into shot, mid-way through the rape; he doesn’t help, instead turning away and leaving. We may feel disgusted by his failure to help, but it is what we would likely choose, had Noé given that as an option. An uncomfortable truth, in a film full of them.
‘Well, look at you…’
But – around the circumstances of the rape itself – this is a film full of people failing to help. Failing to get revenge, failing to restore order, failing (as in the case of the police) to do anything in a timely way, usually popping up on the periphery themselves, with sirens and arrests floating just out of the bounds of the film. Marcus and Pierre eschew their help from the point in time when they recognise Alex, her face obliterated by Le Tenia’s violence, but the crooks they hook up with do rather little for them either; after they have roughed up another woman, this time the trans woman we know is associated with Le Tenia, they are somewhat uncomfortably-laughably chased away by a group of trans sex workers. The film also becomes a parable about faces and facelessness, with omitted or changed identities, partially-glimpsed people, and of course a grand, tragedy-worthy error in the murder of a man who is not the rapist. Really speaking, this film is rape, but not revenge; Le Tenia grins through the murder scene with the appalling, sadistic curiosity of the man we know him to be. After everything, we know he will live to fight another day; he escapes. The whole revenge arc is deeply flawed, almost tilting at windmills. Meanwhile, Alex is alone at the hospital. Her avenging angels are broken and condemned. This is just one of those realisations which lands some time after the credits…well, after the point when the end credits would usually roll.
There are other unpalatable comments and inclusions in the film which can take a little longer to truly land. One of those relates to social class. A large share of the self-justification for Le Tenia’s attack on Alex seems to come down to his perception of her ‘superiority’. What is this based on? Simply her clothes and demeanour; she doesn’t get an opportunity to tell him anything about herself. It’s based on little, but even in a film permeated with violent derogatory language, it’s more than enough for Le Tenia to keep circling back to, referring to Alex as ‘high class’ and a ‘fucking rich bitch’. Elsewhere, the men at the beginning of the theatrical cut in what may be a kind of halfway house (one declares he has recently been released from jail) are not exactly from a successful demographic; Le Tenia is a crook and a pimp, who keeps company with those in a dubiously legal sex club; Marcius and Pierre employ petty crooks, who constantly hector for payment; sex workers – another disempowered social group – crop up several times as temporary players. Immigrants and economic migrants also tend to be peripheral figures.
This is a modern France, but one with an underbelly; those who form part of its underclass either lash out (Le Tenia) or are simply glad to dodge momentarily away from its innate violence and cruelty (such as Donna, the prostitute we see Le Tenia kicking on the floor.) Going off the beaten path in this film spells danger, but then even perceived differences can be used to justify horrendous treatment (alongside, of course, gender – to follow). But class is an unsettling contextual consideration in Irreversible, with conflicts and assaults taking place in liminal spaces often unseen. Regions of the city which are isolated or unfrequented become strangely separate spaces, with their own rules and risks.
The blood red underpass in the film is a key setting, and featured in the film’s original promotional materials. It is also, peculiarly, almost a supernatural space, at least for a moment, as Alex reveals (during one of the film’s rare, if foreboding intimate, calm moments) that she’s dreamed of this place. Perhaps a premonition is too much to call it, but her dream certainly underlines the sense of something inescapable and awful about to hove into view here. Alex explains the dream by making reference to a late period; the links between this and blood/birth (she reveals that she is in fact pregnant) is clear enough, a kind of Freudianism 1a. It also resembles the ‘red room’ in Jane Eyre, coincidentally or otherwise, the space in which Jane’s uncle died, and where she gets locked as punishment whenever she asserts herself, to be freed only when she demonstrates “perfect stillness and submission”. In the novel Jane Eyre, it marks a profound shift in Jane’s life when she does, eventually, escape Gateshead Hall. The red room is also the culmination of Jane’s mistreatment on the grounds of her lower social class and her ugliness; Irreversible shifts this around, so that Alex is raped through the toxic combination of her beauty, and her (perceived) high social class. It is also, in the theatrical cut, where we first encounter Alex; this space defines her, disfigures her, and ends life as she knows it – though, again omitting a sense of closure, we know only that she eventually departs the film, like her partner, on a stretcher, to an unknown, unknowable fate.
‘Put that in your primal brain!’
But let’s address what is, for me, something which follows the film throughout, ending to beginning, beginning to ending, whatever cut you choose; its repellent masculinity. As much as Alex’s rape is deemed (by her rapist) to be about social power, it is still a rape – a man attacking a woman, and lambasting her for being a woman as he goes. We see it all. Sure, the film goes a bundle on its homophobic slurs at/outside Club Rectum, but the men inside the club are engaging in consensual sex; male rape is threatened, and it is horrible when it is, but it doesn’t actually happen. In fact, Pierre steps in to save Marcus from the rape; what do you know, rape can be stopped. However, what this shows is that gay or straight, rape is a viable option for men, a kind of violence and dominance for them to select out of the range they have to choose from. Ultimately, for me, Irreversible is a story of predatory, desultory and failed men. Women are collateral.
For Marcus, his first real thought is to avenge the treatment of his girlfriend by going after the man responsible; it becomes about him, in a way which just doesn’t feel right. He’s too nervy, too loaded, knows too little, and expends a wealth of energy on men who have nothing to do with his chosen mission. Just as Le Tenia questions Alex’s outfit by asking if ‘her man dresses her like that’, insinuating that she doesn’t have full ownership over herself, then Marcus echoes this; remember that he says he ‘stole Pierre’s girl’, and gets corrected by Alex, who tries to assert that she can make choices for herself. She does it laughingly, but she asks not to be treated like an object. Watching the theatrical cut, you notice that – as much as Marcus does seem to love Alex (Belucci and Cassel were married at the time they made this film together), his treatment of her has echoes in her later assault. When they wake up, he covers her mouth with his hand; he grabs and restrains her in ways which feel less playful, knowing what will happen to her. He does and says things which are taken to their zenith in the assault, even telling her that he wants anal sex with her – something which forms the basis of her rape. His words indicate casual, accepted attitudes towards women, restricting their speech, their movement. Marcus is not the villain, but he’s overbearing, and it is his lecherous, voyeuristic behaviour at the party which all three attend which causes Alex to leave early, triggering later events. His behaviour is a faint but disconcerting echo of a whole host of casually-held opinions and beliefs about women, taken to their extremes in the film.
Pierre, too, whom we glean was rejected by Alex for his over-philosophising, shifts from the reluctant voice of reason to the film’s most – or equally, at least – violent man. The impact of all of this wheeling violence for Alex – should she live – will be to redouble her own trauma. But, still, to Noé’s credit, that this is not a standard rape/revenge arc where a woman, after suffering rape and violence, conjures up an unrealistic amount of physical strength to repay her attackers. It would be a weaker film if it did, and another insulting fantasy where women are thrown a sop, an insulting fictional counterbalance in a world where many women have good reason to fear male violence without redress.
Irreversible is nothing if not painfully, jankily, unforgettably realistic. It’s a resoundingly unpleasant watch, but an important film which pushes past exploitation cinema to become something altogether more profound. There’s no closure, no answers, and only an uneasy happiness about to come apart at the seams.
Thanks to Vinegar Syndrome, both the original cut and the straight cut of Irreversible are about to be released together for the first time. Coming to Blu-ray and DVD on 27th June 2023, this release will feature 42 minutes of interviews and special features.For more information, click here.
To mark the release of Sight Extended, a film I called “restrained and savvy” in its careful treatment of AI and social media, we have two sets of iTunes codes to give away so that those of you who are tech-savvy yourselves can take a look. All you need to do to win is to email the site (address to be found under the Contact Us section) with Sight Extended as your title.
We’re going to go for a fairly quick turnaround on this one, so the competition opens today and will close on Wednesday, 21st June at 12pm GMT. As it’s a code rather than a physical product, all we need is your email address: the two winners will have their codes emailed to them shortly after the competition closes. (These codes are time-dependent and will expire after 28 days, just so you know).
All emails will be deleted upon the competition’s close. Good luck!
You know that bit at the start of There Will Be Blood (2007), where a silent, grizzled man is digging into the earth – eventually striking oil? Okay, good. Now, let’s shift things to WWII-era Finland; here’s another grizzled, silent prospector, wandering the landscape alone – only this guy is looking for gold, not oil, and he finds plenty. With me so far? Now imagine someone, director and writer Jalmari Helander perhaps, who lingered on that title – There Will Be Blood – and thought to himself, ‘Imagine If There Really Was Lots and Lots of Blood? That would be amazing.’ From prospecting, to war, to ultraviolence, in one balletic move.
That’s Sisu (2022), essentially, and it’s completely marvellous. The year is 1944 and, after the signing of the Moscow Armistice, the country’s Nazi occupiers are being expelled. They are withdrawing extremely begrudgingly, operating a scorched earth policy as they go. Finland was at this point extremely fatigued by its role in the War, fighting defensively first against the Soviets, then against the Nazis. Our prospector (Jorma Tommila) has all the appearance, on a personal level, of that fatigue, and he is not minded to engage with the retreating Nazis he passes on his travels. He, his horse and his dog simply pass by a small company, who are by now on the road towards Norway. However, these Nazis, not quite drunk with power but still in the bravado stage of the hangover that goes with it, have other ideas. And, when they discover that he is carrying a not insubstantial amount of gold, they decide to relieve him of it, and to kill him. It will provide absolutely no spoilers to say, that doesn’t quite go to plan.
What ensues is a blistering, brilliantly choreographed run of pursuit and vengeance; it turns out that the prospector is far more than just that, and that his time in the wilds panning for gold was something of a career change (Tommila looks like an authentically tough bastard, by the by, which helps the whole thing to land so successfully). The remaining Nazis, led by the equally savage Commander Bruno – though not, unless I’m mistaken, called by his name during the film – now want the man’s scalp. Bruno (Aksel Hennie), who is slightly less thick-as-pigshit than his men, and a strangely calm sadist, has some innovative ideas to catch his prey.
When it’s not a cascade of flying limbs and ripping flesh, Sisu resembles something from the old Wild West, and clearly channels this genre with some glee; as in those particular films, too, the baddie(s) get put through their paces until their calm demeanour gets picked apart. One of the film’s greatest pleasures is watching Bruno getting steadily unnerved. He goes from strangely mesmerising gestures, as he calmly directs his men to their certain deaths, to rising, self-serving panic. Bravo, incidentally, to Hennie, who is a superb lead antagonist here, and a worthy quarry for ‘Aatami’. Hennie does enough to build his character, but keeps himself straightforwardly easy to hate. The back story, of course, is history overlaid with fantasy, but it’s still a fantasy homage to some of the WWII Finns more than capable of superhuman feats; hell hath no fury like Simo Häyhä, for example, who killed hundreds of Soviets single-handedly, and may be the greatest sniper of all time. No wonder the Finns need the untranslatable word ‘sisu’ for such people. (It’s also worth pointing out that Aatami kills hundreds of Soviets, too, even if that happens beyond the bounds of Sisu: acquisitive political systems which seek to swallow up independent nations are all monstrous. For all the fantasy, there’s a kind of defiant catharsis here.)
Sisu is adeptly paced, with incredible SFX and a wide range of inventive scenes (one scene, let’s just codename it ‘the water scene’, made both me and a total stranger at the cinema double with disbelieving laughter at exactly the same point). It has enough historical grounding to keep the right balance of grit and gore, and no matter how gritty/gory it gets, it resonates with a weird kind of …joie de vivre; it’s hard to describe it any other way. It’s also hard to conceive of a film as purely, gratuitously enjoyable as this one; even if you don’t particularly like grisly cinema, it feels like Sisu could win you over. From the director of Rare Exports (2010), it’s another imaginative piece of work but, when I saw Rare Exports, I felt that it lacked a truly convincing, punchy conclusion. No such concerns here; Helander has utterly nailed it. It was nice, by the way, to see Rare Exports actors and real life father and son Jorma Tomilla and Onni Tomilla back on screen together; little Pietari is all grown up! Now go and see Sisu; it’s an absolute tonic, and certain to be a favourite film of this year.
Sisu (2022) is on limited theatrical release in the UK now.
Irish folklore about the ‘other crowd’, or fairy folk, remains ripe for use by horror cinema. Far from our modern cultural understanding of fairies as Disneyfied, benign, pretty little entities, the Irish stories hang onto a notion of the little people as ambiguous at best – malevolent at worst. Their hill forts, their meeting places and their attempts at striking deals with mankind always seem to lead to a bad outcome – for us. Of course this can – and has – already led to great films. Sadly, Unwelcome (2022) isn’t amongst them. Its unclear tone and accumulating minor errors make it a difficult film to read, much less really enjoy; it tries to engineer a big shift a significant way in, but ultimately, it just cannot work by that point. It’s shot its bolt.
The film has a busy, rather blundering start which, to be fair, does establish what it maintains throughout. A woman, at first nameless, is sat on the toilet with a pregnancy test (and not for the first time; the sequence is repeated moments later). News of her pregnancy results in a minor flicker of curtailed masculinity from husband Jamie (Douglas Booth), as we’re about to see. The happy event also signposts to us that living in an urban area is immediately unpalatable; Jamie pops to the shops to get some celebratory alcohol-free Prosecco, has a minor run-in with some hoodies, and they follow him home, turning the film momentarily into a home invasion as they kick the door in and kick in both Jamie and Maya (Hannah John-Kamen, who is back in the jacks by then.)
Elsewhere, in rural Ireland: Jamie’s aunt dies and leaves them her house. After the shock of the home invasion and the violent attack, they’re glad to take it – though, this seems to have happened about, ooh, nine months later, so there’s a massive and unfilled narrative gap regarding how they got on with things until the new house became available. Anyway, they relocate, and local woman Niamh (Niamh Cusack) is on hand to explain to them that Jamie’s Aunt Maeve believed in the ‘old ways’. This means a daily blood sacrifice for some fairy creatures nicknamed the ‘Redcaps’; it can be some chopped liver, that’s fine, but something with a bit of blood in it is expected (hang on – daily?! That’s inflation for you.) Niamh says that she’s happy to take care of it; Maya demurs, on the basis that she’s unhappy about having anyone coming into her garden, and that she’ll do it.
Maya and Jamie get settled in, with Maya forgetting almost instantly about the blood sacrifice thing to go to the pub. With their priorities in such order, and with plenty of objectionable idiocy on display, you can feel more than happy that the Redcaps are going to come along, and are going to do something to these two; well, if they are left to go hungry on what seems like Day One, then it’s clear that these little folk are going to expect something in return. Factor in a family of anti-English, bullying roofers (headed up by Colm Meaney, who out-acts everyone here) threatening their own brand of home invasion, and the little folk may just end up involved sooner rather than later. Now, whatever could they want? What is being so heavily signposted from the opening seconds of the film, that it might turn up to carry a large share of the plot?
Excuse the somewhat sneering attitude, it’s nothing to be proud of, but it’s hard not to feel a little aggrieved when things are dragged under your nose so clumsily as they are here. There are big issues with this script, and as a result of the script, big issues with key characters. And so on. Douglas Booth comes off particularly badly, as Chris is given to hyperbole, awkwardness and unsuccessful, matey maxims; his deliberations on What Maketh a Man are not good. An experienced actor, he doesn’t seem wholly comfortable with this, and the well-handled physical aspects of his role can’t quite wash away these other issues. But the script overall is very wearing. Its humour is strained, and there is a lot of simplistic backfilling to bring the story together which doesn’t sound or feel convincing. It’s all just a little too serious to cross into overblown comedy – even when it finally tries – yet too trite to come together as a convincing horror. It’s a particular shame, as lots of the this film looks great, with outside shots nicely framed, lit and presented, and the more supernatural scenes evoking the uncanny rather well. There are a range of shots used, the music works well – then someone opens their mouth, and we’re back to square one.
It’s surprising that Northern Irish director Jon Wright – who directed the eminently enjoyable horror-comedy Grabbers a decade ago – has dredged up a rather unpleasant batch of Irish stereotypes here. The Whelan family with their thievery, lechery, laziness, multiple mentions of ‘Cromwell’ as shorthand for hatred of all English ‘c*nts’, I mean come on. The fake Celtic tattoos were advised by someone, too; do we need all of this? This is a British-funded project, though, so assumedly Irish viewers would have some issues with the story arc for other reasons. See also ‘Mama Bear’ Maya, who has at least one hand clamped to her extraordinarily massive pregnancy bump throughout the film. We also get to see her eating Marmite from a jar with her bare hands, because cravings. Rumours persist that pregnant women are in fact normal people, still capable of behaving normally. In horror films, they apparently can’t.
By the time Unwelcome finally seems to have decided on comedy – a mode which does, to be fair, work well – it’s too late. The film feels entrenched. The best way to have a good time with this film is, with hindsight, to determinedly treat it as a comedy from the very beginning, even when this means doing some work to make it fit. The creature design is excellent, the shooting style for these sequences ingenious. It’s just that the key components are not there, and can’t support the rest of the good ideas. Now, go and read some Eddie Lenihan. You’re welcome.
Unwelcome (2023) is available on Shudder from Friday, June 23rd.
Sight Extended (2023) starts out looking like a space-set sci-fi; it’s only when you look closer that you realise you’re looking at a much more familiar, convex shape – a lens, specially-adapted to allow a person to access all of their push notifications, calls, maps, you name it, with a mere, literal blink of an eye. As such, the film is more about inner space than outer space, and the resulting story is a sad, often subtle exploration of a world of possibilities which is oh-so near now.
Gamer Patrick (Andrew Riddell) lives vicariously through his gaming persona. An agoraphobic young man, highly anxious, he’s a shut-in with only aspirations of a normal life; interactions with the opposite sex, for example, are on-screen only, with an early scene crossing quickly and disconcertingly into the Uncanny Valley. He even gets mistaken for a bot as he works, and of course he’s a WFH guy; how else could he work? Even his support group is accessed virtually. His sister Angela stops by on occasion, but she (Deborah Aroshas) treats it as a largely transactional thing, filling her pockets with his pills and furnishing her bank account with his money. His life has ground to an unsatisfactory, unsettling halt.
An invite to a high school reunion sends Patrick, if anything, into a bigger spiral of panic and self-doubt. He makes the mistake – though the mistake is easily made – of looking up some of his old classmates, and lo and behold, they are all (seemingly) doing great. True dystopia is often about such tedious self-owns, as well as the bigger, bolder picture; his feelings escalate, and this leads him, in his ineffectual anger, to rage-quit the support group which now seems to him to be nothing but a waste of time, keeping him back rather than helping him out. Fortunately for Patrick, a new option comes along quickly; another of the group’s attendees, a man called Alex, seeks him out and offers him a new kind of support via a new app.
What if – Alex suggests – Patrick could bring all of his confidence as a gamer to real-life situations? The app – called Refresh – can apparently blend both worlds, turning social events and situations into a fun, levelling-up situation as he engages with elements of various games (think Pokémon GO for melancholics). With nothing to lose, Patrick tries it out and, lo and behold, it works for him. It lures him out of the door. It gets him exercising. He even starts to enjoy himself.
You don’t really need telling that things don’t stay this positive – otherwise this would be a heart-warming tale of the benefits of tech, and not many films which come the way of this site qualify for that, all told. This is, and stays, a very personal, character-focused narrative, although Patrick’s experiences with the bigger picture of technology will chime with many. You can certainly see Patrick’s story as representative of something bigger beyond him, too. The world offered by the film, in terms of how tech is overlaid on the real, is only a touch more sophisticated than what we currently have; it’s certainly not a million miles from the roaring hive we’ve already built, either. It notes the worst aspects of social media and AI – it’s inescapability, its ubiquity, its irritating, matey tics – and escalates them, but only by a touch. The results look and feel very intrusive: it genuinely creates a mild feeling of panic. Other scenes, such as those which occur outdoors, look a little like updated takes from Blade Runner(1982), albeit in disarmingly broad sunshine. Gamers will also recognise some of the borrowed visual aspects, too – such as Patrick’s potential to ‘level up’, which looks awfully Bethesda, with a map of traits to navigate, XP to collect.
There are lots of these kinds of films around now, and as AI gets far more into its stride, no wonder (as I saw someone opine recently, we now have AI creating art and poetry while humans continue to do menial work. That feeling of things being out-of-kilter isn’t coming from nowhere.) Although some aspects of this film feels like a super-adroit update of The Lawnmower Man (1992), particularly around Patrick’s compelling transformation, it is much more a film for our times, with most in common with the excellent Black Mirror TV series. This film is engaging because it only-just exaggerates the world we already live in, where human interactions are compartmentalised into likes, interactions and comments. It also offers interesting comments on masculinity, and all of its attendant pressures and concerns. In fact, Sight Extended successfully blurs the edges of Patrick as a character; where does he end, and app begin? Is this all what he wants, or what he thinks he’s supposed to want? These are already recognisable concerns and flashpoints, explored successfully by this restrained and savvy film.
Sight Extended (2023) will be available in the UK from June 12th 2023. *Updated: for details on how to watch, please click here.
Invoking Yell (2023) is clearly a film that likes to layer its influences, giving us a grab-bag of themes and styles. These chiefly being: found footage; 90s-style analogue cameras; the EVP phenomenon and the film’s biggest, boldest theme – 90s black metal. By way of some on-screen text at the start, the film explains that, when the second wave of black metal started to break in the 1990s, bands needed to constantly think up new ways to distinguish themselves from the now-burgeoning scene. The film starts from this point and, actually, turns out to be more a kind of time capsule of this point in time than a straightforward horror film, but the end result – a look at how obsessions and mythologies overlap and establish themselves – is quite interesting on its own terms.
In the world of the film, female Chilean two-piece Invoking Yell have the answer (the band plays Depressive Suicidal Black Metal, by the way and yeah, DSBM is an actual genre.) Band member Andrea (María Jesús Marcone) – who takes all of this really seriously – has started to use a blend of field recordings and EVP to flesh out the band’s early demo recordings. She refers to this as psycophony, and not only does it sound pretty cool, but it makes their music authentically evil: what could distinguish them more than that? Together with bandmate Tania (Macarena Carrere) and Ruth (Andrea Ozuljevich), a-girl-with-a-camera who is interested in joining the band, they are on a mission to head out into the woods to the site of an accident, where a bus careered off the road and flipped, killing a number of children travelling inside.
As far as Andrea sees it, this is a good thing: if she can capture the tormented screams of the dead, that will really push the envelope on their four-track, because it will be an authentically cursed artefact. Whilst they’re in the woods, this is also a good opportunity to make an Immortal-style promo video. The girls have rented a cabin: they head there first of all, settle in (with a little squabbling over bedrooms) but before long, they’re at work, making an excursion out to what they believe to be the haunted site.
There’s the standard lull at this point, the one which typically comes between ‘meeting the characters’ and ‘something spooky happening’. Invoking Yell affords time to the girls talking about their musical influences, the ‘scene’, and perhaps most importantly, how they see what they are doing as authentic ritual, which later necessitates actually holding a ritual. There’s some justifiable teasing of the black metal ethos here, capturing some of its absurdities and po-faced posturing, though it has to be said: it’s all knowing enough to feel properly in earnest, rather than a laugh from a complete outsider which misses the mark. Other than that, the film spends time capturing something of that weird significance you grant to things which exist outside your comfort zone, perhaps especially when you’re young and retain more imagination; abandoned buildings, graffiti, lost objects, these can all take on terrific and onerous meanings. But on the other side of that coin is the way the young often display bravado when it turns out they’re somewhere with a disturbing history; Andrea and Tania like to giggle and posture in locations they believe to be multiple death sites. Black metal can’t quite account for all of that attitude; it’s elsewhere too, but it tends to be a youth thing. Older people don’t court it in the same way, for the most part.
For once, the shooting style – the now-ubiquitous fantasy of ‘snow’, static and other analogue features – isn’t such a bother, because within the timeframe chosen and the musical genre which pins things together, it’s a more authentic-feeling thing. The shifting frame is a little irritating, alright, but not out of place. Ruth openly threatens Super 8 coverage, and we have a Polaroid camera in-shot a lot of the time; consistent enough. It’s explained as the girls want to get that visually-appealing lo-fi look. In-between, you actually get to see some impressive filming locations, though not for long. There is also a lot of dialogue here; it is a film busy with dialogue, with acres of chit-chat on bands, genres, interpersonal issues. Again, no plausibility issues with this, but as a non-Spanish speaker, it’s quite a read.
What you may notice from this review so far is a lot of attention being paid to the film’s technical aspects – shooting style, dialogue, location. The reason for this is that there is very little plotline to really discuss; what you already know, you know. It’s an immensely simple set-up in any case which looks to be heading in one kind of direction, but ultimately, it only tantalises at those kinds of scares. This is a shame – the phenomenon of EVP has the capacity to trample my rational thoughts into mulch within minutes – and by its end credits Invoking Yell turns out to have been far more of a glimpse at the 90s black metal scene than a straightforward horror film. This it does better than the likes of Lords of Chaos, mind you, so there’s much to be said for it. Here’s a film which uses aspects of horror as much as it is a horror, and it may be lost on complete outsiders in some respects, but it’s appealing and evocative in plenty of ways.
Invoking Yell (2023) premiered at PanicFest and will be hitting its festival run later this year.
Roadkill (2022) has the good sense to let its outback shooting location figure highly throughout its running time, almost making the hostile environment one of its one of its core characters. In fact, it makes more sense as a character than some of the actual characters on offer. The film overstretches itself in its plot direction and its character development, and both suffer as a result. We open with a young man in the Outback, Connor (writer and director Alexander Whitrow), reclining on his beat-up old red sports car, on the phone to his girlfriend. He’s promising her that before long they’re ‘outta here’, which never bodes well in a ‘last day as a detective’ kind of way. After the call, we see him flagging down a passing car; ah, so he’s stuck out here? Nope – it’s a trick, and he’s about to rob this family – though why he gets the robbed couple’s baby out of the car, to hand it to them, to drive off and leave them and the car intact is a mystery. Still we’re given enough to deduce that Connor is a career thief, but not a monster.
There are monsters out there, however. We cut to a pair of detectives, thankfully neither of whom is planning a retirement that day, discussing a totally different crime scene. A young woman has been murdered, and there are indications that there’s a serial killer on the loose. As the detectives second-guess where their killer may go next, our roadside robber and his wholly unsuspecting girlfriend Lucy are reunited, discussing in more detail about how they are planning on escaping this neck of the woods. Things falter a little here – there’s a family visit and a meal to get through, and you know how those are – but wouldn’t you know, Lucy’s uncle is one of the hard-bitten detectives from the serial killer case. And there is a suggestion that the robber and the serial killer’s worlds are about to collide too – first with a visual clue, and then with a sudden escalation of events where mistaken identity, the redoubled efforts of the police and Connor’s determination to get away, the film nails its colours to the mast as a revenge-pursuit film.
That last few sentences condenses down the key set-up here, but be warned: it isn’t quite that pithy in the film itself. Roadkill‘s biggest error is in trying to do too much – the cardinal sin of so many first-time feature directors – but in so doing, it actually feels strangely diffuse, rather than overloaded. It pauses to offer us character development, and it rushes a small crowd of characters onto our screen in places, but in some respects this only underlines more questions than it ever answers. Our key cast needs to be refined down and made the sharp focus – nothing and no one else. Lucy (Sarah Milde) is a bit of a prop, sorry to say, seemingly doing nothing except hovering around her and Connor’s modest home, and then re-emerging as a kind of spiritual presence; it’s both a lot, and too little to ask. Similarly, the film really should have given us more on our antagonist (Edward Boyd), who is often peripheral, with a shifting modus operandi and just not enough to work him up into a truly menacing figure.
So, without question, there are issues in this film. But there is the germ of a great idea here, and the film wants to be great, even if it’s hamstrung by budgetary restraints which emerge as pulled punches – the ultraviolence and speeding cars which you may expect often happen off-screen, when a bit more of this would have redeemed things. The Oz location looks great in a ‘wouldn’t want to be stuck out there’ way, and there are some moments where Whitrow is clearly channelling the grand old tradition of Ozploitation: the Oz flag being used as a face covering keys into this nicely. The colouration, the music, these are better than your average indie. Plus, there’s also a variety of camerawork, some decent attempts at action and a decent attempt to bring things together for a finale. There is talent here.
Whitrow clearly has an interest in the Outback as a setting for pursuit and fightback – his first short film, Hunt in Red, renders the formula down to thirty minutes as two teens flee a cannibalistic killer. So he has form, and he has the wherewithal: the recommendation has to be, then, to kill the filler, keep it linear and go all out. The sorts of audiences who would be drawn towards a film set in the back of beyond in Australia and titled ‘Roadkill’ would be likely to want more high action than we see here, so a more streamlined, pared-back storyline would do just the job, if the director has any plans to come back this way.
Roadkill (2022) gets a UK release on 29th May 2023.
Influencer (2022) starts by showcasing its often non-linear, inventive time structure, opening on the vision of a young female body, face down on an otherwise picturesque island beach. We then zip to something else: a motivational speech from a young woman, a social media influencer called Madison (Emily Tennant). Ah, this is content for her channels; she’s travelling solo in Thailand, talking about how good travel is ‘for the soul’ and how people need to ‘surrender to the moment’. Thing is, her demeanour off-camera doesn’t quite mirror those feelgood platitudes. She seems bored, miserable even. What is the deal? In fact, you won’t be able to do anything but wonder – who was the young woman lying dead on a beach at the very beginning? Was it her? Was that Madison?
What we are clear on is that Madison is starting to have doubts about the whole online career thing. In a chat with a friend back home, she says she’s starting to rethink it, aware that it has a really short shelf life anyway – even if it does, temporarily, grant her access to aspirational products and a very receptive audience. Neither does it protect her from the usual issues of fending off the unwanted attentions of men who feel that any solo woman owes them conversation and company, as we see at her hotel bar. Luckily for her, she runs into another young woman called CW (Cassandra Naud) who helps her make her excuses; after that, they become close friends.
The trip gets instantly better; it almost matches up to the claims Madison has been making about it all along. But of course, this is the high point before the film’s first sinister turn. Madison and CW get back one evening for Madison to discover her room has been burgled; her passport is gone, meaning she has to rely more and more on the (unusually generous) kindness of strangers while she sorts out a new one. But she is not well-equipped to deal with problems like this; she’s young, naïve, and it turns out that the whereabouts of her passport is just the first big question raised by the film, in an intriguing succession of questions.
If you feel that, early on, you get a strong sense of where all of this is going – if you’ve seen enough films about what befalls a stranger in a strange land that you feel you can confidently predict the outcomes – then it’s almost certain that the film will nonetheless be able to surprise you, you jaded horror viewer you. It has an incredibly deft touch, happy to subvert audience expectations (in fact, the opening credits roll at 25 minutes in, which shows how carefully and unusually this film is constructed). That deftness also imbues the film with a feeling of queasy disorientation, especially as its twisting, shifting timeframes kick in. It’s a massive risk when a film opens with a dead body – how are we going to meaningfully link back up to that scene? – but, as it turns out, the film is able to handle it very cleverly. It’s also impressive how effectively Influencer can raise your heartbeat; at certain points, it’s almost unbearable.
The film knows its subject matter; it has captured the modern tendency to photograph first, experience later. It also debunks questions of entitlement as it picks away at the disconnect between manufactured self and ‘real’ self. Of course, there’s always been a divide there, but it’s been granted vast new levels of reach by the rise of social media, together with the deluded levels of self-importance which often accompany it. But it’s aspirational because the influencer lifestyle can, even for a short blaze of glory, grant immense power and wealth. These are interesting times indeed, ripe for filmmakers to exploit. Alongside all of this, the Thailand locations are beautifully filmed, offering wide open space and unbearable claustrophobia in turn. There are some great roles for women here too, which riff on another bunch of cultural expectations. All in all, the film’s cast of flawed, often painfully naïve but often belligerent characters works very well.
If there’s any point when the film’s premise begins to strain at all, then it’s towards the end, which is perhaps unfortunate – though, against the film as a whole, it’s pretty minor. Ultimately, when the end credits roll, you have to ask: could the film have done better? I’d say, no. This is an often ingenious, deeply unsettling, very modern horror. Influencer perfectly captures a moment in time. Ten years from this date, we’ll be vastly unsettled by something else; Kurtis David Harder’s film captures terrors which are only possible, like this, right now. It’s immensely, impressively done.
Influencer is available on Shudder from today: 26th May 2023.
Have you noticed that people are getting tied to chairs, or tormented with household tools etc. a lot less frequently in horror nowadays? You could be forgiven for assuming that gratuitous ultraviolence is dead – or at least taking a break. That’s not so in The Wrath of Becky (2023) however: whilst the tone is a long way away from the ordeal horrors of the Noughties, this film is certainly a grisly revenge story which strikes a good balance between cartoonish improbability and more plausible elements – its characters, plot and narrative. It’s a sequel to Becky (2020), but it stands on its own perfectly well, so if you haven’t seen the first film – don’t worry. You’ll get it.
We do get some back story first of all, however: Becky is just a regular teenage girl whose family were attacked by a band of violent Neo-Nazis whilst weekending at a picturesque lake house; said Nazis were in dispute about a mysterious key, which they were searching for there. A case of mistaken identity, sure, but this didn’t stop her father losing his life in the attack – an attack which triggered something in Becky (and we see a bit of that in flashback). Post-ordeal, Becky has got into a pattern of faking saccharin repentance which gets her warmly accepted into foster homes, which she then flees. The attack has turned her into something of a worst-case scenario prepper, perhaps understandably: she spends her time not sleeping, training and setting traps. But Becky has finally found some stability living with Elena, a landlady who has become a friend. The young woman also has a job at a diner. Life certainly isn’t normal, but it’s consistent in ways it hasn’t been for a while.
Things are about to get a lot more interesting, though – if that’s the word for it. Yeah, actually it’s a pretty serviceable word for it. A group of men calling themselves The Noble Men (the thinnest pastiche of The Proud Boys you are ever likely to to encounter) are rolling into town ahead of crashing a local political event, seemingly with nefarious purposes. A small number of them choose Becky’s workplace for a preliminary meet-up and one coffee-based altercation later, they – assuming they have the whip hand in this situation – follow her home to frighten her, but here, things spiral rapidly out of control. Still, thanks to the fact that they have accidentally chosen a very damaged, very dangerous young girl, it doesn’t end with Becky getting a sizeable new dose of trauma. Putting her array of aggressive skills to the test, she tracks them down, not least because they have made off with her beloved dog Diego (credited on IMDb under the name, and this is real, Pac Williams).
This is a bright red laugh-scream of a film, with a great raft of set-ups and set pieces. It’s graphic and bloody, with lots of practical SFX, but the whole film has a consistently knowing but lively feel which comes across via its fast edits, brash but entirely suitable music, quick-changing camera work and a highly colourised, slick overall appearance. The cartoon which accompanies the opening credits does a good job of establishing what this film is going to be, and what it’s going to be like; similarly, Becky’s voiceover, though used sparingly, invites the idea that she, and the filmmakers, are having fun with us – even occasionally at our expense, which also feels fine. Becky confides in the audience, but messes with us too, getting us on side but reminding us that she may be giving us set-ups which aren’t going to unfold the way we predict. It’s another excuse for a fast edit when it happens, and it works well, moving things along at pace. Becky is a de facto unreliable narrator, but the whole film is an array of competitive violence and one-upmanship, so it’s all good.
If it’s like anything else, then perhaps it’s You’re Next (2011): similar pace and tone, similar mash-up of home invasion, survivalism and splatter, similar hard-as-nails female protagonist. By the way, how refreshing that we’ve moved on rape/revenge, to just revenge: once upon a time women rarely became capable of such superhuman horrors without having been sexualised and abused first; aside from some charming epithets thrown her way, Becky’s revenge is an entirely desexualised thing. It’s not a totally desexualised film – the Noble Men mention Parler and 4Chan as they casually chat about their misogyny – but it’s not a central plank here, other than the script using it knowingly to flesh out these characters as bad’uns. The script on the whole is consistently funny and knowing, too, and the very minor lulls are only there to give us just enough character info to make sense of what happens next. The Noble Men are to an extent overwritten and overdrawn, sure, but this isn’t a deeply philosophical work; the point is to justify Becky’s vengeance (though, all told, the second they threaten the dog, most people will be fully on board anyway. Kill them!)
The Wrath of Becky is a crowd pleaser, full of OTT rough charm and gratuitous just desserts; it’s hard not to love its boundless energy. And yeah, there is a bit of retro tied-to-chair action going on, but it works in its place. Everything here works just fine, and it’d be great to see Becky again some time.
The Wrath of Becky (2023) arrives in cinemas on 26th May, 2023.
Thanks to the magic of crowdfunding, there’s now a breed of film made by fans, for fans which doesn’t really seem to see itself much beyond the film festival circuit. If you aren’t there with all of the other contributors to see your name on the credits, has it really happened at all? Mad Heidi (2022) is one such film, proudly championing its crowdfunder credentials right from the moment we first see its faux-grindhouse opening credits, and a film full of the kinds of schlocky gore, whoop-inducing in-jokes and ringing one-liners. Now, there’s nothing wrong with any of this, but it begs the question: how well does all of this work once the festival season is over, and you find yourself watching Mad Heidi alone, on a sofa?
The basic answer to this is that, for the first thirty minutes or so, it’s infuriating; after that point, because it lags its way to the inevitable showdown and takes a while to really drive at its conclusion, it kind of wins you over via its determination to please genre fans with its ‘throw enough mud at a wall’ ethos. However, all things considered, it can’t quite hang together as it must have been intended to do so, not for a home audience at least. The recommendation would definitely be to see it on the big screen, something which is possible as – at the time of writing – we’re a few weeks away from a limited theatrical run in the US.
Anyway, what happens is this: Switzerland, in the world of the film, has turned into a cheese-based authoritarian state where all dissent is crushed. What do we mean by a ‘cheese-based authoritarian state’, exactly? Well, it seems to be Switzerland’s chief industry, and also the source of a lot of its patriotic fervour; the country, under the sway of its dictator (Casper Van Dien!), is also working on a version of Swiss cheese which is going to dominate all the countries of Europe, because of reasons which we can’t go into here.
We’re told that twenty years go by between the opening scene and the next (why?): after a literal roll in the hay, we meet Heidi, all grown up and fraternising with one Goat Peter, a relationship which is of concern to Heidi’s grandfather/only living relative (David Schofield!), as it’s rumoured that Goat Peter has some dicey interests which risk bringing him to the attention of the regime. Any cheese-related insurgence will draw down the wrath of the state – as it does, bloodily, with Goat Peter.
Her subsequent grief brings the bereft Heidi into the firing line, too, and she is subsequently jailed; via a bit of ‘women in prison’ homage, Heidi must turn into a kick-ass heroine to avenge those she loves: she must track down those responsible and make them pay. It takes rather too long to get to this point – directors Johannes Hartmann and Sandro Klopfstein know their fan base and linger in the girls’ cells for a little too long – but the film does have the good sense to save some of its most full-on, crowd-pleasing scenes for later on in the film.
It tries very, very hard to tick every exploitation box you can get away with ticking today. The problem with all of this is that, at this point in time, it always feels a little strained: we’re self aware about genre and film history in ways which can’t but add in a dash of cynicism to proceedings. But this doesn’t stop the film showing a certain, commendable dedication to what it’s doing, even in all of the clutter. ‘Swissploitation’ is coined and namechecked a number of times during the film; this is, by the seems of it, its first outing, and no one can deny that it takes aim at pretty much every Swiss stereotype there is, right down to giving us a death by fondue. There is love here.
Mad Heidi is clearly a low budget film, but no one can deny that it’s actually pretty technically sound, even if you can almost feel the budget straining around the edges of every scene. The lead actress – Alice Lucy – gets fairly stuck onto her role, too, which is very physical in places. She does it all in earnest, which is the only real way to do it, and she is one of the key reasons that the film – sort of – wins you over by the end. It’s probably a film which depreciates in value as the number of viewers declines, but by and large its ardent enthusiasm carries it through the ninety-minute running time enjoyably enough.
Looking at the bigger picture, now that we’ve had Winnie The Pooh: Blood and Honey (a film I personally vetoed for the site) and Mad Heidi, it’ll be fun to guess what other beloved children’s characters are out of copyright and ripe for a horror treatment. My money’s on Pippi Longstocking – I think one book’s public domain now – so watch this space, maybe. Stranger things have happened.
Mad Heidi (2022) will be available is selected US screenings from June 21st 2023.
