Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

Adalynn (2023)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

The horrific side of motherhood has been amply explored in films recently, with varying levels of success; Adalynn (2023) takes its place amongst them, and appropriately, its own success is variable. It certainly has excellent intentions, focusing its scrutiny on a new mother for whom the walls start to close in. But it quickly becomes turgid, and lacks the budget to really give clout to its metaphorical monsters: it becomes a kind of horror-adjacent, or horror-sometimes take on a woman’s postpartum existential crisis.

We begin with a birth, and get to know Adalynn (Sydney Carvill) through a voiceover, as she explains her hopes for a bright future with husband Bill (Wade Baker) and newborn Elizabeth. But her hope comes at a cost to her sense of wellbeing: she’s exhausted, she’s just undergone the physical trauma of childbirth, and she immediately struggles with how she’ll even get close to her expected ‘new normal’. There are early hints of more to this, too – of old anxieties creeping back in, triggered by the shock of motherhood, and by pregnancy and nursing nixing the medication which kept the symptoms in check. Anyone with more than a passing knowledge of our common modern neuroses will recognise OCD in there, and the fatigue of keeping up with her mind’s insistence on straightening, counting and checking contributes to the sense of rigmarole Adalynn is beginning to feel, as she takes over on feeds and other tasks.

The coming flashpoint is clear and obvious: her husband is going away for a conference, leaving mother and baby alone. She says she’ll be fine, but no sooner is Bill out of the door than Adalynn is increasingly panicked. She’s struggling to bond with her daughter, and that’s bad enough, but then she begins to doubt her own sanity. Seeing and hearing odd things, she grows more and more paranoid, losing sight of herself – and fearing the worst outcome for the baby.

Adalynn throws trauma around like confetti, adding more and more plot details in its first thirty minutes until the list of life-shattering issues here is quite long. It seems there are many things which Adalynn has to contend with, and they are all present in varying degrees. As such, you are invited to ponder which, if any trauma is the real trauma, or the worst trauma, if we can call it that; the film starts out with certainties, but then decides to pull away from these, splintering into a world of missing time, flashbacks and – it has to be said – multiple false moments of closure, which are a huge detriment to the film overall. There’s just too much of this for it to hang together and retain any mystery, purpose or appeal. And yet, the film starts so stridently: you could say it goes from one extreme to another, opening with a chopsy voiceover – always a tricky beast – which spells out ideas and emotions which are perfectly clear from the unfolding film. Carvill is more than equal to the task of playing an exhausted, troubled new mother, by the way, and can get more of that across with her sheer, authentic-looking fatigue than any voiceover pointing out the same fatigue.

It’s a genre film – on balance – and as such, it’s not beholden to represent the objective truth about new motherhood, but still: it has its moments, and it’s bold enough to tackle the tiredness, the doubt and the moments of anger, even if it Can’t Go There with breastfeeding, or a realistic post-partum paunch (Carvill is trim in ways that no woman could ever be after growing a whole human). The film also does without an actual baby, come to think of it (though this can be partly justified by the film’s fantastical elements, as few as these are on the whole). There is a germ of honesty in here, though, which still deserves credit. We are socialised to think that childrearing is the greatest, most immense privilege in life – which I’m sure it is for many, but it’s a privilege which comes at a cost to many, so it could never hurt to represent the negative side of it – the pain, discomfort, shock and dismay. Likewise, let’s normalise women who have significant mental health issues pre-baby getting straight back on with the medication and the help they so clearly need to do a good job of parenting. What good is martyrdom?

Horror has always led the way with the most troubling aspects of parenthood, because it always leads the way in reflecting our darkest sensations and anxieties about our lives. In some respects, it’s a shame that Adalynn didn’t go further down the horror route in its own take; the promotional literature is a little misleading, perhaps, promising that the film “trades in a space between horror, fantasy, ghosts, demons, the Satanic occult and dreams.” That makes it sound more akin to Anything For Jackson than the film we actually get. The film we do get splinters into too many component parts and false endings, ultimately, to hold together as a horror, or a fully effective narrative – even if it has some interesting moments, a good lead performance, and some competent, if lo-fi scares.

Adalynn (2023) will be released on March 28th on digital and DVD.

watchAUT Austrian Film Festival 2023: Rubikon (2022)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Plot is not a primary concern in the close-at-hand speculative fiction of Rubikon (2022): that’s not to suggest it’s another of those art installation type films which evades a storyline completely, but it is a slow, quiet, morose kind of film on the whole. It could easily have been done very differently. A few things are established early on: it’s 2056; only the wealthiest can afford the purified air necessary for survival, thanks to the perilous state of Earth’s environment; it’s corporations, not governments, who say what goes – fighting wars amongst themselves, even employing their own militias. This all seems to invite some kind of action movie, but actually, whatever’s going on down on Earth is discussed or observed from a terrific distance, both physically and metaphorically.

High above the decimated planet, a vast space station orbits: the job of its crew is to try to do something, anything to help fix the atmosphere. We start with two new arrivals to the station, each coming from a different faction on Earth but forced to get on thanks to the confined quarters, etc. Hannah (Julia Franz Richter) is military, Gavin (George ‘Versailles’ Blagden) the son of a top executive; they’re the proverbial odd couple. Accordingly, each of them draws down the suspicions of the existing crew for various reasons, but there’s work to be done – an updated mission, in fact, taking them on a new path over the planet with a different objective.

To be honest, the details of this mission never became very clear to this reviewer: it took reading around after the fact to really understand it. This isn’t helped by the fact that the incidental music seems to drown out the dialogue in places, and the pan-European cast each using English as a lingua franca leads to some genuine-seeming communication lapses, but ultimately, the issue here is that this plot element is not strongly represented in the script itself. It turns out to be something like this: ship’s doctor Dmitri (everyman actor Mark Ivanir) has been researching algae, which could provide oxygen and food for the beleaguered population. Some of the astronauts are about to take a sample of this with them on their new mission; then, the key event occurs (and there’s no mistaking that, at least). Earth is very quickly obscured by a vast, rolling wall of what looks like smog, which takes out systems and communications (bad news for the crew who are currently out there, reliant on technology to fly them) but, potentially, this smog does far more. There are some brief moments of interaction which reveal that people down on the ground are fleeing for their lives; how successfully remains to be seen.

So what to do? Stay on the space station – which can be self-sufficient for the foreseeable future – or keep trying to contact Earth? A tough choice, albeit treated quite obliquely; Rubikon certainly has a set of running themes, and one of these is the decision between personal wants and the ‘greater good’. For all that, the film runs aground for a frustrating period of time around the hour mark. It stops almost completely, with clipped conversations and hints at future decisions here and there, but little beyond that, save for one plot addition which is so teeth-grindingly predictable as a way of adding ‘a moral complication’ that it almost destroys the goodwill the film has built up. Still, it takes an interesting perspective by placing the potential last of humanity in orbit, and asking them to weigh up their own safety against altruism, particularly possibly fatal altruism. And then, something occurs which adds greater urgency to their decisions.

This all comes to us via an overall attractive, often innovative piece of sci-fi. Green-screen is used carefully; the module and the station look very…ordinary actually, nothing too striking or different from modernity in terms of aesthetics (a plausibly annoying tangle of wires and cables irritates the crew trying to fix things). But some of the shots used are genuinely chilling and evocative, the roiling clouds passing over the Earth look great, and we get plenty of familiar-feeling, pleasing sci-fi bits. You know the ones. The zero gravity, the spiritual-seeming beams of light from the sun, the dangerous jobs which need to be done outside the station; all are present and correct.

So: many elements look good, the film’s budget has been wrung to the max, the overall idea is sound, and it’s given an unusually languid, dream-gone-sour treatment here. Rubikon offers an interesting spin on a moral quandary, and thankfully it veers away from any simplistic proselytising about the environment; that would be a tedious, jarring add-on to all the dreaminess. It would definitely benefit from losing a good twenty minutes – it’s too loose in places – but there’s (just) enough spectacle and material here to hold interest, particularly for those who like an element of philosophy in their sci-fi, or simply appreciate the spectacle which sci-fi offers.

Rubikon (2022) will appear at the watchAUT Austrian Film Festival taking place in London between 23rd-26th March 2023. For more details, please click here.

Spoonful of Sugar (2022)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Meet Millicent. She’s a twenty-one year old student working on a thesis about children with severe allergies, which means that a prospective babysitting job could double up as useful research. This is because the child needing a sitter, Johnny (Danilo Crovetti) has a seemingly endless list of issues: he has the mother lode of severe allergies, a strict regime, a raft of medications and he’s non verbal, too. But Millicent (Morgan Saylor) really wants the job, and manages to talk her way past his hawkishly-concerned mother Rebecca (Kat Foster), who has a tough schedule of her own and really needs the help. Rebecca’s a self-help author of the ‘sexual awakening’ variety, you know the type: game face, high heels, famine-thin authority. Besides, Millicent quickly forms a rapport with Johnny, so this is enough to get her in. Her relationship with the household thus begins.

Here’s a nicely twisted, twisting tale about families, motherhood, sexuality and identity. Nothing here is exactly as it seems, but even if it were, there’d be more than enough fascinated consternation to go around. Millicent’s enthralled, appalled reaction to Johnny’s father Jacob (Myko Olivier) walking around with his shirt off sounds one early alarm; this family evidently has a lot going on, with husband and wife playing a game of queasy, thwarted encounters against protestations of duty (motherhood and sex are not compatible here, at least in the ways mother Rebecca wants). The presence of a new, naïve girl catches Jacob’s eye, too; there’s a sense that any man readily walking around half-naked when he could be seen by the hired help knows exactly what he’s doing.

But what quickly becomes apparent is that Millicent has her own problems. When she’s with Johnny, she comes across as a playmate, not a sitter. They each seem mutually at some stage of arrested development, but nonetheless, the ways that they bond feel authentically sweet, with some good outcomes along the way for this troubled, isolated little boy. This is a horror, though: it’s not here to resolve all of these issues and make no mistake, everyone has issues here, not just the key players. Millicent has a kind of morbid fascination with family life, but her perspective is that of an outsider, as she has had an abnormal experience of family during her own life to date. She sees the family unit as something to break into, then to do better than everyone else.

Her take on this is dispassionate at first, but she becomes increasingly inveigled into Johnny’s family, something facilitated in all the weirdest ways by her medicinal doses of LSD, part of a treatment for anxiety and depression. Along the way, sexuality looms over her, unwanted but wanted, and Millicent seems in many ways like a new version of May. There are the same abortive efforts to understand the opposite sex, the same unseemly behaviour, the errors, the kooky but failed attempts to grasp a normal life. There’s maybe a little Lola Stone, too. The unpalatable message here is that these troubled girls don’t have a grounding in values and morals, so how can they truly have what they want? Spoonful of Sugar is as sad as it’s sickly and disturbing. That goes for Rebecca, too: via her, motherhood gets a solid drubbing, standing as a list of unpleasant obligations which come between Rebecca and everything she wants. If there’s any hopeful message here, it’s – get thee to a nunnery. That would be easier for every woman concerned in this narrative.

That’s a tale as old as time, of course, or at least as old as nunneries. But Spoonful of Sugar feels very modern, and not just through its slick, appealing aesthetic style (Shudder Originals usually look the part). The career woman and all her attendant guilt, the experimental treatments for anxiety, roles within modern academia, up-to-date, if flawed social care, and even the discourse on choking during sex, which is apparently very now: all of these things position the film on the outskirts of a recognisable world, our own. Things steadily ramp up, and Spoonful of Sugar is more than able to shock; it’s a film peppered with fetid rabbits, after all. That’s got to be some kind of sign.

Even if you may hazard a guess as to where it is all going (and hey, you may be wrong) this is a stylish nightmare with a surprising amount taking place, on and off screen, across a thankfully modest run time. Not everyone will like all of the elements used, but any film which can dig into the idea of ‘victim’ and have so much of interesting substance to say is just fine with me.

Spoonful of Sugar (2022) is available now on Shudder.

Sound of Silence (2023)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

An at times odd, somewhat experimental piece of supernatural horror, Sound of Silence perhaps struggles because it tries to do so much. In its efforts, it at times spins wildly between being hectic and being flat, between being an homage and striking out alone. But there are good elements in here, and these deserve credit. We begin with a domestic setting, and a man in a suspiciously Amityville-eyed attic, working on an old-fashioned radio. He tinkers past the point of danger, in a warning to all inveterate tinkerers: first, hearing something strange – an odd, alarmed voice. Then, the radio itself seems to conjure an apparition, a none-too-pleased female ghost, who grabs at him. And then it gets even worse.

Given the guest spot which the radio enjoys as the opening credits roll, it seems that the item has had the potential for mischief for generations: there it is, in a bunch of photos taken in different historical periods, the people sitting near it all looking oddly blank-eyed. That being established, we move back to the present day: in the US (the location is equally heavily signposted for us), a struggling singer, Emma, is called away from flunking auditions by a phonecall from her native Italy. It seems that the man who tinkered with the radio is her father, and for his efforts he has ended up in hospital – in the ICU, in fact. She and her boyfriend Seba fly home, and get filled in on the details by her mother, who was also injured during the event: Emma’s father has not been acting like himself to say the least. Mama also warns against them going to the house, but Emma (Penelope Sangiorgi) ignores this advice wholeheartedly.

After doing some immediate laundry (this is surely record mileage for taking apparently dirty washing to one’s parents), and having sent the utterly feckless Seba out to get some food and supplies, Emma starts to play around with some old recording equipment in the house. Her parents always fostered her talent for singing, so there’s quite a lot of kit still around, including a small, soundproofed studio. But as she listens to some old tapes, she, too, hears something strange. Whatever the radio did, its influences are still present, and to escape its influences, she has to understand its story.

The ‘haunted/cursed object’ is a comfortable and much-beloved horror trope, and presumably anyone reading reviews at this website can think of a few examples they like. Oculus (2013) is a personal favourite, by the by, and clearly referenced here. Sound of Silence clearly has a sense of where it fits in to this slew of malign bric-a-brac, and actually, using a radio is not a bad idea at all. Tuning into different frequencies always was a little creepy, after all, with all those half-heard and recognised voices mid-conversation, or distant snippets of alien songs, never to be heard again. One of the things about this new wave of indie horror which fixates on analogue technology is that, often, there’s little sense of what that technology actually did which differentiates it from digital; the main takeaway is often simply, ‘it looks funny and retro’. At least here there’s more to it, and there are some genuinely creepy scenes where audio recordings are used – it calls to mind EVP, which may well be nonsense but, again, is unnerving. Sound itself is the enemy here. More visual scares are somewhat less effective, with a lot of reliance on flickering jump scares in particular, but this does at least mirror the ways radios can quickly tune in and out, gaining and losing signal – assuming this was the intention. The film is evocatively lit, though, which cuts across the often crowded frames to call to mind Italian horror of the 80s, with an unreal, dreamy aesthetic.

Of course, to end the ordeal, Emma has to somehow understand what is causing the phenomena: this kind of resolution is the key to getting out. It’s a tale as old as time, or at least as old as the horror genre. The film feels a little strained and uncomfortable where it shifts modes from mystery to exposition to accommodate this, and some of the ways it handles some rather uncomfortable, hefty subject matter along the way will draw sharp sighs from some viewers. It is one of those moments where Sound of Silence overstretches itself, making weirdly light work of sensitive, unwieldy themes. But at least it has the gumption to try and follow a narrative, and to generate atmosphere through more than aesthetics alone. You can forgive a lot as a result, so a few uneven performances, a desire to reference a long list of cinematic influences, or a grim determination to hang on for ten minutes past the perfect place to roll the end credits are just minor concerns. When all’s said and done, it’s better to attempt too much than to attempt too little, and Sound of Silence draws together some effective moments from its grab-bag of ideas and atmospherics.

Sound of Silence (2023) will be available on VOD from March 9th, 2023.

They Wait in the Dark (2022)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

There’s a common theme throughout They Wait in the Dark, clear from the opening seconds, and it relates to the cycle of abuse: how damaged children become damaged adults, making choices which perpetrate further harm – to themselves and others. There’s some room for debate on how convincingly this is done overall in the film, but despite some misfires, it remains a worthwhile project.

As the film opens, we see a little girl standing over the body of a murdered woman – a flashback, we gather, but as it’s made clear to us that we have followed the little girl into adulthood, things don’t exactly seem to be on an even keel now, either. When we pick up her story, she seems to be camped out on the floor of a convenience store with a little boy, her son; this is strange behaviour which soon gets them noticed. They have to move on, heading to a nearby motel for the night (paying cash, which is itself cast as a little suspect). As the woman – Amy (Sarah McGuire) – examines herself in the bathroom mirror, we see that she has a stab wound in her side. They’re fleeing from someone then, and they need to get to the next town quickly.

Amy has just inherited the old family home on the death of her father, and on their way there – where they plan on going to ground for a while – they meet an old friend of Amy’s, Jenny (Paige Maria), who is working as a waitress in a local diner. They used to be close; Jenny is therefore insistent on helping the pair, and drops them at the old house herself, cautioning Amy that the place has become a magnet for local teens, who are aware that it has a history. Kids have been hanging out there, doing drugs, doing seances even; there is some evidence of this inside, but Amy and young Adrian (Patrick McGee) have little choice, and clean up as best they can. They evidently don’t want to be found. But have they already been found, by someone or something? There may be more at stake here than just Amy’s pursuant partner.

The part of Amy was written for actor Sarah McGuire, and she is, by and large, very effective in this role. She is very slight physically, which lends an extra menace to the physical risks and harms she undergoes in the film. Added to that, she is clearly strained, tired, but defiant and fiercely protective. Having established this, the film takes a risk by adding in elements of her own unpleasant behaviour, because having made us sympathise with Amy, we are then invited to call what we think we know into question; certainly, McGuire has much to do here, as do the audience. Added to that, the film is ambitious in the possible directions it could go; it feels a little contested in places as a result, first seemingly a clear-cut horror about a realistic situation, and then potentially an occult horror. It builds in new reveals, using catch-up conversations with Jenny to backfill the story, but keeping the legacy of trauma in view. There are lots of individual plot elements to balance.

Some elements inevitably slip out of view as the film drives towards its conclusion. Similarly, the character of Judith (Laurie Catherine Winkel) is fraught with unlikely lines and developments, which pull away from the more realistic dialogue and performances given by McGuire and McKee primarily: the ways Judith is written to be a ‘nasty piece of work’ seems to involve perpetual smoking (people look increasingly unfamiliar with how cigarettes work the more they recede from use, by the way) and listening to metal with vengeful lyrics as she makes her way to her destination, a destination she finds easily enough. Not needed, arguably: in some respects, you could argue that her physical presence in the moment is not needed at all, particularly when linked with some minor continuity errors late in the film – these are unfortunate. But despite some of these moments, They Wait in the Dark does rally for a provocative finale, endeavouring to give an engaging point and purpose to what comes before. There’s ambition here which is largely successful, and the film does make an attempt to tackle uncomfortable topics head-on, approaching them in potentially unpleasant, but ultimately interesting ways, with a few thought-provoking about-face moments.

They Wait in the Dark is available now.

Jane (2022)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Who’d want to be a teenager today? Sure, for many teens living in the West there’s an immensity of privileges, but these come at a cost: more pressure, more scrutiny than ever. The Jane of this film departs the narrative in its very earliest scenes by committing suicide (off-camera, but clear). Scroll forward in time, and we meet her best friend, Olivia (Madelaine Petsch), who has swapped handling her grief for a punishing relationship with personal ambition. Everything is about college applications now. She follows a strict routine, imposed via her smartwatch, which is all gearing up to get her into Stanford: the extracurricular pastimes she takes part in are all engineered to improve her chances.

This would all be taxing enough, but the transfer of a new student, Camille (Nina Bloomgarden) rattles her immediately. Camille is a gifted debater; Olivia is currently head of the school debating society. When your sense of self is this brittle, then any shifts can feel like a disaster; add to that Olivia’s Stanford application getting deferred, and things feel even more desperate. But at least this crisis gets her talking to Isabelle again. Isabelle (Chloe Bailey) was a close friend of both Olivia and Jane, but had moved away from Olivia in the aftermath. They re-bond over an option which Izzy offers: to use the internet, do some digging, and find out if there’s anything in Camille’s past which could be used as leverage. In today’s climate, no one can ever – truly – leave their pasts behind, after all. But success in their scheme precipitates more scheming: by some happy fluke, it seems that Jane had left herself logged in on Izzy’s old laptop before she died. Who better than a dead girl to mix things up a little?

Olivia is an interesting character here. Never mind the fact that actor Madeleine Petsch is pushing thirty – though this feels like a noble cinematic and televisual tradition at this point – because she doesn’t look out of place in a high school setting, and she’s every bit as ambiguous as you’d hope she would be for a role like this. She’s immensely driven, sensitive to any slights or disadvantages, and this makes her – at least initially – reasonably sympathetic, but by the same token she is fractious, determined, scarily selfish. Izzy is more pragmatic, though the film begs the question of how accurate this impression is. She has her own secrets, and her own agenda. In many respects, she has more at stake than Liv; she enjoys many of the successes that Liv wants for herself. Embedded in all of this is commentary on the insanely competitive college entry system in the US, a mercenary and punishing process which would drive even the most benevolent student past their limits. Our key characters have to negotiate this, as well as their grief, which is clearly unresolved. It hangs over everything.

What’s interesting is how this grief is rendered into opportunity; it affords the girls various options, from teasing to bullying to far worse things. Jane appears as a kind of cipher for what’s really going on, particularly with Olivia, but what hits home even more successfully than this is the use of social media as a means of transgressing old, formerly inviolable boundaries. If you can be anyone, then you can say anything: the troll’s charter. Here, social media becomes a kind of devil’s bargain: when it’s being manipulated to provide certain opportunities and victories, you just know that the payback is coming. The media has changed, but the narrative arc has not. The film plays somewhat fast and loose with the logistics of social media – the log-ins, tracing IP addresses – but it still hangs together pretty well, driving at the central message that remodelling someone’s memory as you see fit will inevitably come crashing down. And many of the old rites-of-teen-passage scenes are there: the classroom, the high school party, the principal’s office. That hasn’t changed. Similarly, the world these girls inhabit is wealthier and more modern in many ways, but the milestones remain.

Jane (2022) has a bafflingly low audience rating on IMDb; sometimes there seems to be no rhyme or reason to this. From this reviewer’s perspective, this is a decent, well-observed drama, and another entrant in the burgeoning genre of social media horror: as a continuing factor in the lives of so many, it’s no wonder we’re seeing more and more of them, with more and more disastrous and/or damning messages. Jane is psychological rather than visceral, but this is no discredit to the film. In fact, in its overarching message – one which only hoves into view at the end – it has plenty to say about success, and those who succeed. That’s most galling of all.

Jane (2022) is available to view now.

Solid Rock Trust (2022)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Solid Rock Trust starts with purpose and forward momentum: this in itself marks it out from a lot of rather more nebulous fare doing the rounds these days. We start a few minutes out from a significant bank heist, and we start as we mean to go on. Something big is happening, and it’s being coordinated by Maddie (Koko Marshall) who, whilst not physically present at the site of the heist, is running the show at a distance. She speaks to the key players by phone: there’s Rowan, with whom she has some history; Carmen, who is none too impressed at the hierarchy of this thing; Nills, an Aussie with a much more relaxed attitude, and then a guy called Boomer – who is new to this, and nervous. And here’s a thing: Maddie is using a different accent to speak to each of them. A cautious approach is clearly necessary.

Maddie has access to the bank’s CCTV system, its security doors and other core systems besides, but she needs the group members to perform their roles so that she can extend her reach even further: this isn’t your standard job. There is a genuine sense of immediacy here, and this is an interesting approach, not to mention a brave one: establishing that the main thrust of the action is taking place elsewhere, off screen, then leaving the lead actor to sustain the tension is novel, or at least unusual. Other heist movies have displaced its actors to a different location (Reservoir Dogs comes to mind, at least in this respect) and similarly, lead actors have delivered a lot of the plot developments via phone conversations (again, you could name Run Lola Run, in this key respect) but Solid Rock Trust marries these two elements, and does so very well, making something all its own.

As the cracks begin to show, and then as the plan begins to fracture entirely, there’s a moment – at around the thirty minute mark – where you may find yourself asking: what is going to sustain us for another hour or more? Well, as it turns out, the time flies by, and it does so with no significant lulls or misfires. Here’s how.

Solid Rock Trust has a snappy, consistent script which is perfectly suited to the film’s running time and its tone, carefully and steadily building the plot, with all of its incipient power struggles, character flaws and themes. But it maintains a light touch, with only a few moments of strained credibility which, on balance, harm the film none. There’s humour in here, too, which successfully shifts things away, momentarily, from building tension. Kudos to writer and director Rick Ives for a great about-face, too, cutting straight through an expected outcome with a rather different one; that scene alone displays all the hallmarks of confident writing, the kind that retains a sense of fun about building a narrative. Varied, engaging camerawork also helps enormously.

But the film really belongs to Koko Marshall, who first establishes, and then holds our interest as the only actor on screen: it’s a big ask, and the whole film would have gracelessly collapsed, had the casting been wrong or the performance not up to muster. She’s superb though, plausible and likeable with a back story which subtly filters through the tense, changeable, spiralling situation. There are other performers here, in a ‘play for the radio’ sense, but it works: they too, both respond to, and drive the rapidly unfolding situations.

Crime dramas and heist movies are not the standard sorts of projects reviewed on this site, but it’s good to take a gamble, and my word, this particular film is a breath of fresh air – a much-appreciated one, at that. It’s a film which makes an artform of its bold approaches and decisions and it comes together productively, getting the key elements just right. In essence, there’s a great deal to appreciate in this clever, pithy and well-handled drama. It doesn’t take a fortune, it takes talent and enthusiasm, and this film is full of both.

Solid Rock Trust (2022) is available now. For more information on how to watch the film, please click here.

Skinamarink (2022)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

To do Skinamarink (2022) credit, all of its tedious blunders are strongly represented in the first few minutes; you don’t need to wait the full one hundred to feel cheated. The warning signs are there, and they’re there good and early: the opening credits which proclaim that it is ‘1995’, though breaking that spell by trumpeting the film’s Covid-19 compliance; the oddly oblique shooting style; the fetishised VHS fuzz; the endless background noise of retro, copyright-free cartoons. Should you wish, as the hundred minutes amble slowly by, you may choose to fill in the blanks here – essentially, to write the film you have in front of you. Good for you if you opt to do that, though here’s a reminder: this is not your job. If the film’s piecemeal allusions don’t land through their own merits, then perhaps they don’t deserve to land.

With all of that in mind, here’s an attempt to describe what goes on in Skinamarink. There’s a family, two kids and their parents, living in a house with wood-panel walls and the correct amount of analogue technology to pass muster. It looks as though the children are getting ready for bed in one instance; we never see them, by the by, or indeed their parents, except for their legs (or backs), as if this is a Tom & Jerry cartoon. A distinctive aesthetic shooting choice which underlines the disconnect between children and their parents, by emphasising physical distance? A representation of the uncanny, depriving the audience of visual and narrative clarity? Or just an annoying stylistic tic which persists for no good reason, giving us more visual information about ceilings than it does characters? You be the judge. It feels reminiscent of the grainy footage in Paranormal Activity, only grainier, and as if the camera has fallen down.

Anyway, by peering deep, deep into these shots of floors and ceilings, you glean that there’s a brother and sister, Kevin (who fell down the stairs and hit his head recently, though when exactly isn’t clear) and Kaylee who, were she ever to escape this house, would spend the rest of her life spelling out her name in a world full of Kayleighs. For, when the children wake up in the middle of the night and wander about a bit, they discover that their parents seem to be missing. The windows are missing too, leaving the children stuck in a house with what may be a demon who moves Lego about, even anachronistic bits of Lego, because demons care not a fig for these kinds of errors.

That’s it.

It seems that a glitch during its run of online screening festivals allowed people to illegally download Skinamarink, at which point its reputation for scares took off; even a cursory look at social media reveals an already baffling amount of traction for this title. Whatever the circumstances of the glitch, it’s done the film little harm in terms of hype. Hype, by the by, which many indie film titles spend years trying to generate, often failing, to their detriment. That’s the great pity of this; through something quite arbitrary, this film is everywhere. You may feel that it deserves to be, but for this reviewer it has too many hallmarks of creative apathy, and is certainly a stretch for a Shudder release, which tend not to be particularly dull.

So much about this film is pure irritation. For instance, this masturbatory obsession with grainy, pockmarked film, emulating the worn reels and videos of the 70s, 80s and now the 90s is incredibly formulaic. Sure, in some respects this can tap into early memories of watching horror, recalling those third and fourth generation copies of illicit titles, but overall, then as now, it’s actually a bit annoying – at least in the quantities we see in modern indie cinema. Skinamarink is certainly not alone in this, but it takes it to the next level. The grain here is so pronounced, you can barely make out what’s happening. Again, this invites you to do the work, to flesh out the glimpses of something-or-other. The alternative is that it locks you out completely, because you simply can’t see. It’s like putting blinkers on a horse. This is all made more exasperating when you consider the possibility that this isn’t even nostalgia, just a hyperbolic version of it as imagined. Ditto this obsession with analogue technology – the film dotes lovingly on old tellies and a landline phone more than most other things it features – and the sheer amount of filler director (and writer!) Kyle Edward Ball has taken from rights-free old cartoons. Most of the dialogue in this film actually comes from the cartoons which are on perpetually in the background. Presumably, as well as not costing a damn thing, they’re intended to generate atmosphere. But for what? What here requires it? Perhaps we should be grateful it’s not Night of the Living Dead being cribbed for free yet again.

Skinamarink quite likely suffers through comparisons to Enys Men, another ‘experimental’ title which has coincidentally just been released. It, too, is a time capsule full of nothing but hot air; release dates aside though, it seems that by being openly experimental, a film can get away with a lot. Here are a few of those things: being about nothing; showing us nothing; sticking with student film quality throughout as if it’s a badge of gonzo honour. Now ‘slow cinema’ is also being vaunted as a badge of honour; combine that with experimental film, and it seems you get more nothing, for longer.

The thing is, horror doesn’t work like that. Horror perhaps could work, somehow, along the lines of slow TV, but for the most part, it isn’t a slow train ride, whereas Skinamarink is. But more pertinently, this seems to be a film about children’s imaginations. Really? Children’s imaginations weave incredibly vivid narratives – narratives which horror fans often chase forever. It’s something which often drives their love of the genre. Many excellent horror films have captured something of that barely-remembered terror, and we love those films for it. Skinamarink fails at this, offering instead the white noise of nothingness which could only come from jaded adulthood.

Skinamarink is available now on Shudder.

Friend of the World (2020)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Friend of the World (2020) starts with a few moments of that kind of angst which can only come from a place of relative practical comfort. Hence, as we see a woman meander back and forth against a beautiful, sunny backdrop, a female voice ponders her own lack of engagement with the world; she wants to ‘really live’, she says. Well, however equally meandering the film which follows, it’s yet another case of the old adage, ‘be careful what you wish for’. Though getting to the crux of that is a fairly arduous process, in a film which is so keen to overlay genre with experiment, symbolism and profundity that it has to heave its way even to the fifty-minute mark.

In the first chapter, titled Ripping The Band Aid, a woman – our narrator from earlier – comes to, in a basement full of rather tranquil-looking corpses. She seems to be the only survivor of whatever-this-was, so she’s quickly up and about, trying to escape from a place where people look like they may have – sheltered? Or been locked in? Who knows, and this lot aren’t telling anymore, at least not on their own behalf. And then we’re straight into another chapter – Boy Meets Girl – as our protagonist’s escape efforts founder and she falls asleep, or passes out, both activities which she finds ample time to do. She’s awoken by a man looming over her – an old-time, military guy, who seems, or at least claims, to be rather au fait with what is going on beyond the walls.

They talk, falteringly: the girl, Keaton (“we only go by last names here”) turns out to be a filmmaker, which explains the fragmentary footage at the beginning; it was her work. She’s also the greatest artiste in the world, as the guy – Gore – points out to her, seeing as how everyone else is now dead. They also talk about the rather more pressing matter of why the world has seemingly ended; there’s another chapter break here (I stopped writing their titles down at this point). Gore, in his de facto role as verbal exposition guy, has a go at explaining, as he does elsewhere in the film; he claims some evidence for his version of events, which he presents to his unwitting companion.

So this film is a post-apocalyptic story with a very lo-fi style: there is the germ of an interesting justification for all of this upheaval in what is, in other key respects, a bit of a genre film staple. Director Brian Patrick Butler has clearly decided to focus on two characters and their experiences, rather than providing any sense of the scale or severity of threat without; you get a handful of other people, and their ‘condition’ is more about inducing trippy uncertainty into proceedings – contact with them causes hallucinatory experiences – than physical menace or similar. Okay, fair enough: 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016), which feels like this film’s predecessor in some respects, sustains a sense of dynamism and drive throughout its own runtime through careful, clever suggestion. But perhaps other restrictions, or simply other aims, lead Friend of the World away from a straightforward story of building paranoia and uncertainty, and towards something far closer to arthouse. Via these more experimental aspects, it’s perhaps aiming for Lynch, or early Cronenberg – though it doesn’t get there, as commendable a goal as these artistic and cerebral body horrors are. It’s simply stretched too thin; it’s too partial, too neither/nor.

The disconnect in acting styles which we get also seems, in its own way, to symbolise the film’s mixed messages. Keaton, actually Diane Keaton (Alexandra Slade, and yes they reference the name) plays a fairly understated role, particularly showing her skills where the film clicks into a real-time, realistic mode early on, as she tries to escape the basement. Up against this, Gore (Nick Young) is all whites-of-eyes, overblown military cliché, although he does get some quite funny, world-weary lines along the way. But he’s kept at a distance as a character, in ways which may be wholly deliberate, but come across as quite jagged. It’s an even bigger ask when he segues into providing the film’s moral message.

The black and white film and the filming itself look very good, with well-composed, well-lit shots which are easy on the eye. The use of chapters and intertitles continues to be an irritating, needless filmmaking tic, particularly unnecessary in a film which doesn’t even reach the hour mark, but overall, it’s a good looking film. And we should never punish a film for having ambition; the ambition here is commendable. It’s just that it’s part claustrophobic character study, part ragtag arthouse experiment, with blaring music and fart sounds to boot. What can audiences make of this? At one point Gore declares to Keaton, “Your film sucked – in a beautiful way”. Sure, this might well be a self-referential line, one intended to pre-empt criticism of Friend of the World, but if there is an element of heading off criticism at the pass here, then perhaps there’s also a sense that this film may not work fully well on its own merits. It badly needed to commit to something – oddness, aesthetics, or plot. A film cannot, after all, simply turn out to be an essay about film.

Friend of the World (2020) is now available to view on Apple TV and iTunes.

Teddy Told Me To (2022)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Teddy Told Me To (2022) comes from that place of oddly warm nostalgia which many horror fans have for the films they saw growing up – as grisly and oddball as many of those films were, they feel comforting and familiar. It also updates things, by adding in the phenomena of YouTubers, live streaming, state-of-the-art CCTV and other trappings of modern life to give the film a little more than just nostalgia. But all in all it’s a fun homage, clearly there for the cast and crew to enjoy making as much as for its audience to enjoy watching, and it gets a long way on sheer enthusiasm.

Starting with a clip from a YouTube channel called Randomland, we watch a guy livestreaming himself as he lets himself into an abandoned spookshow attraction: there’s a legend surrounding the place of – yep – real-life murders having taken place there, so where better for someone to explore? It goes awry, because of course it does. We then flip out of that channel to meet two people themselves watching this (as we now discover) old footage – part of their due diligence as they investigate the same site, ahead of potentially putting in an offer on it. And, hey, a local legend is no bad thing from the point of view of advertising, as they soon realise.

So that’s our frame: couple Zoe (Kamarra Cole) and Danny (Topher Hansson) do indeed purchase the old property and get ready to open, running auditions for new haunted house entertainers (okay, lingering a little too long on this part of proceedings) and, along the way, finding out more about what apparently happened in the old place. They are filled in by the old groundskeeper, Ron (C. J. Graham!) and his brother, who tells them with a little more certainty that, true enough, it’s all more than just a rumour. The attraction does have a dark, violent past. Once upon a time, they were visited by a troubled soul called Teddy…

There’s something of the late-Nineties Troma about the film via its fairly light-touch plotting, its soundtrack, its alt-looking cast and of course the way it splices gloriously OTT practical SFX with as much titillation as it can balance (as well as, as it happens, a Trent Haaga cameo, too). First-time director – and monster museum owner – Tom Devlin has a rock-solid background in practical effects work, as well as being on the receiving end of a few ridiculous deaths as an actor, so clearly these kinds of sequences are his bread and butter; he fills his first feature with them accordingly, and he clearly has a good idea of what he wants to see on screen, ably assisted by the rest of the 1313 make-up team. The film is also a Devlin family affair, with wife Lola as co-writer, and what looks like most of the rest of the Devlins who could get there cropping up as extras. The rest of the cast all have a kind of friends and wellwishers vibe, but it works well here, as the whole idea is that the horrorshow team are more than just that – they’re family. The cast genuinely do seem like they’re happy in each other’s company, and everyone present seems equally genuine in their love of the idea of working in a spookshow attraction, which is fair enough: the set is great, by the way, and is shot well, though to be fair, if a horror director couldn’t do well with wall-to-wall pumpkin faces and creepy props, then we’d be in some trouble.

Teddy Told Me To spends a lot of time clearly lining up the shots, putting work into set-ups which you know are going to follow down the line, but it works: likewise, you have a fair idea of what is going to go down here on the whole, but it’s entertaining almost because of that: the filmmakers get the genre and are having fun with the folklore of the slasher film – without taking it any more seriously than it should be taken. The result is a generally pacey, decently made, incredibly grisly story which does everything it can to surpass its budgetary constraints, while everyone has a good time getting it done. Ultimately, there’s lots to like here and the film certainly deserves to find an appreciative audience; they’re definitely out there.

Teddy Told Me To (2022) is seeking distribution now.

Slamdance 2023: The Underbug

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

There’s a surprisingly languid start to 68-minute feature The Underbug (2023), one which belies the brief amount of time which the film has; the camera lingers first of all on a jungle scene, showing an array of insects in their natural habitat, all oblivious to whatever might be going on with mankind. It has a Sara Teasdale ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ vibe to it. These creatures pay absolutely no mind to a man moving hesitantly, falteringly through the same jungle, making his way towards a house in a clearing.

The man sneaks into the house with a level of panic and uncertainty which tells us that this is not his home. Whose home is it? It seems a fairly genteel, well-equipped place, but it has clearly been left in a hurry and there are tell-tale signs here of great violence. As the man searches the rooms, a radio continues to play in the background. It is Independence Day, a day of great national celebration, but we also hear that India has been gripped by civil unrest which may have reached as far as this place. There are pools of blood on the floors, blood on furniture and blood on doorframes, too, which could indicate that someone has been dragged out of here. The signs are not good. Now that we finally see the nameless man up close, we note that he’s covered in blood, too – and then, to compound his fears, he hears someone.

A second man, at first begging meekly for help, quickly reveals himself to be no disempowered victim after all; he claims this space for his own safety, too. The atmosphere, already tense, darkens considerably as each of these two begins vying for the upper hand. They decide not to reveal anything about themselves, not even if they’re Hindu or Muslim; there’s a sense that giving any information away is to weaken oneself. Then, as the film wheels and pauses on what could be a deeply uncertain truce, the men hear a strange, frightening noise. Is the house in fact empty, after all?

This roiling and uncertain film is a masterclass in tension. The first man, whose progress we exclusively follow at first, uses no dialogue at all in the first thirteen minutes. And yet, through his gestures and the way he half-stumbles, perhaps as a result of an injury, his performance exudes shock and desperation – it’s a stellar turn by Hussain Dalal, and we are fully primed for his desperation to turn even more sour when faced with the larger, stronger man at the door. This unwanted company adds an immense amount of tension to the film. Where Dalal’s character is jumpy and frightened, the second man (played with equal brilliance by Ali Fazal) asserts himself. And how does he do this? Brute force. In the face of this extraordinary situation, the two men soon get drawn into competitive masculine bluster, something which underlines its own haplessness by falling apart as soon as the men are confronted with a strange noise, or a shadow; more and more, the men begin to believe that vengeful ghosts are amongst them.

But this is just a part of the way they interact; conflict cedes to fear and just as quickly, to an uneasy sort of brotherhood, albeit one which we know is immensely tenuous, ready to explode into shards at any given moment. Hints arise as to what has been happening in the outside world, but The Underbug is wise enough to leave many questions floating in the air, denying audience and character alike a sense of complete and clear understanding. The message here is that the world is uncertain and the way in which the film cuts away from the high drama in the house, back to the peaceful jungle outside, reminds us that many of our most savage conflicts can still seem insignificant in the grander scheme of things. Skilled direction and innovative, germane edits and camerawork close in on our characters and move away, framing them, studying them and then omitting them completely.

If some of the symbolism is a little blunt-force and a few moments of exposition have to get through to us quickly, then this is by no means an issue with an overall incredibly skilled piece of film. It weaves together so much in the way a news article cannot – such as issues around poverty, religion, culture and gender – and makes an engrossing story of them, offering ideas and perspectives which may for many Western audiences be a kind of revelation. Whatever uncertainties the film holds onto, there are many palpable and affecting horrors in The Underbug, a film which offers a brief, vivid message in a bottle from a turbulent and violent moment in time. It’s really incredible what’s achieved here, in terms of time on screen, performances and direction, too.

The Underbug (2023) received its world premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival 2023.