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.
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) 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.
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 beautiful and evocative coastal landscapes of Enys Men (2022) make for an unorthodox tourist board advertisement for a fantastical Cornwall – if you like your weekends away to feature a certain amount of the uncanny and the uncertain, at least. Taken as a series of still images, the film feels like a tribute to Lawrence Gordon Clark’s Stigma (1977) and to an extent, The Stone Tape (1972): the imagery, the isolation and the unorthodox exploration of ghosts are all present and correct. But there’s an issue, and it’s this: Enys Men is no more than a series of still images. Where it seems to be building atmosphere and driving towards some fascinating sliver of Cornish history or folklore, it takes the decision to dissipate that atmosphere by shattering into a handful of component parts, none of which feel like they have ever fitted together, nor ever could. This is a folk horror coffee table book, beautiful in its way, but insufficient, and too free-floating to really be considered a film, unlike the films which have inspired it.
In this muzzy-headed assemblage of places and ideas, we meet a nameless woman (Mary Woodvine) who is spending time on the remote island of the title to record information on a rare type of flower. To say she is underemployed would be an understatement; the ‘Volunteer’, as she’s called in the end credits, spends a few moments every day recording the temperature out where the flowers grow on one of the cliff tops. On her way back to the cottage where she’s staying, she pauses to drop a stone down an old well, then heads home, fires up an old generator, and spends the rest of daylight hours watching her tea caddy run empty. Horror enough there, perhaps. She receives occasional supplies, but that’s it: her teenage daughter is in the house with her (maybe; sometimes) but their communication is even more monosyllabic than is traditional with this generational gap.
The island seems to have been abandoned at some point around the turn of the 20th Century. There was, a wall plaque near the old harbour tells us, a maritime disaster here whereby a rescue vessel went to the aid of a supply ship but foundered, losing all hands (meaning, presumably, all or most of the men of the island). There are other indications of a former population, with hints at the long reach of the Industrial Revolution, with a small mine on the island, and a small chapel. But everyone is long gone, and the woman is here for an unspecified amount of time, with only radio contact with the outside world. She begins to see echoes of the past: people come and go from the cottage, children in archaic May finery crowd towards the door of the house – which seems, on certain glances, to be completely derelict. Men stand, silently, below ground, in their mining gear; men come ashore, wearing old-fashioned flotation devices and lifeguards’ uniforms.
It’s interesting, visually-appealing material in its own right, but so, so disparate. It tantalises at ideas of how ghosts are made, and/or how much ghosts know about what they are in ways which feel like a feverish spin on the narratively-coherent The Others (2001). But without dialogue, storyline, direction and denouement, it can never, ever be that. So what, then? Few things are clear; everything is detached from everything else, and where there is a kind of consistency, it’s boring. The film generates a lot of atmosphere, but nothing really lives there. At its weakest, the film feels like its director is almost lackadaisical about any of the usual filmmaking concerns, prioritising aesthetics which grow weaker with repetition, because he’s hoping the audience will overlay a purpose and a point on his behalf. Another explanation is that he doesn’t really care. It looks how he wanted it to look; nothing else really enters into it. Moments of unclear humour are baffling and odd, dissipating the dread that, elsewhere, the film proves more than capable of creating. And then, at last, it dissipates all of the dread, all of it. Metaphors are only effective when they represent something beyond themselves. Otherwise, what are they for?
Enys Men is set in 1973, for reasons which are unclear, other than that directors love to fill their films with leftover analogue technology and, in the case of director Simon Jenkin, he has shot the film on 16mm, too: the commitment to nostalgia here is thorough. Perhaps it has a Seventies setting to reflect the films and TV which went some way to inspiring it; perhaps it’s just an almost-obligatory dash of the kind of hauntological hipsterdom which so many filmmakers now love. It adds nothing specific, however, except some warping and flaring to the film -again, modern filmmakers go a heck of a long way to make their films look quaintly damaged. The audio was overlaid after recording, too, which furthers the strangely unsettling double-distance feeling between audience and actors. Again, it’s effective as a set of weird visuals, and it sounds suitably fever-dreamy too, but – that’s your lot. It’s also unfortunate that the film has garnered these links to folk horror, really, as the essence of folk horror is in the power of its stories and legends. This is not a folk horror in any meaningful sense; standing stones do not a folk horror make. No, this is a film made to be analysed, which we’re all obligingly doing with greater or lesser success. Sumptuous but partial, gorgeous but empty, symbolic without the requisite ideas, Enys Men may represent a different way to use the art of film, but it doesn’t work as a film.
It’s made clear pretty quickly in Argentinian demonic horror-comedy Legions (2022) that we are covering a long period of time – a then and a now. As a voiceover introduces us to a shaman, someone with magical know-how in his lineage, we’re shown life as it was, in a remote village operating by traditional rules against old adversaries. Our shaman is there, waiting for some of his neighbours to bring him the prone body of a young girl; as he begins a ritual over her body, the girl revives, let’s say, seemingly possessed by something with no inclinations to be friendly. As the shaman tries to exorcise it, the demon hexes his family line; no one respects people just doing their jobs anymore.
Back in the current moment, some forty years later, and we hear again from our shaman, whose voiceover is actually part of a conversation he’s just been having. We find out how he, Antonio (Germán de Silva) is living now, and it isn’t too promising. It seems he’s been institutionalised: he’s a killer, detained in a secure-ish hospital as he has diminished responsibility. This is something he seems to have begrudgingly accepted, for the most part. As part of the rehabilitation on offer at this hospital, it seems some of his fellow inmates have been planning a play dramatising his life stories. Again, he seems to begrudgingly accept this, even whilst watching, bemused, as the play slides into farce. Legions is full of humour, but it’s very gentle humour.
During some down time, he’s mentioned another of his life stories: the story of his daughter, Elena, born under a rare blood-red moon, which frankly, isn’t good news. She has apparently long been in need of protection from the demonic entities interested in her, both because of her lineage and the special circumstances of her birth. Sadly, dear old dad being where he is, this hasn’t been very possible of late, but it gets worse – another blood moon is on its way. With help from a descendant of one of the other old village elders, who reaches out to him, Antonio realises that he has to protect his daughter from a particular entity which has been waiting for her all her life. This means helping her, whether she likes it or not.
In many ways, this kind of bloodlines storyline feels very familiar; likewise, demons in horror films look and sound alike, for the most part, so you could be forgiven for some deja-vu in places. The film is quite open about where it takes its cues, so none of this is an oversight on the part of director and writer Fabián Forte, and instead seems to be an intentional use of these quite established elements. Where it differs in how it’s framed. There are no horrified kids in cabins, no sacrificial psychics, no size 6 damsels in distress or any heroic priests, for starters. The supporting characters here are refreshingly diverse in ages, appearances and body types, as Argentinian films seem not to be bound by the same rote expectations we hang onto in the West -and it’s great, even surprising to see. The film blends contrasts between urban and rural, rich and poor, traditional and modern very compellingly, though without labouring the point – again, something expected of a lot of Western cinema.
There are other notable features. For the most part, the film’s setting is a psychiatric hospital, but as much as the place seems a little dated, it’s light and airy, and hospital life is a bit, well – whimsical. This isn’t a bad place at all, and it’s peopled with a cast of rather likeable rogues, one of which is Antonio: it’s only very gradually that we see him move beyond his memories and his accepted role as the institution’s storyteller, but the people he lives with are very engaging in their own right. The film also confidently uses its structure to backfill key plot points, affording itself the time to go slow, both on themes and story development. This may feel frustrating to some, particularly given the flashy opening scene which seems to promise a Deadites-style of horror, and you do get the impression that – given the plural title, and the initial high-action opener – that Forte would have liked to have thrown more at it. But without a doubt the film has wrung every last peso out of its budget by the end, musters some impressive gore and ick, has admirable ideas, and offers an intensely endearing frame which helps those ideas land.
Legions (2022) arrives on VOD (US) on January 19th 2023.
Is the climate our enemy? Sometimes it seems so; sometimes it’s represented as such, too, as if the floods, hurricanes, heatwaves and cold snaps we’ve seen in recent years are all doing it on purpose. Perhaps, then, it was inevitable that horror would take the fear of a new relationship with the environment and run with it, as it has with Snow Falls (2023). It’s a film which takes some elements of the Dyatlov Pass incident and makes it all-American, placing a group of wholesome twentysomethings in a pretty cabin and then putting them through the wringer. As such, it’s a film which offers, and let’s just get these out of the way: a flurry of ideas, not all of which stick, but it deserves some credit for trying out those ideas in the first place.
There’s doom and gloom on the radio as our twentysomethings Eden, Jace, Kit, Em and River – who sound like collectibles – head through a wintry landscape on a fateful New Year’s Eve. We obviously know it’s a fateful New Year’s Eve, or we wouldn’t be here discussing it. The town of Snow Falls is their destination, though they are headed to a remote cabin belonging to River’s family. The group wastes no time establishing there’s no phone signal – though this isn’t always the case, or else our characters couldn’t take some plot-expedient video calls or boast about social media – before settling in. One of the plot-relevant Zoom calls warns them that a snowstorm is heading their way; could they, too, end up on a cautionary radio bulletin?
The New Year’s celebrations pass without a hitch, but the promised snow does begin to fall…and fall…and fall. The group hunkers down, fully expecting to be stranded, but a power outage comes next which takes out the heating as well as the lighting. Their predicament gets worse: soon the roads are completely impassable, the house is getting colder and only a – actually, a reasonable number of people know they’re there, but they are still going to be cut off for a couple of days. Now, there’s a bit of a problem here. Firstly, it’s a little hard to believe that they’re all imminently freezing to death, given the prominence of a lovely, fireside glow; it also looks suspiciously as though the breath vapour has been done in CGI. Can’t we genuinely freeze actors now? Whatever are we coming to? It’s hard not to think of Meiko Kaji in Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, filming the opening punishment scene and getting genuinely sprayed with ice-cold water so no steam appeared on the film, endangering the illusion for audiences. You don’t get that these days, evidently, or at least you don’t get it here. It’s also a little hard to believe in how quickly our twentysomethings come apart at the seams, given the whole ordeal is, what: a few days? Can they feasibly be this cold and hungry already? But, to move things along, we really need to believe in this: we need to believe that the group is growing paranoid and unstable – because here’s where it gets interesting, or shifts gears, at least.
In their fractious state, the group begins to wonder if their predicament might not be caused by the snow itself. They ponder: is the snow doing something? Is it malign somehow, a presence – or a virus, which is changing their behaviour?
This is a decent addition to the plot, this idea of sentient weather conditions, actively seeking to do harm to humans. Previous successful environmental horrors have simply let the conditions themselves do the talking, even if they have edged into fantastical in places; Crawl (2019), for instance, pushes it, but it still plays out admirably as a film about a flooded basement where things go extra wrong. We don’t always need unusual extremes of weather, either: Adam Green’s Frozen (2010) simply shows us how badly wrong things can go if you’re left out in the cold and no one knows about it, though, again, it all goes extra wrong. So Snow Falls attempts to blend the perils of extreme cold, isolation and privation with something else, something potentially supernatural. I mentioned the Dyatlov Pass incident because that, too, has always seemed to do the same, with many conspiracy theories (and a few films) over the years discussing what happened – was it disorientation and hypothermia, or more?
Unfortunately, it feels as though the film doesn’t fully commit to either of the two outcomes it suggests – that things are going to get really menacing, or get silly-zany. The role of the snowman out front (who even built it?) is ambiguous. Monster, hallucination, ironic symbol? Overall, the film really needed to decide on a way to go extra wrong. It doesn’t do this, and nor (given this is film is rated R) descend into out-and-out gore, violence, or anything of that sort. Ultimately, it offers a lot of possibilities, but never really realises these, opting for uncertainty which often feels like a bit of a cop out.
That being said, and taken as a whole, it brings an engaging idea to the table, with some scenes of peril which work well and a reasonable pace, neither outstaying its welcome nor overrunning the central idea. By the way, Snow Falls has to be seen in the winter; to view it in any other season would dissipate any relatability it has. But it seems that director Colton Tran already has another four horror or suspense titles in pre- or post-production, so it looks like there’ll be a few more to go around very soon…
Snow Falls (2023) will be released by Lionsgate on January 17th 2023. Get it while it’s cold.
The opportunity to watch and review short films continues to be one of the key motivations behind Warped Perspective. Yes, we keep saying it, but it’s true. This is such a golden opportunity to get to see calling cards from new, exciting filmmakers, tasked with getting their message across, or in some way communicating a punchline against the potential obstacles of time, money and means. So often, the calibre of storytelling across ten brief minutes feels like it counts for more than a tepid two hours; brevity really is the soul of wit, and for filmmakers who make the leap from short films to features – please don’t forget all the lessons you once needed to know inside out, as the potential to dilute all of the things which make your work great is very real. As ever, it’s a great shame that we still see comparatively so little of short films, or else we just don’t get to see them that often outside of a festival run. However, could that be changing? I won’t be featuring them here right now, as with Netflix money and influence behind them, it would be less a signal boost and just more white noise, but the very existence of Love, Death and Robots shows that there is an appetite for short films (and they really are excellent). There’s also a great streaming platform which caters to short horror films: check out Alter, which also has a YouTube channel, and which offers a great roster of titles – some of which we’ve covered and support wholeheartedly.
In the meantime, here’s a quick recap on some of the best short films of 2023. I hope you get to catch up with them; I hope the teams behind them go from strength to strength; I look forward to seeing what they will be doing next.
Everybody Goes To The Hospital
Everybody Goes to the Hospital starts innocuously enough, or it seems to: the presence of stop-motion animation, the use of a voiceover – it could all have been so innocent, and yes – it tells a story of childhood, but it quickly becomes apparent that this is a story of trauma, made all the more affecting as it retains its child’s perspective throughout, explaining events on screen as if from the point of view of the child affected. Being a child, being spoken for or talked over by adults and yet being entirely dependent on them, is scary; the film perfectly encapsulates that in its story of illness, hospitalisation and a life hanging in the balance.
Lucienne in a World Without Solitude
A smart example of a short film which immediately immerses you in a bizarre scenario, but makes you understand the normality of it all at the cost of your own sure-fire normality, Lucienne dans un monde sans solitude is a recognisable enough, small French coastal town – which is part of a world where everyone, absolutely everyone, has a twin. It’s just the way it is. Not only that, but it would be completely unimaginable to appear out in public without your twin; pity, then, that we meet Lucienne on the point of a break-up with her partner, Paul. It seems amicable, but the logistics of this are quite something. Paul, it seems, has lost his twin: this is unfathomable, subversive, even. In the pursuit of the ‘right’ kind of outcome, Lucienne (and her sister of course) find themselves on the trail of a bizarre, unidentified man – a man walking the streets without his sibling. Visually brilliant and gently compelling, this is a mesmerising short story which teases questions of individuality which we take for granted.
Scooter
A bad date turns into a strange expedition which turns into…well, something which obliterates the simple memory of a bad date in Scooter, where Adrienne is dumped in the middle of the night by a lousy boyfriend, and has to find a way to get home – by herself, by night. If the red flags here seem a little obvious, then forget it: the resulting story has humour, it develops in quite unexpected ways and it ratchets up the pace by performing an effective bait-and-switch. Adrienne isn’t just getting home: now, faced with the unexpected, she has work to do. Nicely done, with a plausible set-up and dialogue which leads us to want to follow wherever our lead character goes.
Kiddo
Kiddo is one of those films which, with a few carefully-realised lines of dialogue, makes you reassess everything you have seen up until the credits roll. It’s very clever, and it makes a few devastatingly effective points about our lived environment and how we behave within it – within our homes, our places of work, and within the wider area. Who is ‘Kiddo’? Why is she referred to by that nickname, particularly given how little it suits her? She’s an older woman; she’s the only older woman in the film. As relationships and ideas unfold, you realise that this is a simple but haunting piece of storytelling. The film will be available on Alter in a few short days (29th December).
Shut
Playing with ideas of personal perspectives, Shut at first seems to suggest that Jonas’s elderly father, Arend, is ill – or in some way incapacitated, certainly unable to recognise his son when he arrives, and seemingly racked with paranoia about life in his remote homestead. It is always worth reserving judgement, however, and as the film backfills its story, supplying us with Arend’s thought processes and what has brought us to this point, and things become devastatingly uncertain. At its core, Shut works well because it shows us people who do, ultimately, care about one another; that is what makes their predicament so impossible.
Smahorror
Two things spring to mind here: firstly, that Smahorror‘s subject matter (a live-streamed suicide, and the subsequent waves of urban legend which begin to amass) is not all that unusual today. We recognise the role of technology and social media in our most profound miseries; horror is already pretty damn good at exploiting this potential. Secondly, for a while there Western horror was absolutely inundated with successful Far Eastern horror, after Ringu (1998) almost single-handedly broke down the barriers. We even had a specific name for Japanese horror cinema, so much of it was crossing into Western markets and fandoms: J-Horror. But, whilst J-Horror (and films from other Far Eastern countries) continue to be made, the rate of crossover in the West has drastically slowed. Step forward, then, Japanese filmmaker Masaki Nishiyama, whose short film Smahorror covers reasonably familiar territory from a recognisable, even classic J-Horror perspective, but manages to make it feel fresh and invigorating. Oh, and at the time of writing, he’s twenty-three years old. This is a smart film which gets an abundant amount done in a short timeframe, and it deserves full credit for that.
Daughters of Witches
On occasion, you could be forgiven for hearing the term ‘folk horror’ and having your mind jump immediately to the English Civil War era; of course, in fact, folk horror depends entirely on the folk. This Mexican short film plays very effectively with the idea that folkish belief cares not a jot if you deviate from it or forget about it; it’ll be there, waiting, with the potential to go horribly, horribly awry if you happen to have forgotten the rules. New mother Clara lives in the US now, but she takes her baby back to her old village to take part in a traditional ritual, to give her baby daughter spiritual protection. Clara is dubious; could this rite really work? Or could it be as dangerous to her child as the risks it is meant to banish? The ritual goes ahead, by night, but there is something not quite right here…
Darker
Darker (Donkerster) does a careful job of putting together its own fascinating, heart-rending mythology. Elements of it feel familiar, but brought together here it feels like it can more than stand alone. A little girl called Rhena enjoys hearing bedtime stories from her beloved father: he tells her that there’s a tree called Atlas where the life stories of living things can be found. The dead seek Atlas out, to preserve their own stories. So, when Rhena’s father disappears, she cannot prevent herself trying to find him – and trying to find the tree, so that she can be near him again. It’s an interesting, not to mention aesthetically beautiful film, which understands something of the way folklore and real life feelings and obsessions overlap.
Lips
Lips manages to combine a very British sense of humour with a very British sense of horror. To be clear, a lot of what makes the British laugh is when pure, irritating inconvenience happens to other people – so when Michael is simply hoping for a quiet pint and a quiet read in a quiet pub, the arrival of a man simply determined to strike up conversation establishes a source of annoyance which many of us would recognise. And, oh god, he has no shoes and socks on; he’s probably mad. Or is he? The story he unfolds to Michael could point either way, to be honest, but the real issue is this: what if what he’s saying is…true? The ways in which Lips gradually ramps up its narrative is funny, icky and memorably extraordinary. If your curiosity is piqued, you can watch the film itself here.
Spare Body
Spare Body is a simple and grotesque idea which has enough about it to generate a deep shiver down the spine. It also bases this moment of acute horror on a premise which reflects our ‘buy anything, anytime’ ethos, with parcels and packages arriving at our doors on an almost daily basis. You can buy almost anything. Well, moving from that, it seems that , in the world of the film, you can order something which has the slogan Second Lives Now Possible; this presents a very upsetting evening’s work for a teenager who gets curious about the parcel hidden in his parents’ wardrobe…
From the perspective of the kinds of independent films usually covered here at Warped Perspective, 2022 has, after everything, been a good year for film: lots of the big genre film festivals have boasted excellent, extensive line-ups, and after a run of virtual-only fests, most physical fests are back (though, if we’re lucky, also offering a virtual festival experience, too – this is one aspect of pandemic viewing which would still be useful to keep). if it seemed last year like normality would never be resumed, then it seems that – broadly speaking – there are more reasons to be optimistic now. It’s not a comprehensively positive picture, but there are reasons to be sanguine. That all being said, some fundamental issues remain for film fans.
In terms of big-budget releases, it’s taken until 2022 for some long-completed films to even reach the cinemas, as studios have remained noticeably twitchy about the prospect of insufficient profits; you could suggest that starving cinemas of long-awaited blockbusters is instrumental in jeopardising cinema attendance across the board, big budget epics and all, but one of the biggest releases has more than reversed the downward trend – as much as this is bound to be an outlier. This may be a valuable lesson for other studios and projects, although sadly one of my favourite films of the year did not do well in the box office, and so this may counteract any sense that the public are definitely ready to commit to going out to see films, all films, any films. 2022 also brought the sad news that the Cineworld and Picturehouse cinemas were in financial trouble and, although their cinemas ae still open at the time of writing, issues persist around the potential longevity of these outlets. Bur despite all of these issues – some of which have appeared to be overwhelming, at various points this year – the public is not done with the cinema just yet, despite an array of different viewing options, and ongoing issues regarding where one of these ends and the others begin. Time, as ever, will tell.
These things are important, of course, and you could write an entire piece about where and how one might have accessed new films this year, let alone next year, but as this article is intended to focus on the films themselves – back to it. Looking at 2022 as a whole, is it possible to summarise the year – particularly the genre cinema year – we’ve had?
Pandemic-inspired horrors continue to appear – how could they not, given the seismic scale of impact caused by Covid? – and some of these have been very good. It hasn’t made my final list, but The Harbinger offered a compelling spin on the illness-as-monster motif, with some genuinely unsettling ideas; in many ways this film feels like the high point of pandemic horror, one which is unlikely to be bested in terms of complexity and ingenuity (but – never say never). We have continued to see a lot of lockdown horrors emerge, now a couple of years after being filmed; these have been as variable as you might imagine, with vastly differing budgets, casts, sets and scripts, if scripts have really been used at all (the pandemic seemed to grant a special kind of dispensation where many filmmakers felt they could just ad lib). Other than that, my overall top ten list this year looks, for the most part, a lot like (largely horror) business as usual; there is little in the way of overarching style or theme, just a diverse and challenging array of titles, representing aspects of different genres but doing more than enough to craft a smart, engaging narrative. That being said, there are a few honourable mentions for what we could loosely term ‘social media horror’ in there; social media does, after all, continue to rule the developed world. A proviso too: I haven’t been able to see as many of this year’s anticipated titles as I’d have liked. There’s no Dashcam; no Bodies Bodies Bodies; no Huesera; no X – to name but a few. Who knows? Perhaps they’d have been on this list.
The vast majority of these films, by the by, were festival releases; only a couple were mainstream cinema releases. As ever, genre festivals are doing incredible work. But, actually, the first film we come to had a modest mainstream cinema run; nor could it be described as a genre film, despite its two co-stars having past form in genre film.
Nitram
Whilst popular culture’s fascination with true crime shows no signs of abating, today’s films on the subject often swerve accusations of glorifying these acts of violence by modifying their perspective, and this is indeed the case with Nitram, whose subject – the life of mass murderer Martin Bryant – is given no gloss, no elevation. The focus is on him, his lack of moral principles or forethought, and the series of bizarre personal events which turned him into a notorious criminal – but not on his deeds. Hanging in the air throughout this film, though, is the sense that something, god knows what, but something awful was always going to happen to this man. Caleb Landry Jones is phenomenal, as is the supporting cast, with particular mentions for Judy Davis and Essie Davis. A gripping, fatalistic film. Full review available here.
We Might As Well Be Dead
Certainly, the spectres of lockdown and the pandemic seem to have cast a different light on the long-standing idea of the ‘gated community’, where perhaps we now have more of a sense of the advantages and disadvantages of such a set-up, or can at least imagine it all the more fully. This motif has been around for a long time, sure, but there’s a new, refined kind of paranoia available for use now, and such is the case with We Might As Well Be Dead, a subtle, clever film full of ironies and social commentary. Somewhere in the wilds of a possibly dystopian world (we honestly never see enough of it to say for sure), the luxurious Phoebus House is a des-res with strict entry requirements, and it makes an artform of demonstrating the ways in which a model community can begin to hairline-fracture and come apart. Along the way, it shines a light on anxieties and behaviours which have never fully been disavowed, however the discourse has shifted. Check out a full review here.
Repulse
Broken families are nothing new in horror cinema; if anything, we should be impressed that the genre constantly finds ways to both interrogate the topic, and also to present us with memorably damaged characters and situations. Repulse reflects this, though it flags up a great big reminder to the viewer that it’s not necessarily always your tumbledown, impoverished, degraded family units which provide all the trouble; in this film, it’s the accidental overlap between one unhappy home and another ostensibly wealthy, comfortable and respectable one which drives the plot. Another factor which works really well here is in the ways Katerina and Viktor’s families come into contact through a series of unfortunate events, rather than some sinister plot to single out the wellbeing of one household; it’s more coincidental than that. Trusting us to piece together the sequence of events which matter, Repulse toys with genre expectations, but has the confidence and clout to sidestep expectations where it sees fit. For a full review, click here.
Nocturna: Side A – The Great Old Man’s Night
Bringing us to the only film on this list this year which had me break down in tears, Nocturna: Side A – The Great Old Man’s Night is a phenomenal piece of work, a film about old age which focuses on the unpalatable truths of ageing – namely that, in old age, your world begins and ends at your front threshold, and that without your memory, you have nothing to anchor you even to your own home. This is a well-realised, acutely painful study of dementia and regret – can there be any two more horrific topics in the modern age? – Topics likely to come near us all? The careful addition of what appear to be supernatural elements work well, acting as a focaliser for the pre-existing terrors and concerns held by elderly couple Ulises and Dalia; that all being said, it is in the phenomenal performances by these two actors, exploring the painful idea of time coming to its end, which underpins the film so successfully. Heartbreaking. Nocturna: Side B, by the by, an arthouse exploration of same, risks washing away the significant emotional weight and narrative impact of the first film, and does not come close to Side A in quality or value; Side A speaks ably for itself and deserves to be seen alone. My review can be found here.
Glorious
It’s not the first film shot almost entirely in a toilet, and nor is it the first film which takes an incredibly small set and still manages to explore some pretty vast existential questions from that location, but Glorious deserves full credit for doing both of these things – and of course far more – with a kind of ease, humour and yet, a steadily-ratcheting sense that something far more sinister is going on here, from a personal, very human level right up to – well, right up. Wes (Ryan Kwanten) has just gone through a hideous break-up and, his car loaded with stuff, he realises he needs to take a rest break. This rest break turns into an overnight stay, which turns into a hangover, which turns into a strange conversation with the guy in the cubicle next door – and it kind of goes from there. It takes some serious creative chutzpah to launch into a piece of world building like this, but full credit to director Rebekah McKendry for doing so, so much with what are ostensibly very simple elements – at least at first. Check out a full review here.
Barbarian
A film I decided to just watch and enjoy on its own terms rather than review – that happens from time to time – Barbarian makes this list because it’s simply so much pacey, multifaceted, grotesque fun. It starts with a very modern misunderstanding which seems to be leading us to anticipate one sort of fate for our protagonist Tess (Georgina Campbell), who arrives at an Airbnb in a remote, deprived suburban neighbourhood which has been double-booked; forget your expectations, though, because the guy already in the house (Bill Skarsgård) isn’t the bad guy here. The film soon spirals into an entertaining mélange of horror elements, encompassing: home invasion (well, sorta), the monstrous feminine, serial killers, you name it. It all glides along, gradually reaching out to draw in new characters and to add exposition, but never feeling like it has to hold itself to some kind of checklist; it hangs onto a few secrets, but it’s all immensely well-handled, engaging and entertaining. Sometimes that is more than enough, as much as you could identify a point or a scene here and there which have significance beyond themselves, pointing to an element of social commentary. But that’s not the key thing here, and it’s great that it’s the case.
Speak No Evil
Speak No Evil is a horror rooted, ultimately, in good manners; all of the plot’s doubtlessly horrific, brain-frying elements come to pass because of the polite behaviour of its key protagonists, Danish family Bjørn (Morten Burian), Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch) and daughter Agnes (Liva Forsberg), who go to visit another family they met on holiday. Sure, we may have seen some of this before – the perils of not speaking up, or not following one’s instincts – but almost certainly director Christian Tafdrup’s film excels in terms of sheer, unflinching focus on the repercussions of this. Speak No Evil allows itself some very brief moments of humour, but these are entirely obliterated by the cruelty which follows; in fact, the humour included in the film only makes the eventual direction more galling, because the antagonists in the film are normal, in many respects; they tell jokes, they test the water, and therefore all of their subsequent brutality comes from a place not of superhuman horror, but plausible, if extreme choices. This film stayed with me long after watching. It still hovers uncomfortably on the periphery of my consciousness, asking, ‘Well? What would you do?’ For a full review of this superb and harrowing film, please click here. And remember to never be polite to strangers.
Megalomaniac
Another decidedly, unreservedly nasty film which doesn’t trouble itself with audience-calming resolutions or providing a sense of justice, nor want to show that the orderly world outside of the chaotic one is ready to come in and solve all the problems, Megalomaniac is no doubt a skilled, if challenging piece of work. Horror does not, after all, owe us social justice, but rather it’s there to contort, extend and reflect the worst aspects of humanity, and make us contend with it. Thus is the case with the appallingly makeshift family dynamic at the heart of this film, with adult siblings Felix and Martha struggling to make their way in a humdrum world after the death of their ‘father’ – if indeed he was their father – who turns out to have been a serial killer, and as such has not successfully passed on much in the way of workable life lessons. But where Felix can only emulate, Martha tries, heartbreakingly hard, to join the world outside, and her treatment at the hands of men very little better than any other men she’s known is genuinely unpalatable. An exploration of misogyny, not an excuse for same, Megalomaniac is a tough watch, but out of its gloom, its New Extremity colour palate and its violence come clever, well-realised messages. You can check out a full review here.
You Are Not My Mother
Out of the dour suburban background of a North Dublin housing estate comes an extraordinary debut film from director Kate Dolan, incorporating a very modern story of family alienation with a subtle, supernatural incursion that calls on barely-remembered Irish folklore (and indeed, the film successfully makes the point that even if you forget about the folklore, the denizens of that folklore won’t forget about you). Char, played by the very talented Hazel Doupe, is a teenage girl whose relationship with her mother is somewhat fractious; her mother has mental health difficulties, and struggles to be there for her daughter. But one day, when Char is leaving school, she finds her mother’s car, abandoned: what could be a missing person’s case is happily averted when her mother returns home unharmed that night, but where has she been? And why the sudden new interest in Char? It’s essentially a very simple idea teased out with extraordinary skill and patience, more than ably supported by an excellent cast and just the right balance of folk horror and gritty, unflinching realism. Here’s a full review.
The Northman
…and after all of that, my film of the year has significantly less in common with most of the films on this list than they do with one another, at least on first glance: it’s a fantasy-drenched historical epic, one where magic and fate feel like very natural parts of the world presented, as they should; The Northman is vast in scale, intricate, spanning years and digging onto two key preoccupations of so many sagas – vengeance, and bloodlines. Is that what perhaps pushed some audiences away? Perhaps it was too traditional for some audiences, too unconventional for others, but really speaking, Robert Eggers has done exactly with this subject matter what I would hope and expect him to do. He has also brought to bear plenty of the individual style he’s developed over the years through his other work.
His vision of a tough, bitter, warlike world on the fringes of Northern civilisation, a disinherited son and a curious, fantastical, shifting redemptive arc is an absolute triumph – and regardless of whether or not this film really flew at the box office, surely it will grow and build a deserved reputation from here on. After all, at the end of it all, it also manages to be profoundly moving; who wouldn’t watch that ending and not feel every part of that vindication is deserved? It takes courage to make a Viking epic with that level of magical realism and stern, unflinching historical detail, bring it all together, and succeed. Here’s my full review.
And finally – some honourable mentions…
The very funny Triangle of Sadness, where harsh reality lands on a group of nouveau-riche vacationers and possibly teaches them a thing or two;
Deadstream, an enjoyable social media horror (which has replaced found footage with selectively filmed footage for baying online audiences, which is better)
Follow Her, an entertaining exploration of – again – online platforms and revenue streams, with some harsh lessons around consent and content;
An intriguing and rightly unsettling interpretation of mental illness, Hypochondriac shows us what a breakdown looks like;
Sissy takes the rekindling of a childhood friendship and refracts it through modern, contested, always-online adulthood with all of its very own horrors;
And lastly, though perhaps a little bit because I almost overlooked this excellent zombie-ish horror as being one I’d actually seen in 2022, The Sadness is an absolute humdinger – visceral, sharp and unflinching.
Cyclic Law, based in France, occupies an important space as a purveyor of dark ambient and experimental music. And this label’s releases are genuinely experimental, too, rather than simply sounding eclectic in ways which themselves soon become pretty predictable. There’s often a sense of mystery to what CL releases, if that’s not overstating it. And so we come to øjeRum – actually the solo work of artist Paw Grabowski, who lives in Copenhagen. As so often with Cyclic Law releases, there’s an interesting story behind Reversed Cathedral, his newest album.
The album is based completely around a Mannborg Harmonium, an instrument which became very popular around the turn of the twentieth century, and was manufactured for many years at Leipzig. John Lennon played one on We Can Work It Out in 1965; this instrument was very popular throughout the century, made light work of its American counterparts in terms of competition, and became widely-known for its surprisingly resonant depth of sound. But tastes change; as such, many of these old Mannborgs became old fashioned, left to time.
This happened to the instrument eventually used by Grabowski, as it was closed up in a largely unused room in a house out in the Danish countryside. Denmark being a country of rainy autumns and bitterly cold winters, this benign abandonment had a subtle, but noticeable effect on the harmonium; it began to deteriorate, rattled by the damp and plunging temperatures. What better a condition, at the outset, for an album themed around it and it alone?
Yes, the harmonium itself is the only sound source used on Reversed Cathedral; all things considered, this is a very fitting title for the resulting music, which, if we accept that cathedral music is meant to be uplifting as much as it’s also often solemn, things here are rather more introspective and downcast. Each song is really a kind of chapter, with titles which call to mind a series of ghost stories, because the music has an ethereal, ghostly, liminal atmosphere throughout. Each track works together as part of this whole and fits together perfectly; it is all introspective, subtle and evocative, and as such it is an ideal immersive experience which happily hovers on the periphery of your senses, rather than demanding an intent listen. It simply isn’t that sort of music. It immerses you in something else entirely.
Fans of the left-field, not to mention audiophiles – I know some of you still pop by – you should check out this project, if you have any love in your hearts for this kind of layered, contemplative, genuinely experimental music. It would make a great soundtrack to other ventures, too – to paint, draw or write to.
Reversed Cathedral is available now and you can check it out on Bandcamp, a site which gives a fair deal to bands and labels.
Somewhere, in a very dour-looking Yorkshire, a group of young people are being taken on a bus trip to a place called ‘Wonderland’ (which, again, looks pretty dour – but that’s not beyond the realms of the imagination in Britain). They seem happy enough; however, there’s something not quite right about this whole set-up. They’re all wearing identical jumpsuits, QR-coded, and their mood darkens considerably once they actually get inside. What is this? A prison? Some sort of ‘reward’ which turns out to be something completely unexpected? Well, almost…but not quite. This excursion is also unusual for the fact that one of the people on this trip seems to be a lot older than the others, and yet she’s referred to as ‘Kiddo’. Has she been coming on trips like these since she was a teenager herself? What’s her story?
Answers to these sorts of questions are not clearly forthcoming in Kiddo (2022). This is not a failing of the film, however, but rather a testament to the ways in which writers Brett Chapman and Scott Milligan have left interesting spaces within a highly symbolic and surprisingly complex mini-universe.
Kiddo (Lisa Howard) seems to know the bus driver; in fact, it looks as though he’s not a driver as such, but a Jack-of-all-trades whose main job is as a farmer – okay, as some kind of agriculturalist, but he certainly looks the part, and as we see a celebratory dinner welcoming his young son Jasper (Paddy Stafford) as a full partner in the family business, it seems all the more like a long-standing relationship with the environment as a resource. Now, whether or not you guess the twist in this set-up is by the by; there are so many deft touches here which demand attention. Why does this family of farmers have such an overweening, but dismissive attitude to Kiddo? Why is she kept around in the way she is? What is so special about her?
There’s a slightly dystopian vibe here, or more accurately a speculative fiction vibe perhaps, but the way in which Kiddo works is that everything seems so normal – with one or two thought-provoking exceptions, so the contrasts work very well, one thing against the other. Kiddo herself is both humanised and dehumanised during the course of the narrative, and as dialogue is relatively minimal, we mainly glean her thoughts and feelings through her facial expressions. Dawning realisation is a key feature of the film, and it comes together against an aesthetically appealing, if perplexing, curious backdrop: the baby pink jumpsuits against the stark landscape, the homely farmhouse dotted with visual clues of a shared, and a sinister history.
It’s difficult to discuss the film’s overarching impact and success without discussing it in terms which give the game away, so let’s just say this: if Kiddo aims to question how we engage with our environment, and the hypocrisy in how we behave towards those in our care, then it does so incredibly successfully. It’s only really when the credits roll that you can really piece things together, and appreciate that this is a surprisingly rich, emotive narrative for its fifteen-minute run time. There’s plenty to think about after the credits, too. Kiddo is a worthwhile short film which makes light work of a particularly punishing perspective.
Kiddo will be available to watch on Alter from 29th December 2022. For more information on Alter, please click here.
