Fantasia International Film Festival usually winds up giving me a large share of my films of the year: it’s second to none in sourcing and selecting a frankly daunting array of fantastic new features. Now about to launch its 26th edition, and after bearing up under a couple of years of Covid restrictions, it will take place in and around the film theatres of Montreal from from July 14 to August 3. As usual, it will run a number of new and exclusive genre entries, many of which look like a suitable blend of thought-provoking, unsettling, entertaining, disorientating and disturbing. In terms of titles to look out for – and fingers crossed, Warped Perspective will be running coverage on as many of these as we can! – here are a few for your edification. Don’t stop here, though: you can take a look at the full program at the festival website.
Polaris
Many post-apocalyptic visions take place in an urban, or post-urban sprawl, but this isn’t so with K.C. Carthew’s vision of a snowy, bleak and post-technological world inhabited by a girl and her polar-bear mother: the two are following the North Star to its zenith, but – journeys of this kind are seldom uncomplicated, and the girl must use her wits and to escape from the events which overtake her. Action meets magical fantasy meets eco-drama in this festival opener.
House of Darkness
American director Neil LaBute is back after a run of short films and TV work: his newest feature, House of Darkness, is described as a darkly-comic battle of the sexes. Hap (Justin Long) has met a beautiful woman (Kate Bosworth) who seems to be very much interested in him; heading back to her fairy-tale home, the chemistry between them seems to develop further – but is it all too good to be true? Hap begins to suspect that the house is not what it seems, as the film examines the power-play between these two people. Who is leading whom?
Glorious
Rebekah McKendry has made the bold, if not completely unprecedented decision to set her new horror in a toilet stall: but, even if horror has proven itself to be a little scatological in the past, then it’s not quite been done like this where protagonist Wes (True Blood‘s Ryan Kwanten) winds up embroiled in a bizarre question-and-answer session with whoever is in the cubicle next door…it transpires that to get out of that stall at all is going to require quite a lot from this already suffering (and badly hungover) guy. ‘Weird’, ‘twisted’ and ‘Lovecraftian’ are words which have already been used to describe Glorious, and that’ll do nicely.
Speak No Evil
It’s great to see Denmark – and The Netherlands – represented in this year’s horror releases – and it sounds as though Speak No Evil is going to pack a real punch, doing what good horror does: fusing a relatable, real-life scenario with such an escalation in tension that it has been described as “profoundly uncomfortable”. In the film, a Danish couple agrees to go and stay with a Dutch family they met whilst on vacation, going against their better judgement in order to remain polite. Most people would follow suit, no doubt, but the film explores what happens as boundary after boundary gets crossed, with misunderstandings soon escalating into something incredibly ferocious.
Next Exit
Death as a destination? In Next Exit, set in a very, very close futurescape, the technology now exists to track the dead into the afterlife – which, it turns out, is real after all. The pioneer of this research, Dr. Stevenson (Karen Gillan) needs volunteers to help her with her work: step forward two strangers, Rose and Teddy, who agree to take the plunge, helping Dr. Stevenson to chart this new frontier whilst escaping from their own personal issues along the way. Described as “equal parts ghost story, misfit road movie, speculative science-fiction and heart-rending tragicomedy,”Next Exit promises to be an affecting, engaging, multi-layered experience by first-time director (but experienced producer) Mali Elfman.
This is, of course, just a handful of the films to come. Watch this space for coverage of the festival, coming very soon.
Nitram (2022) is an immensely uncomfortable film. Even with no idea of the real-life events on which it is based, you can still sense a disaster in the offing, right from the opening credits; we are privy to a close character study of someone lacking in the most basic signifiers of humanity. If you do know what is coming here – the film is based around the events of the Port Arthur shooting of 1996 – then you will still feel just as rootless and powerless as we veer ever closer to it. Director Justin Kruzel has been judicious in what he has left in and what he has kept out of his film: there is no sensationalism here, no danger of portraying events worthy of being emulated (a responsible decision for reasons addressed in the film, as well as a structurally intriguing one). But the unfolding chaos all still feels like it’s heading, irrevocably, in one direction.
The film opens with hospital footage of a little boy – the real Martin Bryant – who had burned himself with firecrackers; the interviewer asks him if he’s learned his lesson. Nope: I’ll do it again, retorts the child, completely missing the cue to join in on the moral. It sets us up neatly to meet the same person in adulthood (Caleb Landry Jones), still living at home and still setting off firecrackers to entertain himself, seemingly unable to understand his neighbour’s yelling or the frustrations of a nearby school headmaster, when he rocks up to hand out fireworks to boys ten years his junior: it’s a half-baked attempt to ‘make friends’, but like all of his attempts, it fails. It’s clear that something is up with this young man, but what? Physically, he seems normal, is even quite attractive – if unkempt – but he’s erratic, aimless, childish, and given to tantrums. Whilst his father (Anthony LaPaglia) makes excuses for him – grateful for any brief moments of normal family life – it’s clear that his mother can barely withhold her anger, and in trying to hide it, spits every line she speaks.
One day, going door-to-door in the neighbourhood to try and make money from mowing lawns, ‘Nitram’ -Martin spelled backwards – encounters a woman called Helen (Essie Davis) who seems unusually amenable to his efforts. They form a friendship – she’s lonely enough to see his lunging efforts at kindness as coming from a person genuinely capable of it – and he soon moves in. Helen is an heiress, so she’s wealthy, buying him a car and almost-everything he asks for. Money and the spectre of money runs through and thought this film: Nitram wants the means to fulfil his preoccupations, whilst his parents are stuck trying to manage him on their limited means, though his father has a pipe dream of buying a B&B out in the sticks: getting the cash together would mean easier lives for them all, he reasons. His parents are nothing but confused at their son’s sudden setting up home with an eccentric older woman, and his mother questions it: do you see him as a husband, or a son, she seethes – seeing as you have neither?
This odd set-up is short-lived in any case: Helen dies in an accident, in which Nitram is badly hurt too but, true to form, he learns very little, simply going through the motions of the time they had spent together back at the house – which, it transpires, she left in its entirety to him. He’s a rich man now, and he can buy the lot: the surfboard, the clothes, the plane tickets – and the guns. To come back to money again, we’re shown how people are blinded to all of this young man’s jaw-dropping personal failings by the kitbag full of dollars he starts lugging around with him.
These are people with plenty of lived experience, too. The film is noteworthy for the fact that the vast majority of its cast are middle-aged. Nitram’s parents, Helen, his psychiatrist, his nurse, even the travel agent. The subtext here is that these are people with professional and familial responsibilities who can’t evade contact, though they are still mightily flawed in their dealings with him. People of Nitram’s own age reject him outright; his mother is aware of this, and her half-baked suggestions that he could go and ‘meet a girl’ come couched in an awareness that no girl really deserves that. But she’s aware of his isolation, and still clings to this occasional, ill-conceived idea that he could find a way to be normal somehow – with a job, wife, kids. A life away from her. There’s the barest sense that she, too, knows that this will come to naught; Judy Davis’s performance is extraordinary, her eyes shining briefly with tears she stops herself from shedding, before she retreats behind a detached defiance she has learned the hard way.
Caleb Landry Jones already has a strong track record of playing outsiders, and he brings this experience to bear on his latest role. He manages to be magnetic and repellent here – a thoroughly dislikeable person who fascinates nonetheless. Reflecting the difficult line walked by filmmakers tackling emotive real-life cases of this kind, he manages to present Bryant as realistic and human, but not exactly humane: it’s as impossible to empathise with him as it is for him to empathise with others. He never reacts to events in expected ways, and he always seems on the verge of ruining the moment he’s in; if his lack of social skills is in some broader sense painted sympathetically, we are too up-close with Nitram’s jagged, uncomfortable traits to pity him. We don’t need to see the crescendo of his actions to know that someone as broken as this will lash out somehow. The film never grandstands on the social issues which facilitate this, but the devil is in the detail and it’s handled with sober, unflinching focus.
Lucky McKee’s directorial debut May (2002) was not a huge box office success. It initially made far less money than it cost to make, and it baffled many of the audiences who initially got to see it, including the New York Times reviewer Stephen Holden, although he took for his point of reference the slasher genre: he felt that May was a little better than your average slasher. This is less damning with faint praise and more a case of fundamentally misunderstanding what the film intended to do, but thankfully, the film’s reputation amongst more receptive potential fans steadily grew, with its release on home video (I rented this from Blockbuster!) allowing a far broader and more appreciative audience access to this strange, touching and surprisingly intimate horror story of loneliness. The internet as a source of community, though still in its relative infancy in the early Noughties, also helped to promote the film: far from misrepresenting it as an almost-slasher, those more ready to attune to its message saw it as anything but that.
This is preaching to the choir I’m sure, but, look: slashers tend to focus on the victims of an omnipotent, faceless, vengeance- or grudge-driven killer. May is certainly not faceless, and she’s not omnipotent either; she doesn’t bear grudges, she craves care; in fact, it’s her fallibility which continually hurts her. She’s not our antagonist but our flawed protagonist, whose vulnerability prompts her to do horrific things which we are ready to forgive and – by nature of how the film is put together – we share her perspective throughout the film, as closed off from regular human contact and affection as she is. It’s a hard film to watch and it’s hard not be affected by what happens to May, whatever her horrific faults may be. The film is a challenging test of empathy – of how you weigh empathy and why you feel it, despite everything else which happens.
A central element in the film’s success is the casting of Angela Bettis as May herself. Bettis, by now a well-known, frequent collaborator with McKee, was early in her career when she got this leading role, and few genre film fans would have known her – but May made her instantly recognisable, and in turn she makes May a coherent, if jagged and troubled character on screen. It’s impossible to imagine anyone else in this role now. A petite actor, she seems close to being frail in this film, and seems authentically nervy – but there’s something palpably frantic beneath the surface, making its way out from underneath her pathological, crippling shyness. In short, the incoming crisis is signposted early by Bettis’s demeanour, even without the clearer moments of foreshadowing which follow. I always felt that the cover artwork for this film was an odd choice in some ways, with Bettis very starkly lit, looking almost greenish, crowned with sharp-edge items (like dressmaking scissors) and looking coldly at the camera; the film itself is much gentler and more character-driven exercise than the poster suggests, with nothing starkly lit in this way. Even the bloodshed looks suitably autumnal somehow, in keeping with the film’s Halloween time period and October colour palette.
Interestingly though, the film opts to open with one of the last moments in the story – May, screaming as her eye socket pours with blood. So there are no surprises here, at least in one key respect – we know trauma occurs, and therefore there’s a sense of inescapability, that we as the audience are going to find our way back to this grisly, upsetting point by some means – and, after all, there’s no good journey that ends with an eye out. Ocular trauma is a continual theme, as is the relationship between seeing/not being seen. We’re soon whirled through a quick-fire array of moments from May’s childhood, showing that she had a lazy eye as a child and had to wear a corrective patch – which ostracised an already shy girl from her peers, who thought she was odd and disappointingly unpiractical. Her mother’s insistence that wearing the patch will eventually make her ‘perfect’ is another big warning sign: an overbearing parent, an emphasis on physical perfection, and, oh – mom’s gift of a doll, Susie, who would act as May’s de facto best friend, even if May wasn’t allowed to actually get the doll out of its child-unfriendly glass case (more anon) and play with it. Mom’s infamous edict – “if you can’t find a friend, make one” – is tragically short of the mark, but these are words which the grown-up May still chooses to live by. Any port in a storm, maybe.
Tellingly, the interim between childhood and adulthood is not explored at all: we can only infer that May’s parents are dead or otherwise absent, as they are never again mentioned in the story. It’s an absence which clearly weighs heavily. After filling her daughter’s head with life lessons, May’s mother is gone: only the doll survives from that time period, acting as a locus for all of the anxieties and cravings for company which May feels. Through May’s tendency to confide in the doll, and also to ask for advice from the doll, Susie is a quasi-character in its (her?) own right. The slowly cracking glass case links the film’s kooky moments of realism to its more symbolism-heavy, horror content; ironically, the closer May gets to actually holding her “best friend” Susie for the first time, the more her life finally spirals out of control, albeit this is driven by her sudden recent efforts to get into the trappings of adult life, particularly by securing a boyfriend. This is all precipitated by May finally getting her lazy eye fixed; she gets to embody the ‘perfection’ she was raised to look for, as if this was a fairy tale and she needs to look the part in order to play the part. This is also her way, as she understands it, to participate in the world as an equal.
“So many pretty parts…”
To get there, or to make the attempt at least, May has to suspend her tendency to see people not as coherent wholes, but as assemblages of body parts – which she has grown used to evaluating on attractiveness, forgetting the person almost entirely. Again, this comes from her overfamiliarity with doll parts, which can be easily detached from the main body and swapped around; moments of particular crisis see her retreating to her collection of dolls, sitting amongst their scattered limbs and clothes. Doll parts rain down through the opening credits; her final retreat from normality sees her return to dollmaking, her brief attempt to engage with whole people now over as she selects limbs and a body for a ‘friend’. Like Victor Frankenstein, she selects parts based on their beauty (the film knowingly references Frankenstein with street kid Blank’s tattoo) but unlike him, May doesn’t want to make a creature to have them worship her as its creator and she certainly doesn’t recoil in horror at what she’s made; she just wants some compassion.
Up until that point – and because we are always kept on a level with May herself – the camera shows us her unique perspective by focusing closely on parts. Mirroring this, May’s style of dressmaking is to hack things down into parts and then stitch them together again. But as far as bodies go, we see the world via an array of hands, necks, legs: when May whispers to Susie that she likes Adam because she likes him in his entirety, we could find it hard to believe that, because she still fixates on his ‘beautiful’ hands – and so do we, because we can’t do any differently. In a similar way, the frame is often filled with May’s hands: this looks almost choreographed in places, but it’s relevant to how the story plays out because her skills as a seamstress and her craving for touch are so vital to the story here. They are also key to her job: she’s a veterinary nurse by day, which explains how she knows her way around a variety of sutures (with a few dreadful anecdotes about errors) and also how she can sit and cut her hand with a scalpel as a way of “relaxing”.
In her continual nervous hand gestures, we also see May as a woman in a kind of arrested development, lacking the smarts to get through adult situations. Lots of this is almost physically painful to watch – though it goes beyond fidgeting and staring at her hands. It’s writ louder than that. In one of the first scenes shared by May and prospective date Adam (Jeremy Sisto) May’s hair is gathered into pigtails and she’s sucking her thumb. Their initial vibe is more like an older kid guiding a younger; for instance, Adam offers her a cigarette, and has to tell her how to smoke it; her embarrassed responses to these interactions have her embodying a typically shy response, bowing her head and fighting between wanting to be there, and anywhere else.
Whilst Adam is confused by May’s non-sequiturs and lack of social graces, it’s still obvious that he has the upper hand here, able to navigate the situation and to an extent, control it. The same goes for May’s co-worker Polly (Anna Faris) who, like Adam, is often baffled by May’s weirdness, but still feels able to call the shots, even turning it around so it’s her that tries to seduce May, rather than May desperately misreading the cues and attempting to seduce Adam. Both of these supporting characters remain very ambiguous and it’s never fully clear if they genuinely have good intentions towards May, or simply slot into a dominant role with so clearly awkward and confused a person; again, as an audience member kept on May’s own wavelength, we perhaps share May’s uncertainty. And, even when she seems certain – for instance, after fully accepting Dario Argento fan Adam’s assertion that he ‘likes weird’ and emulating a moment in his (Italian language credits!) student horror film – we’re shown in no uncertain terms that she’s wrong.
“I need a real friend – someone to hold.”
The way in which she escalates social errors and misconceptions is painful to watch; although she goes further than most people, you can’t help but feel for her when she makes these soul-shattering mistakes. Seeing May break down in tears when she overhears Adam’s roommates describing her as a freak is a truly horrible thing. And, even when she turns to violence to complete her withdrawal from a world which, even though it only extends over a few blocks, has chewed her up and spat her out in a few short days, we can hate the actions, but never the person who takes them. Even when May’s childish refusal to take Susie out of the box for the children she volunteers with results in a final, bloody piece of foreshadowing as the glass finally shatters and injures them all. Instead of helping the children, May chooses the doll.
It’s a clear indicator that May is done with people, and the final scenes of the film make very clear that May has passed from unfeeling reality into a more fulfilling fantasy. May’s new doll ‘Amy’ (spelled out of broken pottery fragments of what had spelled ‘May’) finally gives her what she wants, extending an arm to hold her and to gently touch her bloodstained face. It’s a moment of pathos which takes us away from the grotesque body horror elements which precede it. Where fantasy and reality begin and end here is unclear; it also feels like the wrong emphasis. After everything, perhaps May deserves her moment of gratification.
This blend of ambiguity and sympathy for a woman retreating from an unfeeling world would crop up again in Dans Ma Peau that same year, and ten years later in divisive indie movies like American Mary (2012) and the underrated Excision (also 2012). There are, of course, other films with some thematic or stylistic overlap, but in the above examples alone we see a fight for feminine agency which reads similarly to May, with some nods to the role of surgery and the search for ‘perfection’ too. Perhaps May crept in there as an influence on the later films. Perhaps it also reminds us that the ugly and the painful aspects of suffering and desire can be subtly handled, a lesson set aside by the time McKee came to direct that exercise in sadism, The Woman (2011). The suffering on display in May is far more adroit, and it certainly doesn’t feel two decades old.
In dystopian worlds, there’s a fascination with the possibility of closed environments. These small bastions of normality in the face of threats from beyond appeal to us, the more so when it ever becomes clear that – where humanity is concerned – nothing can ever be truly hermetically sealed: against hostile outsiders, environmental catastrophe, or the outbreak of disorder from within. Films like Dawn of the Dead (1978) with its shopping mall, or Snowpiercer (2013) with its class-divided train carriages each showcase a different aspect of this idea; Glasshouse (2021) goes a step further and has aspects of all those potential sources of breakdown. However, its handling of themes is very different, almost languid, and it’s a masterclass in slow-burn cinema – taking a very different approach to this kind of subject matter.
In what at first seems to be an idyll, a group of young siblings live in a large Victorian greenhouse: here, they are presided over by their mother, a formidable matriarch (Adrienne Pearce) whose prim, coiffed appearance is broadly in keeping with the fin de siècle vibes of their home. Clearly, all is not as it first seems: when going out into the grounds, the family needs to don protective clothing, and they fiercely guard their space with armed sentry duty, shooting anyone who gets too near (then making full use of the human remains, to feed their crops). Prim and proper these people may appear, but they have no qualms about carving up and using any biological material at their disposal.
This usually-genteel looking set-up has, we soon come to understand, endured a run of pandemics, culminating in something called ‘The Shred’, which destroys aspects of a person’s cognitive function. It doesn’t render them mindless zombies exactly, but it erodes their memory and rationality, leaving them shells of their former selves. It’s an unpleasant condition, and it makes perfect sense that this family would do everything they can to avoid it. To maintain order, they closely follow a number of what Mother calls their ‘laws and litanies’, at the heart of which is the need to reject all outsiders. But even at its most orderly, the hairline fractures within the family unit are already beginning to show. Gabe (Brent Vermeulen), the only male in the group, is largely unable to participate in rituals along with the others, as much as he tries; brutal nightmares necessitate that he be restrained at night. In a house populated with young, elderly or simply physically weaker females, his volatility is a cause of watchful, sad concern for the others.
And then, of course, a moment of weakness sees the two oldest girls, Bee and Evie (Jessica Alexander and Anja Taljaard) let their guard down when a desperate man approaches the house’s perimeter. They shoot at him, but only wound him, then pleading with Mother to allow them to nurse him back to health. As they’ve already brought him into the outermost part of the property, Mother begrudgingly agrees. The hairline fractures spread rapidly, not least because the presence of this man (the distracting Hilton Pelser) highlights the absence of another member of the family, Luca – a brother who left, but apparently disappeared without trace.
This series of developments may look very familiar as written, but it’s the way Glasshouse handles all of this which marks it out as an unusual piece of filmmaking. It opts for a sober, scaled-down approach throughout, weaving an atmosphere and aesthetics which call to mind Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Angels and Insects (1995), amongst others. There’s none of the usual grime and distress of post-apocalyptic cinema here. Plot-wise, at least initially, it’s hard not to think of The Beguiled (1971): there’s so much here about the presence of a mysterious male outsider, who soon feels confident and superior enough to game his way through his interactions with the women, though he fails to realise his part to play in this drama. There’s a dash of Gilead in here too, on occasion. And, ultimately, why not prioritise cleanliness and order, when faced with such turmoil elsewhere? If you can do laundry, then why not do laundry? In a post-pandemic wipe-out, god knows there isn’t much else to do. There’s only so many people to shoot.
With its minimal, but carefully-written dialogue, the film does just enough to balance exposition against atmosphere; it hints at a bigger picture, both in terms of the world at the gates and the emotional lives of the characters. This is, after all, a very restricted location with only a small number of players to inhabit it. The very deliberate slow pace allows plenty of time to enjoy the way the film looks, and additionally it is dotted with significant symbolism (let’s add here that some of the possibly accidental double entendres in the script give the game away slightly, even before the sexual symbolism becomes clearer). However, the most poignant aspect of the film is in its dealings with the topic of memory – what is is to forget, and be forgotten. In this, the film manages some surprises, too – surprises which really hooked this reviewer. Glasshouse is a clever, beautiful and often verdant film, carefully realised and – for those with the patience – very rewarding. It only remains to add that this is a first feature by director and co-writer Kelsey Egan, which is pretty extraordinary.
Glasshouse (2021) is available on digital/On Demand on July 12th 2022.
The Pain Eater is one of those stories which feels familiar in some aspects, but yet weaves a new potential mythology of its own, one which it launches into a world rendered very recognisable. As such, it’s a convincing and engaging blend of unpolished, everyday family drama, and something else entirely – which comes down to the reader through a far more literary, though never excessively literary written style.
We start with the aftermath of a death in the family. Steven and Michael, brothers, are just in the process of dealing with their father’s death and funeral. One of the first issues is this: Michael, who’s in his late teens, is not quite a child and not quite a man, either. He had been living with his father before his sudden death, and this raises an issue for the remaining family members of what to do with him now. Whilst he’d be happy sitting in his room for however long he can get away with it, there’s an initial plan for their estranged mother to move back in to the old family home before older brother Steven, wisely, offers to do so instead. Now that he has graduated college, he reasons that he can do it in the short-term. Michael reacts as he usually reacts: indifferently. But his brother moves in anyway.
This could all have been a domestic drama in its own right and a very different kind of story, of course, but there’s more at hand here, and there are early hints of something not quite right about the set-up, about what Michael has been up to. He’s clearly struggling with his emotions – perhaps this isn’t unexpected – but Steven finds out that he’s been attempting to look after a clearly suffering, dying cat in the yard. Whilst the older brother is repulsed, it seems like Michael sees nothing wrong; it’s as if, in his state of grieving, he’s just glad of anything at all to nurture. But this creature is not all that it seems. In fact, when the cat finally expires, there’s a…something which emerges from its body, and seems to recognise Michael (who, again, seems to take this all strangely well, but there’s that teenage nonchalance again). The weirdly symbiotic set-up between creature-human which ensues soon begins to affect other members of the household, too: but what is this creature, and what does it really want?
The Pain Eater is has a third person, omniscient narrator, though it chiefly moves between the two brothers and their internal monologues; other characters are more closed book situations, though you do come to understand them via their interactions with Steven and Michael, the key characters navigating their way through this strange tale. Characterisation unfolds at a decent pace, humanising the brothers very plausibly with relatable touches many readers will recognise. Many elements they will hopefully not recognise at all: there are elements of body horror throughout, as unpleasant to read as, no doubt, the author understood and intended. The novel also presents a kind of curious realism, debunking ideas around death, family, emotion and other heavy topics. There’s an edge of dark humour here: as an example, look out for quite a lot of vomit at a funeral…
Whilst a lot of the cultural references around Michael and his best friend, Halie, are a little lost on me, and so don’t illuminate them much (theirs is a world of anime and gaming) and the quick acceptance of the ‘new normal’ by the characters involved is a little odd, all considered, the narrative wisely chooses not to get bogged down by that; it moves on quickly. All in all, this is as much a cautionary tale as a body horror-tinged story, and there are aspects of allegory too – there’s a big element of ‘be careful what you wish for’ here. Not to give too much away, The Pain Eater is an effective piece of storytelling written in an effective style, as much about the horrors of failed communication as it is addiction, grief or any of the other themes which could overlay the darkly imaginative, almost cinematic events that unfold here.
In recent years, no doubt as a result of changing social attitudes and debates, there’s been a steadily-increasing number of films which – subtly or less subtly – interrogate the relationships between men and women. This is their specific modus operandi, rather than incidental to the story. Men (2022) makes no secret of its modus operandi; it’s overt from the opening scenes. It also opts very much for a horror lens, distorting and refracting its key ideas through heavily symbolic content. The issue with this, for all its strengths along the way, is that the film struggles to justify, or to explore that symbolism; if you were to be uncharitable, you could even suggest that there simply isn’t enough depth here to bring everything together at the end, and it’s thus left to the audience to do it for themselves.
That’s not to say that the film doesn’t start strongly: it absolutely does, weaving an intense sense of dread and vulnerability. This is cemented by the performance of Jessie Buckley as Harper, who immediately comes across as a woman raw with grief after the unexpected death of her husband, James. But grief is seldom uncomplicated; James’s death came after a number of problems for the couple, culminating in Harper’s decision to ask for a divorce. To help get over this ordeal, Harper has rented a house in the remote English countryside. When she arrives, she’s greeted by the owner, Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear) – what we’d tend to call an ‘eccentric’, an old country boy who has lived very much within the village bounds, though he seems harmless, and Harper’s plan to get away from it all seems, initially, to be working. She heads out to explore the area, and the greenery and the silence seem to be working their magic. (Incidentally, let’s assume seeing apples on the trees at the same time as bluebells in the woods is all part of the strange otherworldliness of this place, rather than a daft oversight.)
As mentioned above, Men explores its themes through a horror lens, and there’s always a storm after a moment of calm such as this. As Harper playfully tests out the echo of her voice under an old, disused railway arch, she seems to disturb someone: a man at the other end of the tunnel stands up, and then begins to make his way towards her. She responds as anyone would – or at least, as any lone woman socialised from early childhood to steer clear of strange men in lonely locations would. She retreats, but the nude (!) male figure follows her.
Thus begins the unravelling of whatever binds Harper, even nominally, to reality; this means, in terms of plot coherence, a series of diminishing returns. Not only does this strange, mute man follow her back to the comparative safety of the house, but all of the men she encounters thereafter (all played by Kinnear) display a range of threatening or degrading behaviours towards her. She behaves at first as you may expect, which is to run through the gamut of: attempted politeness, bemusement, anger and fear – pretty much in that order. However, the stranger things get, the less Harper’s reactions resonate with what’s expected, and the looser the relationship between narrative and exposition becomes. The film also introduces some very loaded symbolism and imagery which it values enough to come back to several times, though never quite to the point of unpacking that symbolism. In fact, in its initial setup, Men did remind me a little of Robin Redbreast (1970), story, folk horror symbolism and all.
The difference is that, neither in its dialogue nor its denouement, do these images and motifs get explored in any depth; even if they are aesthetically appealing and shot beautifully, they tantalise at a meaningful conclusion which, sadly, never comes. After becoming engrossed in the ratcheting isolation of a profoundly likeable and sympathetic female lead – and equally impressed by the acting chops of Rory Kinnear, who is an absolute asset to everything he’s ever in – the film withers and dithers away to an ending, which feels disappointing. It feels unfair to everyone concerned in establishing and carrying the film to that point, too; adding in a quick hodgepodge of grotesque surrealism feels like a cop out, not a bold artistic decision. It’s also difficult to determine whether the film is critiquing sexist attitudes, or glorying in regurgitating them somehow; much of this remains unchallenged, or gets blurred by the strong new focus on the ick factor.
Men does many things very well, particularly in its first hour: it’s artistically made, well shot, with a haunting choral soundtrack which perfectly suits the escalating tension on-screen. Its initial confidence is also clear in its early use of playful notes, giving us some moments of dark humour to offset the sense of a true existential crisis in the offing. Sadly, the rather sudden spasm into all-out metaphor (after rather clumsily lining up a few obvious symbolic nods) dispenses with many of the finer points which the film had built. It’s fitting that Kinnear spends a lot of time wandering around in the altogether, as The Emperor’s New Clothes comes to mind at this point. It’s a shame, and though no detriment to the excellent performances, it’s at great detriment to the film as a cogent whole. As I left the cinema, I overheard another attendee say to his friend, ‘I guess I’ll have to Google what that all meant’. That isn’t really the hallmark of a fulfilling trip to the cinema or an effective story, I’d argue.
Following on from our recent review of the ‘creature feature road trip’ movie The Passenger, we were pleased to get the opportunity for a quick chat with leading man Ramiro Blas, who plays the inimitable (and potentially divisive) leading man Blasco in the film. Blas has a long pedigree as an actor – over twenty years – and a wide range of experience in TV and film. But it’s in The Passenger that many of the readers of the site may be encountering his work for the first time. We talked about his experiences playing Blasco and of appearing in The Passenger (which hits some theatres on June 3rd and VOD at the end of this month).
WP: Firstly, thank you very much for talking to Warped Perspective! You are an experienced actor who also has some experience in genre cinema – including a role in [REC] 4. What attracted you to The Passenger?
RB: What attracted me to The Passenger, obviously when I finished reading the script, was the arc that occurs with this kind of retrograde, homophobic and even sexist antihero, but throughout the filming that changes radically and you realise that he is a character from the deep Spain with an old-fashioned education like the one that exists to this day in many villages. I was interested in how he ends up becoming almost a lovable and admirable character. The way he goes from antihero to hero.
WP: Where did you find the inspiration for Blasco? In your opinion, is he a sympathetic character? Does he have good attributes?
RB: I consider that he is a character full of kind attributes that make him a gentle being; he even goes so far as to risk it all for a creature that has nothing to do with him and ends up almost adopting her with a paternal kind of love, beyond anything the first indications of the film suggest.
WP: How do you expect audiences to react to Blasco?
RB: We talked a lot during the filming and during the creation of the character about how we originally expected people to be a little freaked out by the kind of retrograde character that he was. However, I always bet that he was a character who was going to stay with the audience and that he would end up being loved. In fact, I learned to love the character. It is a character that allowed me to change a lot the image that I have as an actor, because here in Spain (because of the series that I have done before) I was always stuck in the role of the bad guy. However, this character is tinged with a goodness and a sincerity that filled my soul.
WP: The Passenger gets quite…messy in places. Did you enjoy working on this kind of ‘body horror’ project? What was fun, and what was not so fun?
RB: The characteristics of the filming attracted me a lot, especially because I know the directors and I knew what they were looking for. I had already worked on short films with them, especially with Fernando [González Gómez], and I know his cinematographic point of view. The project caught me from the start, because as I read it I was imagining what the images were going to be like, especially because of that continuous tribute that the film pays the cinema of the 80s where horror became entertainment as well. There are many analogies to great directors and great films of the 70s and 80s.
The good things about the project were really everything: travelling through the character and their moments, discovering within myself what were the real fears that this character could feel. The only bad thing was the weather conditions, because it was filmed at night in the middle of the mountain forest and the cold was enormous! That’s the only bad thing I could say.
WP: In terms of your own likes and influences – are you a genre film fan? If so, what kinds of films do you love?
RB: Well, I don’t know if I could say that I’m a fan of the genre. But it’s a genre that amuses me above all things, and in which I always try to find a fear that goes beyond the pre-established, beyond the stereotyped. I do like horror movies with lots of reality. I like psychological horror films, especially where the fears of any human being are manifested in the film and where the actors who play the characters in the film transmit and transmute, going through those fears in an absolutely real way.
WP: And finally, now that The Passenger is getting a release – what is next for you?
RB: At the moment I am shooting a rather dark series, a psychological thriller for the Netflix platform and then there are a couple more film projects to shoot in Italy that we are waiting for. The actor’s life is like that, we are always waiting sweetly…
The blurb for The Passenger – or La pasajera, to give it its original title – doesn’t give too much away; going from this to an opening scene which seems to point to a different genre of horror altogether, the film we actually get turns out to be quite a pleasant, unpleasant surprise. The Passenger could be best described as a creature feature road trip, darkly funny and overblown, and tailor-made to be a diverting Saturday night film – which is of course intended to be a compliment.
Although we start by picking through some potentially offputting genre staples – lost hitchhikers in the woods, creepy mist, creepy ghostly (?) woman hightailing it out of said mist – this is brief, and we’re quickly whisked off elsewhere, with more than a few signals that none of this it to be taken too seriously. Somewhere in rural Spain, we meet Carlos Blasco (Ramiro Blas), a driver who ekes out a living by hiring out his ‘vintage’ van – it’s not quite a taxi, and it’s not quite an independent hire, as he’s along for the ride.
On this occasion, he’s due to drive three women – a religious type, and a career woman dropping off her unimpressed teenage daughter at her father’s – and it’s soon clear that Blasco is clearly a comedy of errors kind of a guy, a fact which doesn’t really endear him to his right-minded passengers. He seems well meaning, but he tends to say the wrong things, particularly where women are concerned: for all that, he’s warm and likeable: this could be the wrong impression, but it doesn’t feel like we’re intended to oppose him or dislike him. He quickly forms an odd friendship with the teenager, Marta (Paula Gallego), too, which draws her away from being the surly teenager she first appears to be.
The awkward journey continues, but when it goes from bad to worse, it really goes from bad to worse.
Noticing something at the roadside, they pull over and Marta finds herself investigating what looks clearly like the kind of space debris which can only lead to dreadful, splattery consequences for the people that discover it. They get back into the bus and a squabble soon ensues, but there’s more: the bus then seems to hit someone, a woman stood out in the darkness of the road. The women on the bus insist that they go back and help this person, but there’s something …not quite right about them, even before they’re dragged onto the bus. The set-up is complete then, and things are about to get very weird (this also casts a different light on what seemed to be a ghostly figure in the early reels; oh no, it ain’t).
That’s enough with the plot summary: the important thing is that what ensues is a fairly ambitious, rather enjoyable mash-up of different genre elements. There is a lot if accompanying dialogue, sure, but no justifiable way to say that things get boring. It has the fun, OTT feel of something like Night of the Creeps, but the road trip element is an engaging development, as it’s usually associated with Hitcher-style threats – very definitely human, even if oddly powerful or knowledgeable to the point of seeming a bit supernatural. Well, whatever is involved here, it pays dividends in terms of horrible ‘ick’ body horror. One slight issue is that not all of the Spanish cultural references fully land; some expressions go untranslated, for example, which might not be hugely significant, but it’s a shame to feel like you’re potentially missing something. But hey. Along the way, we also get decent characters and good performances which really hold things together. The unlikely due of Marta and Blasco is genuinely charming, and – come what may – Blasco is great, so it would be great to see him on screen again. Perhaps we will. Perhaps we will.
The Passenger will be released in cinemas on June 3rd 2022and on VOD/DVD on June 28th.
The (alleged) relationship between heavy metal and pure, unadulterated evil has given rise to some great horror movies down through the decades, and the best of these have been able to marry a sense of humour with their often fairly grisly content. When it comes to this humour, it’s also important that the film laughs with the audience – because you can bet that a large proportion of the audience will be metal fans themselves – rather than at them; the film has to be on our side, never peering disapprovingly in from the outside. Films like the standard-setting Trick or Treat (1986), Black Roses (1988) – shut up, it’s fun – and of course Deathgasm in 2015 have helped to form up a small, but solid subgenre all about the Satanic Panic which still gets linked to rock and roll.
These aren’t words I ever really expected to link to a horror film review, but, well, step forward, Dave Grohl, for it was the Nicest Man in Rock who came up with the initial idea for Studio 666 – a worthy new entrant into the aforementioned subgenre. Based on his idea, directed by BJ McDonnell (equally well-versed in metal videos/documentaries and horror, given his work on Hatchet III) it’s a film which feels like what could have happened had the audio recordings in Evil Dead II come with some good guitar hooks. From that, you can probably guess a lot about the plot. Grohl came up with the idea for the film based on his own experiences of recording the tenth Foo Fighters album in a strange, remote mansion house. Ergo, Studio 666 places the Foo Fighters back in that strange, remote mansion house and this time loads it with mysteriously abandoned recording equipment – equipment linked to an up-and-coming metal band in the 90s, who sadly had to abandon their killer album on account of being suddenly dead.
The Foo Fighter management suggests that the band should cut themselves off from the outside world to really hunker down and get their new record done, and so they agree, heading to the abandoned Encino mansion -but they still struggle for inspiration. Grohl, in character, decides to explore the house’s basement (of course) where he finds said abandoned equipment and listens to the tape: it’s amazing (and it actually is really, really good). It cuts sharply through his writer’s block and helps the band to get going on their next album, but at what cost? (That was a rhetorical device, but go on – guess.)
This is an absolutely unpretentious film, and it’s a lot of fun. A few things are clear – one of which is that, however successful the Foo Fighters are as a band, they ain’t actors, but somehow their clear shifts from script to improv, and a certain level of looking even less like actors up against the genuine actors working alongside them, more than works out. I think it’s because whatever else is going on in terms of their performances, they’re very comfortable in each other’s company and it seems like they’re really having fun (something which comes into especially sad focus, given that drummer Taylor Hawkins has passed away since this project happened). I’m not sure in what order the scenes were filmed, but it looks as though the band warms to their roles as the storyline progresses; either that, or you just kind of get used to the film’s style and how they each come across; what’s important is that it works on its own terms.
You could choose to see a Real World point in here about the unholy cabal of record executives always pushing for the next album, and certainly there’s an argument to be made for that reading of the film, but it won’t be made here, because the occult elements are far more entertaining seen as a means to some ingeniously gory set pieces; they just happen to be set pieces which come about via occult plotlines, given that there’s a demonic presence pushing for the completion of the ultimate heavy metal album track (and band members quibbling about how unfeasibly long the track is clearly haven’t been keeping up with Bell Witch’s career arc). Practical effects are blended with CGI very well, and there’s a lot to be said for seeing ex-Germs guitarist and FF musician Pat Smear (who now comes across as a kindly uncle figure) screaming his lungs out as malign entities try to tear him apart. Pretty much everyone in the film, by the by, gets put through their paces, with each getting their moment in the grisly spotlight. Fans of the Hatchet franchise, and similar, will love the knowing homage to horror classics, and it’s entertaining picking out the potential nods to pre-existing films (I would put a… okay, a tiny amount of money down on there being a reference to The Sentinel (1977) at one point).
Studio 666 doesn’t set out to change the face of horror, but it has a sense of where it fits in, it clearly showcases a love of the genre as well as a love of the music so often closely associated with it, and it’s a great Saturday night film – with the right balance of jokes and SFX. There are some great cameos, too. (The only truly unbelievable plot point is that Dave Grohl, in any condition, wouldn’t graciously take the demo from the food delivery guy, but you can’t have everything.)
Whilst it’s usual to get screeners for feature-length projects arriving in the site inbox, it’s less usual to get screeners for short films, so it was great to hear from the UK-based Sketchbook Pictures a couple of weeks ago: Sketchbook has (thus far anyway) exclusively worked in short film – a medium which Warped Perspective has long championed. Warped Perspective not only reviewed The Thing That Ate The Birds, the short film which they sent, but we were also able to embed a link where readers could turn into viewers, and view the film for free: if you missed that one, well click here. You can come back afterwards.
Sophie and Dan then very kindly agreed to answer a few questions about their work to date. Enjoy!
1) Firstly, how did you guys come to be working together on film? And how do you work as a team?
We fell in love first and are now married with two boys. Along the way, we started collaborating whilst Sophie was at art school, firstly with Dan as Director/Writer and Sophie as Art-Director/Producer, but this evolved into collaborating on the writing and then eventually as co-writer/co-directors. It was a natural evolution for us.
It’s hard to define exactly how we work as a team as we’ve been doing it in different capacities for so long, so it feels very organic. Hopefully we are on the same page, trust, empower and don’t talk over each other (too much)!
2) Thinking about your careers so far – what is your proudest moment?
It was a very special day when we found out that The Thing That Ate The Birds had been selected for SXSW in 2021.
3) You have made a number of short films to date: what, in your opinion, makes for a really great short film?
Some of our favourite shorts like Nash Edgerton’s Spider, Simon Ellis’s Soft and Rúnar Rúnarsson’s Two Birds are all brilliantly executed, simple and clear narratives with big repercussions. These are three absolute gems that are well worth seeking out.
For us, we always try to keep the essence of our shorts as simple as possible, so with The Thing That Ate The Birds it’s structured around the question of what is killing the birds? With ‘Bill’ (a DIY short we made in 2019) it’s based around the idea of a woman trying to communicate with a dead loved one.
4) In terms of The Thing That Ate The Birds, where did the idea for this come from? Would I be right in thinking you could interpret events in the film in a more symbolic sort of way than taking it at face value, or did you not really have any sort of intent regarding that?
Sophie grew up in the North Yorkshire Dales and we both lived in a small farmhouse on the moors for a year in our late 20s where we got to know the local gamekeepers and take part in grouse shoots. This was a fascinating window into a world that not everyone gets to see, and we’ve always loved the friction between commerce and conservation that lies at the heart of what a gamekeeper does. It felt like a great backdrop and setting for a horror film.
We wrote the film during the Brexit campaign when it really felt like communication and nuance had disappeared from the political discourse and in lots of ways, we felt that the country was losing its head, hence the themes and backdrop of the film.
The key theme and takeaway for us was lack of communication (both in his marriage, the world outside and how he deals with unfamiliar intruders on his land) so we worked hard to make the genre and drama elements reflect each other and propel how his actions have tragic consequences.
The idea that the film could be seen more as symbolic is totally valid and became more apparent to us as we were working in the edit – but in saying that, our stance is that everything you see in the film happens to the characters.
5) Short films are often an important part of film festivals: it can be frustrating, then, that excellent shorts don’t often get widely seen or known about beyond the festival circuit. Is that something you have found yourselves? Do you think there is scope for short films to be more widely appreciated, and if so – how?
Funnily enough we were talking about this the other day. There must be thousands of shorts and features that are not online or in an archive and could be potentially lost forever.
For us short film is an art form of its own and now there are fantastic platforms to place your film post festival run, for example ALTER, DUST, Short of the Week, Vimeo, etc. Channels like Alter and Dust are great, because they have subscribers and an inbuilt audience which has been a big help to us getting more eyes on our work.
It would be great to programme more shorts before features at the cinema or on TV channels like Film Four, but advertising rules, so it’s either a 15-minute short film or 15 minutes of adverts…
6) What draws you to genre filmmaking in particular?
We love it for the pure genre thrills of tension and suspense, but also for the way fantasy and genre can talk about the truth of human existence, fear of the unknown and politics – whilst making you either sick or laugh or both. There are endless possibilities to genre!
7) And finally…what are your plans moving forward – do you have any exciting projects on the way that you can mention?
We are about to start developing a feature screenplay with a well-known partner that we cannot name yet. It’s another horror film set on the Yorkshire moors. And in the summer, we should be shooting our first music video – which will contain genre elements, of course…
Many thanks to Sophie and Dan for their time. You can keep up with Sketchbook Pictures on Twitter and Instagram.
Icelandic band NYIÞ are not particularly forthcoming when it comes to publicity. Very little is known about them, and you often need to look to other artists to get even the barest amount of information about them, but it’s clear that – inside Iceland and beyond – they have a small but dedicated group of admiring fans. Nor have they just come along as a new project, as they already have a long history of recording and performance. What’s at least sort of clear is this: they seem on the surface to be a good fit with the metal genre, and they have some touring history with metal bands, but they’re little to do with that genre at all.
Given their album artwork, their song and album titles and their stage set-ups (right down to their interest in the occult and ritual), you’d be forgiven for expecting something between Sun O))) and Dragged into Sunlight – which isn’t the worst comparison, actually, but NYIÞ is far more about ambient, malevolent soundscapes and what I’d have to shrug and eventually refer to as ‘post rock’. If that has piqued your interest at all, then you could do worse than to spend a few minutes looking at some live footage of the band, captured last year. The skulls on the mike stand and the concealed faces look familiar, but the sound is less so.
Recently released on France’s Cyclic Law label, the keyboard-taxing “᛬ᚢᛁᛋᚿᛁ•ᚼᛆᛏᛁ•ᚼᚱᛅ᛬” is in fact a compilation of the band’s earlier releases, here brought together with some additions. Linking these together, we are told, is the use of ‘curse poetry’, a literary tradition which goes back through thousands of years of history. The band has either repurposed existing texts to make these additions, or looked to historical precedent (a grimoire dating to the 1600s is one such source). There is some slight sense of the ‘joins’ in the album perhaps, given that it brings different projects together, but overall it works very well, with the opening track ‘Decompose’ (also the only track title in English) setting the tone: slow, impressive, often pleasantly dissonant. There’s no clamour of guitars, rather a deliberate track which begins to add in the wide array of instruments used on the album. Orchestral sections run throughout, and the use of strings on Angurboði is genuinely very beautiful.
By the time Fjörbrot plays, it feels as though this is the closest we’re going to get to anything conventionally ‘guitar band’ in nature, though the song feels like a continuation of the palpable menace of Til eru hræ, with its sinister vocal burr. (Of course, what is spoken on the album is in Icelandic, though non-Icelandic speakers will still catch the sense, or at least the tone.) By the time we get to Rót (‘Root’) and Iða (‘Maelstrom’), the final two tracks, it does feel as though we have come full circle; there’s certainly ‘magic in the web of it’ when you consider the album as a whole.
“᛬ᚢᛁᛋᚿᛁ•ᚼᛆᛏᛁ•ᚼᚱᛅ᛬” is a heavy, ominous album, very expansive by its nature – but it works well, and is certain to reward further listening. Full of slow gravity, it takes an interesting premise, explores it in an unconventional manner and delivers a crisp-sounding, atmospheric and hypnotic release (Cyclic Law are past masters at working with bands who eschew convention in their music, and they have done excellent work here). Of course, it won’t be for everyone, but none of the really interesting stuff ever is.
