Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

Interminable: The Wheel of Time

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Amazon is not an organisation known for its tight budget, so it was no surprise to find out that its recent exclusive TV series The Wheel of Time – according to some sources – has cost an eye-watering $80 million to make. Based on a series of so-called ‘high fantasy’ novels by author Robert Jordan, some might suggest that these were never a good candidate for adaptation at all. With a vast array of characters (numbering in the thousands!) and a kind of world-building which apparently hovers between impressive and derivative, it stands on the brink of alienating Jordan fans, and not winning over anyone else, who might well see The Wheel of Time as Game of Thrones without the fun. It turns out that yet another world of monsters and corsets isn’t as diverting as you’d hope.

For the record, I’m in the latter camp; I haven’t read the Jordan novels as they sound horribly overbearing to me, and the moniker ‘high fantasy’ almost always makes me think of the unpopular kids who tried to choose their own nickname. What’s high about this, exactly? The ‘high’ aspect is, apparently, meant to designate all the monsters and corsets as somehow speaking the truth to power, a symbolic slab of world-building which calls to higher, deeply human truths. Appreciably, the term may be more the work of fans than the novelist, and in many ways this series wasn’t really intended for me, but it still begs the question: what is the higher truth here? What wisdom does The Wheel of Time endow which sets it apart from the rest?

Here’s what I’ve seen, by seven tedious episodes in and with one to go. There’s a journey of some kind. Tick. There’s the suggestion that, through fate – tick – five young people in a remote village could be the ‘Dragon incarnate’, which means that they will at some point in their near futures have the choice to either make or break the world as they know it. We don’t know which of them is the Dragon, and sadly it seems that the term ‘Dragon’ is being used symbolically here, which has so far deprived the series of a bloody good, great big monster to quell the tedium; even the final season of Game of Thrones, shorn of plot, at least had a real, city-felling dragon. Hope is now dwindling for this in The Wheel of Time. But anyway, a mysterious magician – tick – has ridden into the village promising to help guide these young people – even if she can’t tell who, exactly, is the fated one out of the five of them – on an Unexpected Journey. Tick. This journey is prompted by a heinous attack on their sleepy hamlet by some critters called trollocks, sorry, trollocs, NOT orcs, and stop laughing at the back, Brits. So off they go, getting split up, getting back together again, and that has taken no insignificant amount of time.

What can possibly justify this effort? Rather than a higher truth, what this looks like is a basic re-tread of Lord of the Rings – and that’s one thing which could quite easily be done without.

Fantasy writers so often seem to settle into the same pattern, the same clichés, and I say that as a (primarily) horror fan who has lived through the found footage era. But, even that churned up some more variety than a hell of a lot of fantasy, high or bloody otherwise. Tolkien probably never intended to spawn a thousand bedroom writing projects from bearded and/or braided people who often hold his work in higher esteem than any religion, but he has, and he’s established some by-now incredibly worn trammels which no one seems to really question, or even mind all the repetition. The fantasy genre so often seems to present a kind of Medieval Europe with funky add-ons, hanging onto a predictable array of accessories – buxom wenches, tyrannical knights, sword battles, cloaks, awkward afternoons at the tavern, a pre-technology hearthside or two – but augmenting them, perhaps taking the rather more historically-dubious claims of wyrms and witchcraft from real manuscripts and making them flesh. Medieval Europe was Christian, and the hangover from that is a long one: there’s usually some diabolical figure of chaos who threatens the world, like that lad from the Bible, and some mortal force for good to push back – ditto.

In many ways, fine, there’s space for this kind of storytelling, it’s as old as the hills in fact, and in many ways this forges an interesting link between the hazy world of early European history and a modern, limitless filmmaking which can paint something really grand out of all that. Certain series exceed these trammels because the character writing is so good – think The Witcher. But: if this re-treading is happening over and over, with newer incarnations each seeming successively rinsed of novelty and characterisation, then it’s time for a change. The Wheel of Time is guilty on both fronts of this weak, derivative storytelling.

The first issue is that it is practically impossible to care about these would-be Dragons. They are personality free zones, collapsing under the weight of their names, which each read like a bad hand at Scrabble – with the exception of the unusually pedestrian name of Matt, or ‘Mat’ for one of them, but (spoiler) he seems to be a bit of a bad lot, as you’d expect with such a common name. Matt? That’s a name from the local paper, if ever I heard one, whether you drop a ‘t’ or not. If in doubt when naming, bang in a few vowels; that makes names more exotic, apparently. Each of these people seems to be dressed exclusively in ethically-sourced cotton, they’re all wild-eyed with a lack of understanding, and they each do a manageable number of stupid things per episode as they proceed on their journey. Ostensibly there to guide them to what look an awful lot like the Oblivion Gates from the Elder Scrolls is Moraine Damodred, a member of the equally voweltastic Aes Sidai, which is a female-only magic organisation. Yes, it’s progressive, as only women can really do magic, but ‘progressive’ here seems to mean ‘what we give, we take away’, which isn’t really all that progressive at all.

For starters: the magic itself is a bit hit and miss. It’s rare, mostly insipid and bloody dull to watch when it is there. It seems to entail a hell of a lot of effort to generate a few wisps of cobwebby Forces, or do some suitably feminine healing: any more than this and the spellcaster seems utterly incapacitated, just like a fainting maiden who has over-exerted herself by looking out of a window or trying to dress herself, or something. The other, younger women, when not fighting with every bit as much physical strength as the bigger, heavier, more muscular males in the story, natch, are also capable of this magic, but again – it’s hit and miss. On a similarly progressive note, clearly a lot of time and care has been put into selecting an ethnically-diverse cast here, and that’s fine: there’s no sense or purpose in quibbling over the ethnic makeup of a society in a world where wispy magic exists.

But what is given, is taken away: why, then, do the only Irish accents in this belong to a band of itinerant tinkers? Is that not a stereotype, one which a large proportion of Irish people would like to query? Some stereotypes, some omissions, some creative decisions are more resilient than others, and they’re left in there, because deeply cosmetic priorities are endemic at this stage. Similarly, the Aes Sidai aren’t really allowed to fraternise with menfolk unless it’s in the form of the woman’s personal steward – think Tails scampering after Sonic – but they are allowed to have sexual-ish relationships with other women; we get to see a bit of that. This is progressive, see, but then they seem to rely on their stewards to travel anywhere; admittedly, the resilience of da patriarchy is openly discussed in the script, but it’s still in there, even in this particular fantasy, and unaddressed in any depth. It seems relevant that the Aes Sidai ‘cannot lie’, but they are free to bend the truth; that’s how the whole series to date feels; this is an attempt to do something with due diligence which nonetheless relies on twisting that into a recognisable form, whenever it’s expedient.

Rosamund Pike, saddled here with the lead role and the task of précising an unwieldy amount of back story, simply cannot do her usual, metaphorical magic (I would also question how the hell something can cost millions of dollars, but a bad wig still look like a bad wig; now this is the tale as old as time). Her presence on-screen to some extent helps to corral some kind of purpose and personality out of her young charges, but she’s not infallible, and her character often looks as perplexed by their torpor as many of us must surely be. Once you’ve zoned out of the pretty scenery, there is almost nothing of quality here, and what’s left is just a slab of Amazon TV filler, both overly busy and empty, a paragon of more money than sense.

The Wheel of Time is a plodding, derivative and toe-curling fantasy series which will win the novels no new devotees, and may put off a few existing fans, though Serious Fans will probably just enjoy seeing characters and places from their favourite books rendered in 3D. Good for them.

That time again: Keri’s favourite films of 2021

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Anyone feeling a sense of deja-vu?

Well, if at the end of 2020 anyone optimistically thought we’d be back to some kind of normal by now, it seems – sadly – it’s not yet to be. And perhaps it’s never to be at all…that’s not to suggest that we will forever be completely under the sway of a cycle of virus outbreaks and lockdowns (god forbid) but it’s hard to imagine a time when various health authorities decide they needn’t be concerned with Covid variants or their implications anymore, either. So, this might be a new cycle of relative freedoms and relative restrictions, a time when the winter is most likely to see us ousted from cinemas and film festivals, and who knows? The concentration of horror film festivals around Halloween might become a kind of de facto end-of-year party before the coldest, darkest months limit what we can feasibly do.

But never mind what might happen: what has all this meant for film fans in 2021?

To start on a positive note, it’s meant the absolute pleasure of a return to seeing films on the big screen, which has absolutely had an impact on at least two of my favourite films of this year, and maybe a few more of them, too. No one watches anything in a vacuum, after all, and after a period of months away from the cinema, it was genuinely really exciting to be back. Film festivals themselves have largely operated under a blended system again this year where online passes have been offered alongside in-person viewings, even if the latter have had to be limited for social distancing reasons. This has worked very well; there will always be an appetite for in-person fests, but there have also long been reasons that many interested parties have been unable to attend in person, so in some respects – despite the extra work for organisers – this has worked out pretty well. As for films themselves, a few big blockbusters have yet again been delayed, if not by Covid itself, then by the potential knock-on effect which makes promoters fear for their profit margins. Streaming services have been getting hold of new releases a lot more reliably, but then that has its own knock-on effect, right to the highest level.

At the other end of the spectrum, it’s perhaps inevitable that low-budget cinema, especially horror, has been shaped by the pandemic, and these effects are clustering in two main ways. Firstly, I’m thinking of the sheer number of films ‘made under lockdown’ and as such boasting next to no cast, an often hastily-assembled plot/screenplay and deserted locations. Secondly, it’s not as if horror has ever been averse to using the theme of contagion, but that has still escalated in the last year or so, as the real-life situation has fed into, and been transformed by, horror storytelling. This is understandable, though there’s been a minor wave of very similar stories, potentially meaning the best of these have been submerged under the rest. Them’s the breaks when you opt in, by accident or choice, to a response of this kind.

However, the calibre of films at some of this year’s festivals has so often been exceptional: whether made during a lull in the cycle of lockdowns, or a while ago, but finally seeing the light of day in 2021, there have been some truly creative and worthwhile films out there. Many of these missed out on a general release and played at festivals only: in this case they are well worthy of seeking out, and I hope they get the decent releases they deserve. Others managed to get a general release, and more power to them. Here are my favourite films of the year.

10: A Quiet Place: Part II

As mentioned, this was one of the films I managed to see in a conventional cinema setting, something which felt like a rare enough treat when I did it. But for all that, this sequel is a very competent, tense, well-delineated film which hands us some of the back story from Part I without compromising too much on the mystery of it all. If it has any lessons – not that it’s there to moralise – it’s to point out just how suddenly life can change forever, on whatever scale that might be. A Quiet Place: Part II is a great survivalist story which picks up seamlessly from the first, expanding the universe and giving us some much-appreciated context; it’s a great monster movie too. Out of the minor wave of sensory deprivation horrors which came along in fairly close succession, it’s certainly the best, and it’s gratifying that there should be another (final) part to this story coming soon. You can read my full review here.

9: The Green Sea

The Green Sea could so easily have been one of those films which offers just too little conventional structure to really engage the viewer, but thankfully that isn’t the case in this studied, cautious and ultimately sensitive story: if it keeps a few secrets, then you can all the same feel sure that there is some order at work here, an order which ultimately impacts upon the character of Simone – ably played by Katharine Isabelle, here a hard drinking, often vicious and damaged woman who has isolated herself from the world for reasons at-first unknown. When she gets behind the wheel one evening, drunk, and hits a little girl, she panics, taking the injured girl home with her; they begin to form a bond, and it seems that this girl has come into Simone’s life for a purpose. Shot in beautiful parts of the Republic of Ireland, The Green Sea utilises its remote setting and charming, if self-destructive lead actor very well; it’s hard not to be moved by the end. You can read my full review here.

8: Censor

Looking back on the year that was, I half feel that Censor’s success has in some respects worked against it; it’s after all an entertaining, lurid film which can be enjoyed as much on those basic terms as it can by being refracted through rather conflicted articles in The Guardian, social media saturation and cinema screenings upon cinema screenings. If you’ve yet to see it – if you weren’t at any of the screenings, perhaps – just know that it’s an engaging skit on the role of the film censor, with its lead character, Enid (Niamh Algar) getting increasingly drawn into a dark, shady world where – as the rumours always went and always will go – there’s real murder in them video nasties. Weaving personal tragedies into her quest to find out the truth, there’s an overall decent balance of Enid’s characterisation to practical gore whilst the film, a love letter to analogue tech almost by its nature, still looks great with good lighting, framing, splatter and trippy, nightmarish scenes. There are nice details throughout, too. You can read my full review here.

7: Vicious Fun

Vicious Fun deserves its place in this list for several reasons, but just to start things off: rarely has a film so lived up to the promise in its title, and also – it has Ari Millen in it, which is always a reason to sit up and pay attention. He has a subtle kind of magnetism (though sometimes not-so-subtle, see above) which makes him a great bad guy, and he plays a great bad guy here. The premise is this: Joel, an unlucky-in-love horror journalist (perish the thought) has an unrequited crush on his housemate, Sarah, and decides, in his wisdom, to trail the good looking guy she’s stepping out with, hoping to find out that he’s a bad ‘un. It’s a bad plan, made worse when he follows Sarah’s beau Bob (Millen) into a bar, gets utterly, accidentally drunk with him and then trapped in a cupboard until after hours. Well, we’ve all been there. But when he emerges, he realises that Bob – and some others – are there for some kind of group meeting; the question is, what exactly are they there to discuss? A lively, well-paced comedy of errors, Vicious Fun manages that tricky balance between gore and comedy very well; it’s a skill which eludes many filmmakers. You can read my full Frightfest Glasgow review here.

6: Last Night in Soho

I wasn’t sure if I was going to like Last Night in Soho, as 2021 has seen me reach a certain saturation point with nostalgia, but it did at least have a different kind of nostalgia at its core. Indeed, the 1960s London which is weaves together is carefully done, looks gorgeous, and works brilliantly as a mirror image of today’s Pret-saturated London, always retaining its mystery and danger. It also plays with conventions of supernatural cinema incredibly effectively, and once it gets past its neck brace-inducing nod to Me Too, it’s a far more thoughtful, often brutal story of a past which leaks its way insidiously into the present. Superb acting, a story which would no doubt yield new surprises on repeat viewings and a real feast for the senses, Last Night in Soho absolutely deserves to be seen and enjoyed. You can read my full review here.

5: Dune

Dune is every inch the blockbuster, has a budget which would certainly dwarf nearly all of the other films on this list, and as such, may feel like an odd fit here. It’s also been a while coming, what with concerns over the film not recouping its budget, so in many ways it’s at odds with films of lower budgets which have been pushed into distribution as soon as humanly possible, but let’s not get too mired in a discussion about the impact of Covid on profit margins; Dune, directed by Denis Villeneuve, is an absolute masterclass in how to get a multi-layered fantasy of this kind done and done well. Of course, David Lynch, albeit dogged by difficulties, made a version of the same story back in 1984: I’d go toe-to-toe with anyone who declares that this is a bad film as it certainly has its own charms, but Villeneuve – unhampered by the expectation that the entire story had to fit into one movie – has handled his subject matter differently, both showcasing great skill at rendering a multitude of worlds, peoples, languages, cultures and beliefs cogent, and also detailing his individual characters in a sensitive way which makes their journeys, if you’ll pardon me that overused buzzword, significant. For a detailed article on Dune from a huge fan of the books and as such Warped Perspective’s resident authority, check out Helen’s feature here.

4: Martyr’s Lane

Having had time to reflect on Martyr’s Lane in the time since I viewed it, I can honestly say that it has stayed rather uncomfortably with me – in some respects for personal reasons, as its particular exploration of childhood fears and losses hits very close to home indeed, for reasons I’ll leave off the internet – both to avoid spoilers and to avoid that whole mea culpa thing. Perhaps that’s something quite specific to me that other viewers wouldn’t get, and I understand that. But beyond that proviso, Ruth Platt’s storytelling really effectively skates the line between a careful, sensitive exploration of childhood loneliness and a very menacing tale of the supernatural. For all that, its supernatural elements are not presented to the audience as inherently malign: it’s just that all the child characters here, played with immense sophistication and pathos by young actors Kiera Thompson and Sienna Sayer, want something more from the adults in their lives. The strained, almost unbearable tension at home yields up its truths on a child’s terms: clues are left, knowledge is shared, and grown-ups only slowly share their truth. This is a well-paced and well-made film and if you want to support female directors and writers, may I suggest that this is a fine place to do just that. You can read my full Fantasia 2021 review here.

3: We Need To Do Something

Oh, man. As I said when I reviewed this film after Celluloid Screams, it takes some real chops to get away with setting your entire film – by and large – in one room, particularly when that room is the family bathroom. But, through a pacey unfolding story which segues from what could simply be isolation+extreme circumstances into something quite, quite different, We Need To Do Something is never dull. Not at all. It’s effective because it has the confidence to play with its time frame, doling out, little by little, an incredibly overblown, incredibly dark back story for the events which are now unfolding. Everything connects well, and new context is provided for scenes and conversations we’ve already seen; add to that a jet black sense of humour and some absolutely disgusting gore and you might just have yourselves the perfect midnight movie.

2: Possessor

The realisation that Possessor took up residence in my brain less than a year ago troubles me. I went back and checked the dates; I went back again and looked at last year’s top ten films, as I knew it would be on there if I’d seen it in 2020. Not a bit of it. This is a still relatively new film to me, then, but it has indelibly burned its way into my synapses in a very suitable way, given the subject matter. It’s everything I cherish in good, dystopian sci-fi: a recognisable world, in many respects our world, but with a key twist which places all of the key characters under significant, terrible pressure. In his work thus far, director Brandon Cronenberg has focused on loners, people on the periphery of normal life; Syd March in Antiviral tries to exploit his unique position as someone with access to an array of do-little celebrities which his society fawns upon, and it backfires horribly on him; in Possessor, Tas (Andrea Riseborough) moonlights as an assassin, so we have another shady character, but she does it by temporarily obliterating the selfhood of others, occupying them and manoeuvring them to do her work. Such an assault on the self is bound to go wrong, and it’s no spoiler to say yes, Tas finds herself eroding under the weight of her role, as does everyone else in contact with her – whether in contact willingly, or otherwise. This is a stone cold piece of filmmaking and please, let it not be another eight years until Cronenberg makes another one. You can read my full review here.

1: Mad God

Mad God is a film which has languished, partially completed, for (and this is no exaggeration) decades. Three decades. In fact, it’s pretty amazing that it’s ever made its way into a finalised form, as it could so very easily have stayed on the shelf forever. A little context: this stop-motion animation is the horrible, horrible brainchild of Phil Tippett, the SFX maestro who has been behind the likes of Star Wars, which I gather did alright. But the shift towards CGI in the early Nineties convinced Tippett that the film would never find an audience, and so he reluctantly left the project alone, only rekindling it in the 2000s when Kickstarter became a viable funding source.

The resulting film is a vivid, repellent, mesmerising slab of fantasy where an explorer is deposited on the surface of a monstrous planet (Earth? An alien world? It hardly matters). This is, however, just the first piece of visual trickery which the film has to offer: Mad God constantly plays with scale and threat, one moment the explorer dwarfing the creatures around him, the next appearing as a speck against the gargantuan statues and structures either on, or under the ground. The disorientating impact of this film barely pauses, and if it does pause to examine some improbable creatures doing improbable things, then it’s soon off again, sometimes inviting us to laugh at the sheer cruelty of this place, but moving onwards to some as-yet unforeseen point, before exploding even that small amount of certainty. I came out of the screening – which took place at an odd, jarringly early time in the day – wondering what in the hell I’d just seen. I’m still wondering. I want to do it all over again though, and this is without doubt the best film I’ve seen this year. Should you need further persuading, be sure to check out my Celluloid Screams review here.

Honorary mentions: Hors Du Monde (an unseemly, disturbing examination of a man’s fractured psyche and the horrors he commits); Titane (a bizarre fantasy which becomes something akin to heartwarming, with Agathe Rouselle very ably taking us there), The Dark and the Wicked (an exceptionally dark and brooding supernatural horror which achieves some knockdown terrifying scenes) and Guns Akimbo (forget the negative hype, if you can, as this is a super-charged, fun piece of modern exploitation cinema).

An Exquisite Meal (2020)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

The affectation and awkwardness of the dinner party has never been particularly appealing – and, if you already share those feelings, An Exquisite Meal (2020) is really not the film to change your mind. It’s a surreal, deliberately alienating glimpse at an especially abortive evening in. If your tastes can tolerate this particular kind of unravelling, narrative-lite filmmaking, then there may be just enough narrative to go around but, if you value coherence, this is another dinner party to avoid.

The opening credits, whilst stylish, give little sense of what is to follow (blending 60s-reminiscent animation with grainy, black and white shots of pots and pans). Well, it’s clear a meal is about to take place at least; we skip into colour and the present day, and we have the first of our dinner guests about to step into a very particular kind of suburban home where evidence of global travel is very much front and centre and there to be discussed. Our guests are the stereotypical unhappy couple Beth (Victoria Nugent) and Mark (Ross Magyar), who can’t even agree on the wine they’ve brought. Their hosts are intrepid voyageurs Irene (Amrita Dhaliwal) and chef for the night, Dave (Mike Jimerson).

A few competitive conversations later, Paul, a friend of a friend arrives…then the friend Paul gained access by claiming to know arrives, and finally, some French stranger arrives, but he seems appropriately highbrow to get a place at the table anyway. The stage is therefore set for some sort of disaster to unfold – no one makes films about nights which run smoothly – but it takes some time to determine what precise form this disaster will take.

The truth is, there is no precise form. If the film does anything consistently at all, it’s to pour scorn on the kind of moneyed middle classes who forever talk about what they’re doing, but get around to doing very little. An Exquisite Meal is certainly observant in key respects, even if its targets and topics are so recognisable as to be unsurprising: people boasting about holidays, showboating about exclusive cooking ingredients, talking about yoga retreats or considering IVF purely as a ‘non violent conception option’…well, okay, that last one was a little more out there, but the others are familiar enough, a safe array of irritating genteel pursuits.

The film is very dialogue-heavy and most of its running time consists of these kinds of chats; it’s yet a little too practiced to be funny, for all that, particularly given some of the issues which dog the performances. Some of the actors here are so overblown as to be approaching caricature, whilst some others mumble their way through: it’s as if they’re in different films to one another. The personal disconnect between Dave and Irene may be deliberate, but it feels like their very different ways of speaking their lines are more accidental. And there’s more. There’s loud, persistent incidental music which doesn’t seem particularly meaningful, or fitting. The film – barely an hour long – is divided into chapters, which as ever is a completely meaningless, trendy conceit bringing nothing to the table (yeah, sorry).

Perhaps more importantly though, An Exquisite Meal is difficult to place in terms of a genre; it’s not quite a drama, not really a comedy, certainly not a horror, and not much of anything else except a kind of dinner party version of Waiting For Godot, with all of the Absurdist fixations on purposelessness and deliberate oddness. That is ambitious, in its way, and certainly ambitious for a microbudget film, but a little like the characters in the film, the ambition is compromised. Proceed with care, and only if your tolerance runs to this kind of episodic, non-conventional cinema.

An Exquisite Meal (2020) is available On Demand and Digital from December 28th 2021.

The Darkness of the Road (2021)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

The Darkness of the Road (2021) takes a few risks in how it composes its particular brand of existential horror. With a very limited set (long shots are curtailed by, well, the darkness of the road), a tiny number of characters and a disrupted narrative arc, the film sacrifices a lot of the usual plot drivers in order to focus on its nightmarish, often surreal style. There are a couple of lags and a couple of outstanding questions but, if you wait for it, it does join the dots in a reasonably successful – and certainly a striking – way.

The film starts with a young woman, Siri (The Stylist‘s Najarra Townsend) and her young daughter Eve, who are both out on the road in the back of beyond somewhere late one night – it seems they’re heading out on a remote highway towards a new life. They stop off at a small garage, where Siri runs into a peculiar pair of clerks: one is older, and about as responsive as her sleeping child, whilst the other is more ‘chipper’, asking the inevitable questions about where her boyfriend is, sneeringly overcharging her and so on. A minor comedy of errors ensues, which ends up with car trouble and a girl from the service station hitching a lift out of there, as it seems she’s also trying to get away from her old life.

The two women hit the road and talk: however, they are soon jerked out of their conversation by a sudden turn of bizarre events, seemingly culminating in the realisation that little Eve is no longer in the back seat of the car. In a panic, Siri and her passenger try to navigate this situation, but whether in the broken-down-again vehicle or in the unlit wilds, they realise their precariousness. It’s soon apparent that the timeline here is disrupted, and things quickly feel disorientated, but key questions linger: what is out there? And how much of Siri’s perceptions can be trusted?

Clearly director and writer Eduardo Rodriguez is very deliberately foregrounding atmosphere here, and he achieves this in various ways. Firstly, the film looks very striking, and whilst it could have been drab and under-lit and perfectly plausibly so, given most of the film takes place in the dead of night, it instead looks very painterly, with lots of vivid, rich colours and contrasts, night scenes or not. For example, the blue of the night is incredibly intense, and contrasts with the pale yellow of the car’s interior light very nicely. There’s much more of this too, and care has clearly been taken with how the shots are composed, how they are lit and how they all interconnect. This dreamlike atmosphere also relies to some extent on the very fractured nature of the story as it unfolds, which means a fair few gaps in logic and a rather jagged feel – not for everyone, sure, but something which overarches the whole movie.

There are some horror staples, too, such as the ever-malfunctioning mobile phone trope, but to be fair, the film still manages to instil a decent pace early on, hurling different elements at the screen. Based on the first ten or fifteen minutes, The Darkness of the Road could have gone in a few different directions: the survivalist perils of a remote location, the perils of abrasive, likely dangerous locals or the perils of supernatural terrors. (It helps, I think, to go into this film blind, like this reviewer did.) In the end, it shifts away from any of that, at least in any straightforward sense, though there are some grisly and disturbing scenes. Actresses Najarra Townsend and Leah Lauren are more than equal to this, though it’s Townsend who bears the brunt of the ordeals; her character is perhaps somewhat more accepting of various hideous sequences than many of us would be, but that’s in keeping with the film as a whole. The whole balance of the film – performances included – is about disorientation, which eventually gives way to grim understanding.

This female-led film doesn’t answer all of the questions it raises, and maybe a little more on the relationship between the two women would make the conclusion more satisfying, but in terms of the never-ending bad dream it sets out to explore? It certainly does that. If you like it introspective and bleak, though framed and displayed in a visually very effective way, then there is a lot here to like.

The Darkness of the Road (2021) is available on DVD, Digital and On-Demand now.

Autumn Road (2021)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

There is a germ of a decent idea in Autumn Road, a film which comes across, at least at first, as a love letter to small town Halloween. Indeed, it’s an attractive film, with some great settings, and some careful sleight of hand which provides some interesting sequences. Unfortunately, all the Halloween aesthetics in the world can’t stand in for a plot or good performances, nor can they replace a script or a judicious edit. This is a film which, although coming in at just over the sanctified ninety minutes, feels far, far longer.

It starts reasonably enough, with two brothers, Charlie and Vincent, whose dad runs a Halloween attraction. Their friend Winnie (Maddie-Lea Hendrix) spends a fair bit of time at the Graystone house, and heads off to Trick or Treat with Vincent, with Charlie making his excuses. When they get back, Winnie goes to see Charlie, who likes hanging out in a hearse; she gives him one of her candy bars, on the grounds that she is severely allergic to peanuts – but then seems to forget this life-threatening ailment when she lets Charlie kiss her, triggering her anaphylaxis. Charlie flaps about, darting out of the car to ask his brother to help – which, for reasons which still elude me, he declines to do, letting the girl die and promising Charlie he’ll ‘take care’ of the situation. Charlie seems to take this sudden turn of events quite well too: it simply makes no sense. But anyway, we now move forward in time.

We’re privy to an audition going really quite badly, something which I thought was deliberate to show that the actor in question really couldn’t act – but then this standard of performance continues throughout the film with an oddball, flat and detached delivery from Lorelei Linklater (it gives me no pleasure to say as much, but it really is staggering). Laura – for it is she – doesn’t get the gig, and her roommate tells her they should just write a film of their own, which they begin to do before a (presumably, completely unintentionally hilarious) accident cuts this plan short, sending Laura back to her home town to reconnect with her mother. When she gets there, she instead reconnects with the now grown-up Charlie (director and writer Riley Cusick): turns out Laura is Winnie’s sister, and she has such a rough time getting on with her mother as a result of the girl’s disappearance that fateful Halloween. So there we have it: Charlie has lived this whole time largely untroubled by being an accomplice to his brother, Vincent (also Cusick, for they are twins) is the unpredictable, violent one, and Laura understandably has questions about her sister’s disappearance.

That’s it. The possibility that Laura was going to continue to write her screenplay, working through her own trauma in the process, or supernatural phenomena was going to lead her to Winnie, or even that she was simply going to find out what happened to her, does not come to pass as expected. There is a lot of talking, and a lot of head-scratching moments which compound the initial, unbelievable plot point where two kids preside over a death by layering on other, smaller, equally implausible scenes. The guy Vincent punches in the face, simply wandering off without being particularly bothered by his assault…the girl who angrily quits her job but is right back there the next day…Vincent heading off to attack one of his co-workers wearing a disguise that the same co-worker would see him in every single day at work…these sorts of things just need to be ironed out when reading through a screenplay, but then when the writer, director and acting lead is one and the same person, this process often becomes diffuse, it seems.

There are, eventually, some answers, but by this point the relative lack of plot and the wildly differentiated performances (where Laura is flat, Vincent is depicted as a wild-eyed, leering danger) have extinguished the film’s initially engaging premise. This is a shame, as there was a lot of potential here with a setting which would do any horror fan’s heart good, but it’s not enough on its own. It’s not immediately clear what the title refers to, either, but really, that’s not the most pressing of concerns.

The Willing Fool: the Spectacle of The Wicker Man by Robert J. E. Simpson

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

The Wicker Man (1973) continues to hold its place as one of the best-beloved British horror films of the past fifty years, with new viewers and fans emerging as the years pass. This speaks to its many strengths, and the way in which it works on many levels, offering the potential for new readings and responses from new viewers as well as its existing fans. As such, Robert J. E. Simpson’s charming, well-informed and engaging monograph on the title has a great deal to offer and makes for an interesting, thought-provoking read. As a long-time fan of The Wicker Man, it certainly gave me new ideas and ways to interpret.

The book has an interesting pedigree – as explained in the introduction – whereby it started life as an academic project but then, for a number of reasons, ended up on the back burner for a period of some years. Finally completed when the pandemic landed us all with rather more time that we would have had, the book occupies a somewhat liminal position between academic writing and the pleasure of writing about a film which is clearly dear to the author. There’s always a danger with academic writing that researchers focus so closely on the component parts of whatever they’re studying, they lose sight of the sum of those parts. In other words, they stop enjoying the film as a piece of entertainment, which always shows in the writing. That isn’t the case here, and although academic ideas are brought to bear on the film (for instance, Roland Barthes and the relationships between visuals, music and text) these are always kept accessible, footnoted and most importantly, blended carefully with the overall considered, but warm and enthusiastic tone of the text. This helps the more academic, ‘meta’ type ideas to really land; there’s no danger of the text turning into something abstract, too far removed from a fan’s perspective on the film.

When I say the film, of course the book is largely focused on the ’73 original, but it also draws some interesting comparisons with the much-maligned remake of 2006 and also looks at the perplexing ‘sequel of sorts’, or else extension of the Wicker Man universe, The Wicker Tree (2011). This is all handled fairly, though the author largely seems to reflect positively on the greater subtleties of the 1973 film as a result – again, which seems fair.

The Willing Fool is also structured in an interesting way, rather than with the more conventional description, information on casting and so on before moving into a closer study of the film; it is organised, in keeping with its avowed focus on the spectacle of The Wicker Man, by symbol, visual focus, character, specific settings and frameworks (such as the ‘documentary’ claims in the introduction). It’s an approach which works well, an intuitive style which breaks the spell of the expected, formulaic standpoint used in film writing. In this respect the book emulates what it identifies in the film itself, in its disruption of a conventional, distanced, separate approach from the Wicker Man narrative. It’s also a positive, all told, that whilst the book takes in ideas about folkloric precedents, it doesn’t simply take a ‘folk horror’ approach. The rise and rise of folk horror as a discipline has led to some fine writing, but it needn’t replace other ways of seeing, or speak for them all. (Film credits, an article on The Fantasist and an interview with director Robin Hardy are included in the appendix).

Coming in at just over 120 pages, this is a slim illustrated volume, well-focused with just the right level of range and detail. Even for those who may have pored over The Wicker Man a hundred times, there will be information and critique here which will be of interest. Full disclosure: I have worked with Robert Simpson over the years, but that changes nothing about this recommendation! You can check out ways to purchase The Willing Fool here.

Blood in the Snow 2021: The Family

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

Toil – in the Biblical sense – sets us going on the very first scenes in The Family. This is an immediately bleak, dirt-encrusted tale of life inside an insular and grimly religious household, with an undisputed – and cruel – patriarch presiding over the children’s labours. ‘Father’ (Nigel Bennett) is not averse to smothering his wayward offspring in mud, if they can’t or won’t work any more. The dour intensity here is, then, immediate. But is Father paranoid, or simply vigilant? He presses for the isolation of his family to continue, but he stresses that it is vital; at prayer, and at chapel, the family are apparently aware of an ‘interloper’, mentioned by name as Abaddon, who wants nothing more than to steal these people’s souls. Son Caleb (Benjamin Charles Watson) is on the verge of adulthood, to be recognised as a man hereafter – but this doesn’t grant him more power, but seemingly less, as he struggles to understand what his new role actually means. The drive to ‘keep out the darkness’ seems to become even more urgent.

Fundamentalist religions and cults, like this one, have long been selling passes to a very selective afterlife and purporting to stave off cunning spiritual foes; the question here is what really exists on the outskirts of the compound. As Caleb checks the animals traps one evening, he crosses the threshold into the ‘forbidden’ outside and hears a sound. It sounds like a woman, singing, and he finds a mysterious dwelling a little way off, too. Frightened, he retreats, and it seems for good reason: his transgression is punishable, his sin of crossing the sacred threshold held up as a great danger for everyone else. Again, if this is purely down to Father’s rod of iron approach, it’s notable that not long afterwards, the peace – such as it is – gets disturbed. This is deemed all part of Eitan’s plan – Eitan being the version of God the family worships. A further change in the family dynamic is around the corner, and a new arrival complicates dynamics and statuses. For Caleb, faithful but unaware of Eitan’s grand schemes, his suffering will become the crux of the action.

Several other films have tackled this idea of the isolated family unit and how faith can present horrors of its own, but The Family does so excellently. The escalating strangeness is handled carefully and quietly, with subtle but innovative developments and surprises, even if you might be tempted to guess at where things are going (this reviewer never felt quite confident enough for that; the nature of the family is such that certainties are in short supply). For such a mood piece, the tone and pace work well together. The film is chaptered – into…seven parts? This is de rigeur, but as usual this particular lofty tic doesn’t add a great deal, feeling unnecessary given the skilled ways in which the narrative is moved on by words and deeds in the script.

One of the ways in which the film succeeds is via its excellent performances. Benjamin Charles Watson as Caleb gets the majority of the screen time, and he’s certainly equal to it; he is an innocent, always trying to discern the best ways to behave and being stymied by his father’s cruelty. Father, though, is not just a straightforward villain, however sinister he can be. There are odd moments of what look like warmth and concern, or is that a ruse which tricks us, too? No wonder Caleb is disorientated. Able support comes from the other siblings, particularly Abigail (Jenna Warren), who has her own limits; Mother (Toni Ellwand) is seemingly every bit as vicious as Father. A rock solid script with no glaring anachronisms, which I’ve seen in other period films helps cement some excellent casting (The Family looks like a 19th Century conservative Christian family, and they sound like it too).

Be this a 19th Century setting, rather than (say) a 17th Century one, but there are some similarities here to The Witch, a film which is similar aesthetically, with the same period detail, use of natural light and an isolated family farmstead, but The Family is nonetheless no re-tread of the influential earlier film. True, it has a similar feeling of never quite being fully abreast of the mysteries unfolding, and there’s that self-same sense of sexuality, hovering over both stories, but in key respects, The Family has more questions to ask. It’s a mysterious film and feels no lesser a film for alluding to, rather than answering everything.

The Family is a brutal yet thoughtful film, meticulous in its details and impressive in how it marries atmosphere with tension. It’s also a film which shows that in folk horror, it’s often the folk themselves which are the source of the horror. Very impressive.

The Family will screen as part of the Blood in the Snow Film Festival on November 23rd. For more details, please click here.

Prisoners of the Ghostland (2021)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

It’s not entirely clear what has happened to Sion Sono in the past decade. Shorn perhaps of whatever inspiration was behind discomfiting, outrageous gems like Guilty of Romance and Love Exposure, he seems to have dedicated himself to being a filmmaker making films about filmmaking, and on and on it goes – a kind of gentle pissing against the fourth wall, settling into a comfortable rut with only the odd foray into anything more interesting. So, when I read the blurb for Prisoners of the Ghostland, it was massively encouraging. Frankly, the blurb would do anyone’s heart good: Nicolas Cage, as an unwilling vigilante, sent on a mission where, should he fail or deviate, his bollocks (and other bodily organs) will explode? Sign us up, right? Finally, Sion Sono was back to the kind of madcap project which brings out his best; with cast members including Cage, Bill Moseley and Sofia Boutella, it would be very hard indeed to ruin this.

Well buckle up, because somewhere along the line, this Grade A exploitation cinema idea came all to naught. It’s almost impressive, and a big, bold lesson about the perils of optimism.

The film begins in what we eventually learn is a kind of shanty town called Samurai Town. Is it a parallel universe, a dystopia, or what? This isn’t really dealt with – but what we can just about determine is a place which splices East and West: geisha mingle with cowboy types, samurai wander around and occasionally smack-talk one another, and so on. Not everyone seems to like living hereabouts, however: a young woman, Bernice (Boutella) decides to high-tail it one night, taking a couple of friends with her – to freedom!

Freedom! – is in a place just up the road, another kind of shanty town, but one which seems to be marginally worse. This is the Ghostland, a time-frozen zone, and Bernice’s freedom there is of that eternal kind: she is now able to lie around in rubble in a nightdress, ruminating on her decisions. Back in Samurai Town, her grandfather the governor (Moseley) wants her back. To achieve this, he employs a nameless character (Cage, referred to as ‘Hero’ in the credits, as the naming choices here are straight out of arcade games in the 90s). This fella has been languishing in jail for some years after his involvement in a bank heist which went badly wrong – like, shooting innocent bubblegum-consuming kids wrong – but that’s what you get when you hang around with people named things like Psycho (John Cassavetes). Never go on a bank job with anyone called Psycho; it’s a recipe for these kinds of kid-slaying disasters. And, if you didn’t get the magnitude of this bank heist, don’t worry: that scene will be along as a flashback a few times over, so you can really enjoy its profundity and plot relevance.

So, famously, the unnamed-Hero-Cage is prepped for his mission with a special leather suit which has small explosives attached to it: these will be triggered if he takes too long, if he has impure thoughts, or if he strikes or impedes someone vulnerable. Good idea, right? Were this played with Cage’s usual madcap vigour – of which a little goes a long way, but still – then it’s an idea which really could have worked, and there were a few brief scenes where a little of that exploitation cinema promise was fulfilled. However, overall, Cage is not himself here, neither really brooding nor really animated. Even the lines which were clearly intended to be catchphrases fall oddly flat, and for the most part he swaggers from place to place looking rather lost. Yes, we’ve finally found it: after a period of time which has given us Mandy and The Color Out of Space, here is a barely-there performance by everyone’s favourite over-actor.

Could this be because of the nature of the shoot? After the testicle-exploding suit, the film is probably best-known as ‘Sion Sono’s first English production’. In practice, this means a lot of Japanese actors chewing through their lines in English, very likely by rote (or at least with limited understanding of what they’re saying). Hurl this up against a number of American or other English speakers plodding through their own lines in an inexplicable, barely-clear situation, and you get less of an innovative blend between Eastern and Western and more of a babble, hard to follow and deeply unengaging. Making this in English – or even mostly in English – was a silly mistake. Foreign language films don’t automatically flounder in the West these days (just look at the massive success of Korea’s Squid Game) but dreadful films will always flounder everywhere, or at least they should. This is a dreadful film.

Hero finds Bernice relatively easily – well, she only seems a brief distance away, to be fair – and the rest of the film concerns getting her back, and what happens then, power games, redemption, etc. Great. So plot isn’t a priority, and nor is acting, legibility, or pace; the whole film billows clumsily throughout with very long, almost slow-mo sequences which really test one’s patience. What else do we get, for the film’s 90+ minutes of running time? Very little, save for a few discordant, tokenistic moments of gore and, incomprehensibly, acres and acres of actors who dance, sing and mime various elements of the back story. This is particularly annoying as, alongside the rest of the film, everything feels lazily under-edited, with long, jerky, unpolished takes of these extras who contribute so little here. Every scene feels like it’s been done in one take before moving on, to be fair, but save for showcasing how large the open-air sets are, a succession of extras miming seems to add insult to injury, taking us out of the small amount of plot we have to play with and making us watch people dancing instead.

Just to be clear: Prisoners of the Ghostland is so bad as to be insulting. Its storyline is famine-thin; its performances veer from a complete waste to dreadful; the sets are cheap; the English language thing is ludicrous and unnecessary; every good idea is buried beneath pointless choreography and flabby takes and the whole thing has the unpolished feel of a vainglorious mistake. This isn’t a film so bad, it’s good; in fact, it’s borderline unwatchable, and don’t let any intimation of exploding testicles charm you otherwise.

Prisoners of the Ghostland will be released on Shudder on November 19th 2021.

Blood in the Snow 2021: The Chamber of Terror

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

In a darkly comic film which seems to strive to fit in as much practical gore FX as possible, The Chamber of Terror suffers to an extent for its ambition, but on balance, achieves much of what it sets out to do. You can’t really criticise its enthusiasm, even if there are a few missteps along the way.

We start with what is clearly intended to be a franchise character – one Mr Nash Carruthers, who has a ‘shit list’: this means gathering up a number of people and putting them through some pretty unpleasant situations, and all in the name of personal vengeance. It wouldn’t be much of a shit list otherwise. We see some of this going on before the credits even roll; this is another love letter to 80s horror in many respects, right down to the title font, and certainly in Carruthers’ badass characterisation. And, it seems that Carruthers has the son of a local mobster in his sights. He tortures one Tyler Ackerman, hammering him into a box and leaving him there. We’re led to believe that Tyler’s a goner, and that’s that: we’re primed for Carruthers doing more of the same.

Instead, a month passes: Carruthers is still at large, but his down time gets disturbed by a couple of masked intruders. They’re not entirely pros, but they’re still able to capture Carruthers and take him to the Chamber of Horrors itself, a torture set-up in a safe house which is being overseen by Ava Ackerman, Tyler’s sister. The Chamber of Horrors has a long standing, and Ava is prepared to use it to find out where her brother is. Carruthers is taking it all rather well; it even seems like he’s enjoying himself.

As Ava strives to take control of the situation, things take an…unexpected turn. Not only does Ava get the information she wanted about her brother, but there’s more taking place, meaning that this is no longer a straightforward torture horror – which it could have been, all told. The film changes tack completely, transforming into a very gory homage to a hundred and one existing horrors, and perhaps one of its issues is that it does try to fit so much in, swinging the plot away from one thing to something else entirely. There’s clearly affection for the genre, though this does veer towards self indulgence in some places; there’s a lot of dialogue, but it takes some time for the characters to really ‘stick’, which holds the film back in the earlier acts to some extent. Some characters are there, loud, and then they’re gone, which can be a little jarring. But it knows what it’s doing in terms of how it paying lip service to horror, openly alluding to it in the script on more than one occasion. You may or may not enjoy this approach, but it’s loud and proud at least, and it does manage the about-face rather well, turning into a different genre of horror entirely.

Whilst the film could have used some cuts where it starts to dawdle – the hot-cold-hot game, for example – when it gets going, its change of direction makes it into a dead cert festival crowd pleaser, the sort of thing which elicits cheers from an audience. It spends a lot of time setting up what is essentially a gore fest, and perhaps sacrifices some plot to get there, but the SFX is very good fun, as well as nicely done on the film’s limited budget. There are viewers for whom this kind of back-to-basics gore is the most important element of their horror cinema, and it’s clearly close to the heart of director Michael Pereira, here directing his first feature-length film, but with a back catalogue of similarly OTT fare in his filmography. So yes, there are a few lulls and a few choices which could be questioned along the way, and its self-referential style may not be for everyone, but there’s plenty of ambition here, as well as – overall – enough going on to keep The Chamber of Terror entertaining.

The Chamber of Terror will screen as part of the Blood in the Snow Film Festival on 20th November 2021.

Last Night in Soho (2021)

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

There’s already been abundant proof of Edgar Wright’s love of horror, but his most recent film, Last Night in Soho, changes tack from what we may have seen already; it’s a ghost story, but it pushes at the boundaries of what a ghost story can be; it’s a kind of 60s-glam spin on The Mezzotint in some respects, and a very modern, hardline assault on selfhood in others. Or, is a time travel story? Perhaps finally it’s a cautionary tale about wallowing in nostalgia which is not your own, or at least, the perils of living vicariously. All in all it’s a fascinating and engrossing story and whilst some aspects of the plot are laid on rather thickly at first, it’s so carefully constructed and paced that you want to go wherever it takes you.

The psychically-sensitive Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) has inherited her gran’s tastes in music, fashion and cinema; when she receives news that she has been accepted into the London College of Fashion, she’s thrilled and can’t wait to take her 60s inspirations away with her. We know that she lost her mum at a young age; she sees her, sometimes, and feels her mum’s approval. Batting away grandma’s concerns about London as a kind of entity which swallows people up, Ellie moves out, very excited for her future. Needless to say, this rather naïve young girl should have listened to her gran (Rita Tushingham). A few crude encounters later – with a pervy taxi driver who jokingly tells her he’s going to lurk around her Halls of Residence and stalk the girls living there (!) and her wonderfully awful, if cartoonish new roommate Jocasta (Synnove Karlse) – and suddenly Ellie isn’t so sure about big, bad London. She soon makes the decision to find somewhere else to live and happens upon a dated little bedsit not too far away: it’s perfect. The landlady, Miss Collins, is a bit of a stickler, but that suits Ellie just fine. She begins to feel like she could do this.

Once she has moved in to her new place, though, Ellie begins having odd visions – lucid dreams of the old Soho, a world which looks almost impossibly glamorous and classy. In this, her aesthetic paradise, she sees the reflection of a young woman about her own age and begins to follow her; she is in awe of her confidence and charisma, finding her incredibly aspirational as she charms her way into the life of a club booker called Jack (a dapper Matt Smith) and, seemingly, commences a career as a singer. But the girl – Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) – is not on the trajectory that Ellie first supposes she is. Soon, Ellie’s visions are intrusive rather than tantalising, and they begin to crowd out her real life, tentative as it already is. Ellie no longer feels like a bystander, and feels somehow that she has to find out what happened at the end of the story which she has, to some extent, been living.

The beginning of the film has some very clunky male characterisation which feels like it has taken on the message of #MeToo and run amok with it, though thankfully later developments balance this out. The instant addition of the bad man in the taxi and some of the godawful men Sandie encounters in her life, for instance, are eventually balanced out by a screenplay which begins to weave something far more considered out of its initial elements. Last Night in Soho is at its best once it has established its key players and plot points and is then in a position to weave everything together in a fascinating way, with surprises and developments which encourage viewers to think again about what they’ve seen. The little visual link-ups, and the use of references which make new sense in light of something we’ve already been shown are truly skilled, subtle and effective – far more skilled, subtle and effective than any number of ‘Easter egg’ type packages beloved of lesser screenwriters and directors, whilst showing a level of trust in the audience to understand and appreciate them. And, at the risk of wallowing in nostalgia which is not my own, either, 60s Soho looks absolutely phenomenal: it’s rendered incredibly well, it makes for a superb backdrop to the story and it’s every inch the gorgeous fantasy. Note the addition of photo comparisons with London now, which use some particularly unflattering shots taken during Covid lockdown, but make their point. Doesn’t it look soulless, lonely? No wonder Ellie gets drawn in to the old Soho, however brutal and malign it is beneath the surface.

The performances here are solid, with McKenzie offering up a suitably blank slate character at first, one who runs the gamut of emulation and self-determination. Anya Taylor Joy is really in a supporting role here, but exudes the kind of magnetism which makes her appeal – and everything else which befalls her – very plausible, whilst Michael Ajao – carrying the flag as the film’s Sole Straightforward Good Bloke – is good to watch because, frankly, he’s the only humane fellow student enrolled on Ellie’s course, so thank god for him. But as is so often the case it’s the older actors who really have the gravitas here, namely the wonderful Terence Stamp and of course the much-missed Diana Rigg, here in her swansong performance and perhaps appropriately starring in a film set – in part – during her heyday as an actress. She will, probably, be remembered in her later years as the Queen of Thorns, but Miss Collins is a great role with some great lines. Responding to Ellie’s distress that something terrible may have happened in the past in her room, she retorts simply, “This is London. Someone has died in every room in every building…” Her worldliness, her eyeroll-realism is an important part of the film, and she plays it beautifully: the film is dedicated to her memory.

Fans of the era will of course absolutely adore the music, the cars, the clothes, but beyond all that, Last Night in Soho is a bloody effective, creative and classy take on supernatural storytelling. It would certainly merit a rewatch, and this would no doubt turn up more evidence of Wright’s brilliant, meticulous ideas.

Last Night in Soho is in UK cinemas now.

Blood in the Snow 2021: Woodland Grey

Posted on by Keri O'Shea

In many respects, a good way to sum up the sylvan horror of Woodland Grey is with the old adage, ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’. It’s an unusual film, calling on some familiar horror elements, but then in other ways completely rejecting these, in order to create something far more introspective, fractured and surreal.

From the very beginning, the film asks questions, questions, questions. It begins in the middle of some mysterious, stressful event, with a man (Ryan Blakely) leaving his rundown trailer in the woods to investigate a strange sound… we don’t, at this juncture, discover what is going on. The next day, life seems to go mutely on – he hunts, he makes a fire – but he’s given to casting odd looks towards a small, locked-up building a little way away from his camp. This may be yet another of the film’s already growing list of questions, questions, questions, but a rather more pressing one comes with the nameless man’s imminent discovery of an unconscious, injured woman in the woods.

He brings her home. She revives, disorientated and scared of course, but, as her injuries won’t allow her to move very much, she reluctantly accepts the man’s help. He is not used to company, and finds her conversation quite a challenge – but it’s when this girl, Emily (Jenny Raven) herself discovers the locked building (and what seems to be inside it) that their relationship becomes more… strained. Steadily, as the film adds additional information about why Emily came to the woods when she did, the plot weaves together in a very interesting way – pulling audience loyalties here, there and everywhere. Emily’s early attempts at conversation with the man are tonally odd and stilted, and whilst the man is still an unknown quantity, this troubled, loner character seems most deserving of sympathy. But, through careful plot layering, this response shifts. Characterisation is expansive here, able to subvert expectations, even whilst dialogue and exposition are doled out very sparsely.

Sylvan horror is always a favourite. Best of all is where films are able to embed ‘the woods’ as a character in their own right, and even where ideas and development are lacking, some nicely-shot woodland scenes are often enough to contribute at least some decent atmosphere. ‘The woods’ are definitely character-worthy here, with some intriguing exposition. Ideas are certainly not lacking and it is pleasingly difficult to predict where things are going. Actually, though, for the most part the film feels quite claustrophobic, and any sense of the scale of the woods is held back for most of the running time, with the camp and its environs really feeling like a very very small space hemmed in by trees, to the point that it’s inescapable.

The plot’s progress, with gradual invocations of something very weird, profound and all-encompassing, is able to hold interest, albeit there’s a slight lull around the hour mark as the characters reset before being drawn further into their own nightmare scenarios. Along the way, and as per the title maybe, this is a pale, washed-out, cold looking film, very sparse in its beauty. It’s almost dwarfed by its soundtrack in places, which offers a varied blend of delicate and looming; you are led to understand that you will feel unsettled via the soundscape on offer, which works very well with the tone of the film.

Woodland Grey is difficult to review without spoilering, but suffice to say that it is a largely low-key, reality-disrupting film which draws you in to its strange world. It could have done without some of the looping false conclusions, perhaps, and its increasingly surreal direction will lose some viewers, but many more will enjoy picking through the deeper meanings here, appreciating that the film dodges the expected. Regardless of a couple of minor issues, this film is disconcerting, smart and creepy.

Woodland Grey (2021) will receive its World Premiere at the Blood In The Snow Film Festival on Monday, November 22nd 2021. For more information, click here.