Archive: Author: Keri O'Shea

Japanese cinema has a proud tradition of body horror and over the past ten years or so, the Sushi Typhoon phenomenon alone has given us a whole host of flying limbs and mad mutations which are lots of fun to watch. For many of us, films of this ilk have pretty much set the bar for what’s possible to do on screen, with each subsequent movie going one step further – nothing is too silly or extreme. Lest we forget, though, Japan also boasts an equally proud heritage of kink, and in Mai-Chan’s Daily Life, the two have become one. A fetish film coupled with body horror? The result is nothing if not memorable…
Based, as you might have guessed, on an adult manga (which features in the opening and closing credits, as a nice nod to the source material) Mai-Chan’s Daily Life starts with a young woman, Miyako, who is seeking employment. She gets invited for an interview to begin work as a live-in maid at an isolated estate on the outskirts of Tokyo. There’s another maid already incumbent, the cute Mai of the film’s title – whose role it is to show Miyako the ropes. Still, given that the interview involved stripping off ‘to get measured’, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that the job is not exactly conventional. The girls have to dress up as cats to eat their meals off the floor, for example, and they must keep the torture chamber immaculately clean. Their employers – Mr and Mrs Kaede – are indeed a pair of perverts, but they’re enabled to go that little bit further in their pursuits by the fact that Mai seems to have the supernatural ability to regenerate, whatever is done to her. So the Kaedes routinely gouge out her eyes, hack off her digits, and then simply wait for it all to grow back. And, when Miyako sees them doing this, it isn’t long until she’s getting off on the hi-jinks as well. Continue reading “DVD Review: Mai-Chan’s Daily Life (2014)” →

By Keri O’Shea

There seems to be a minor trend in modern horror (and posssibly other genres, though I see less of those) for starting the narrative of a film at around three quarters of the way through the arc you’ll eventually get to see in full. I noticed the same thing about the very last thing I reviewed – Don’t Breathe – in which the very first scene shows us one of the key characters in a heck of a lot of trouble at the hands of another. Structuring the film like this takes a lot of the surprise elements away from the audience; we’re positioned as knowing bystanders, already clued in that things are going to go badly wrong, and left only to observe the finer details. This is evidence, perhaps, of the way in which horror fans have become rather jaded, no longer expected to be carried along by a straightforward linear plot because we’ll have seen it a million times before – but even if I’m extrapolating way too much here, I think it’s fair to say that showing most of your hand of cards before the game has really started is a risky strategy, and one which demands careful work.

This brings me to What We Become (2015), a film which is oddly enough not the first Danish zombie film I’ve ever seen, giving the lie to the trivia section of its IMDb page, but oddly enough, it labours under a lot of the same issues that I talked about five years ago when I reviewed its predecessor, Opstandelsen (‘Resurrection’). I don’t feel customarily coy about calling this a zombie film or worrying too hard about spoilers, either, as even aside from the three-quarters-along start point, our key family’s little girl is plastered all over the publicity materials – looking decidedly bloodthirsty and infectious. So, with the possibility of big surprises receding by the second, the film’s opening scenes (distraught mother, nursing suspiciously ill little girl on her lap, as all people seem to do in films when someone gets infected in this way) quickly give way to a step back in time, and we meet the family in happier days: there’s the slightly wet dad, Dino (Troels Lyby), the domestic martyr, mother Pernille (Mille Dinesen), the floppy-haired teenage son Gustav (Benjamin Engell) and the little angel from the poster, Maj (Ella Solgaard). All seems reasonably normal: Gustav is rebelling in a very low-key way, though gets cheered up by the arrival of a cute new neighbour; his dad is trying and failing to reach out to him, Pernille is doing ALL the work around the house, tuh, and Maj spends most of her time petting her pet rabbit, which (spoiler alert) doesn’t go full Holy Grail at any point.

The film does a reasonable job of setting up the characters here – our main family, plus their neighbours – and this is something it maintains quite well throughout. We get some sense of simmering low-level tensions, but all in all the family unit is represented as settled and normal, with enough time taken to establish their general believability. It soon all goes wrong, though, as we have always known it would: a strange strain of flu arrives in the area, initiating a crackdown which sees people confined to their homes by gun-toting HAZMAT special agents who shrink-wrap the houses (!) and threaten to kill anyone who tries to escape, or indeed asks questions. The family are reduced to watching the TV to find out what is going on, but they clearly aren’t being told everything, and the strain of living on the food and water rations doled out to them by the HAZMAT guys is soon unbearable.

Because that’s what this film is, for the most part – an exercise in claustrophobia, with a family stuck cheek-by-jowl with one another for the forseeable future. And for all the pomp of the opening scene, the pace of the film trickles away beneath the weight of all this …waiting. I’ve already said that What We Become is a zombie film, and yeah, it is, but even this aspect is held off for a long time, keeping the pay-off we all know is coming to the minimum. If this film is about anything, it’s about how people can be manipulated and isolated by societal powers whose authority we tend to trust. (I do not see this film, as other reviewers have done, as a commentary on the migrant crisis, by the way. Perhaps I’m wrong, but then not everything’s symbolic.) Eventually, of course, we get back to the opener, and then we proceed onwards until the film’s close; there are the usual developments, the usual silly decisions and the usual shambling dead laying siege to the living, with no deviations from a plot-line which most of us have seen a hundred times.

I suppose this is my biggest bugbear with this film. It sticks rigidly to a formula, and yes, whilst elements are neatly in place, with decent performances, some good camera work and a number of effective scenes, one might ask – why make a film which is so achingly familiar? Had no other films of this kind ever been made – no imperiled families, no groups of people holed up in houses, no corrupt, cruel officials, no mystery viruses, no bogus healthcare, no symptoms which kill then resurrect, no peckish corpses – then What We Become would be an excellent example of a horror film. As it stands, it simply blends in. Either writer/director Bo Mikkelsen has seen every zombie film and wanted to make an homage of his own for his first feature, or else he’s seen very few and isn’t aware of the raft of similarities here, or just maybe it’s easy to get funding together for a good old zombie movie, but in any case – the sheer lack of distinguishing features here damages the overall competence of this film, which is a shame.

By Keri O’Shea

As a willing outsider to parenthood, it’s not too much of a reach for me to see the whole thing rather as some very fine horror movies have seen it – as something alienating, pervasive and often irrational. Having children is something most people sign up to eventually, or often yearn to if they can’t, and then ask repeatedly if you’re going to sign up, too. Being a parent confers status, but it also shifts a person’s priorities completely; it’s one hell of a fork in the road. As for pregnancy and childbirth itself, it may have stopped killing women (in the West) in the numbers it once did, but it still walks hand in hand with invasive medical procedures, pain and discomfort, lethargy, sickness, physical damage and of course, mental health issues. All of this is, of course, ‘worth it’ and, as I’m regularly assured, I’m just one of those awful childless women who doesn’t understand – but, hey, even if mainstream culture is still reticent on the dark side to raising a child, then horror cinema has long embraced it, both squirming at the physical aspects of pregnancy and holding a mirror to the life-subverting aspects of bringing up baby too. Rosemary’s Baby, a classic of this kind for good reason, positions Rosemary’s pregnancy as something quietly monstrous, sapping her strength and then her autonomy as she’s manipulated and sedated in turn. She is given one opportunity for revenge and reassertion of self, but instead capitulates to her maternal instincts. Other films look more closely at the role of the baby itself, such as Grace (2009), which pushes the draining physical demands made by a newborn into more grotesque, if understated body-horror territory – again, pushing the mother away from her friends and family, her instincts compelling her to nurture her child at all costs to her.

This brings us to Shelley (2016), a film with similar subject matter and some similar developments to the above, but which – on reflection – is more subtle and ambiguous, defying any neat summary, yet one of those rare films which dares the disapproval of all of those folks crying out for neat summaries.

The film begins with a young Romanian woman, Elena (Cosmina Stratan) being driven to her new place of work, where she’ll be acting as housekeeper and assisting Louise (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), who is recuperating after an illness. Louise and her husband Kasper (Peter Christoffersen) live an isolated and largely self-sufficient life on their small Swedish estate: there’s no running water, no electricity (the New-Agey Louise seems to actively fear it) but the married couple seem fine with their no-mod-cons existence, and the house’s environs are indisputably serene and beautiful.

Elena and Louise begin to bond – first, via conversations about Elena’s little boy, Nicu, whom Louise asks after. Elena explains that he’s living with her parents back home while she works to save money for them both. It soon transpires that Louise has suffered miscarriages and the ensuing complications led to her womb being removed; this is clearly a subject which causes her profound pain. Off the back of this frankness, a warm, believable friendship between the couple and their employee soon follows. Elena teases them for their unusual lifestyles, they tease her back, and it seems as though the presence of somebody new has added some fresh energy to their home.

One evening, Louise asks Elena if she would consider surrogacy for her and Kaspar. Their payment for this, she explains, could enable Elena to go home to her son far sooner, and secure the apartment she wants for them both. After careful thought – and a mother’s desire to do right by her little boy – Elena accepts, and the reception of this news by her hosts is genuinely sweet. The implantation of Louise’s egg and Kaspar’s sperm is successful and Elena’s pregnancy progresses – but soon, she begins to suffer nightmares, then minor adverse symptoms which worsen. Louise, seeming genuinely alarmed, is worried about her, though medics assure them both that the baby is fine: however, Elena is convinced that something is wrong and begins pleading to leave.

The film could have began to flounder at this stage, painting the rest of its plot in foot-high letters and adding a pentagram at the end for good measure (as is conventional). By the time half of the film had passed, I found myself hoping against hope that this wouldn’t be the case, and thankfully it isn’t: to do so would have rendered the slow, meticulous build-up of atmosphere null and void. Shelley isn’t an exercise in clear exposition, and its mood is not generated to lure viewers into a false sense of security before a change of tack. What it does superbly it does oh-so quietly, and it maintains this approach throughout.

Things are shown to be out of kilter – quite aside from the mesmeric, deeply-unsettling sound design courtesy of Martin Dirkov – in unassuming ways. The clean Scandinavian interiors have flies crawling in cupboards; Louise swigs from a bottle of red wine, all the while extolling the virtues of clean living; there’s something faintly hollow about the quiet happiness on offer. Also the way the narrative skips – from Elena’s warm agreement to being a surrogate through to a cold, functional medical procedure, for instance, lends the film an episodic, dream-like quality which can feel exclusionary and unsettling. We are led to feel exactly as Elena (with whom we spend the most time as a character) must feel. The ‘good news’ of her pregnancy reinvigorates Louise and Kaspar’s sex life; as they grow closer, more intimate, the person facilitating it all is shut out even more. Elena’s nightmares may be just that, or they may be supernatural, but unquestionable is her loneliness, and as pregnancy weakens her physically, she begins to recede as a person. Louise seems genuinely alarmed by her surrogate’s condition, but attempts to help her strip Elena of even more autonomy. She’s given ‘healing treatments’ she didn’t ask for, given nutritious food which doesn’t match what she chooses to eat, and is grilled on her behaviour. Louise is no monster (Kaspar, however, grows ever more absent) but it’s impossible not to feel sorry for this poor girl, in a strange country, away from her family, growing increasingly vulnerable as her pregnancy – or is that Louise’s pregnancy? – develops.

One of the brief downsides to this character-centred approach is that little is truly made of the sylvan setting; the press release mentioned the house being a significant presence in the film, for instance, but on balance I disagree. Where these people live is relevant in terms of their isolation, and of course Elena’s distance from home, but otherwise, people’s internal worlds seem more developed and are given far more attention on-screen. Still, the rare skill invoked by first-time feature (!) director Ali Abbasi weaves a complex tale, and leaves us with questions which I feel could definitely be rewarded by repeat viewings. Is Shelley pre-partum psychosis writ large? Is it a parable on human exploitation? Is it about the all-consuming effects of maternity, or is there – is there – something more otherworldly behind it? These things I don’t know, but the film is better, not worse for it. It’ll be too quiet, too arty for some, and any answers it provides are inconclusive, but I’ve never before seen a film which marries the idea of starting a family to such an utter sense of dread, and as such I think it’s a unique and defiant piece of work.

Shelley will be released on DVD and download on the 10th October, 2016.

By Keri O’Shea

I hope that I’m not doing the film being reviewed a disservice to immediately mention Game of Thrones here, but it sees that the success of the latter is now so huge that there’s a large battle-shaped void in our viewing when the latter disappears from our screens for another year, and more than a few eager souls ready to fill it. Now, whilst medieval epic The Last King doesn’t have any fantastical elements like giants or dragons, it certainly boasts a lot of the aesthetics and themes which make GoT the indisputable smash banger that it is, from hails of arrows to loyalty in the face of political power-play. And then of course there’s one of GoT’s key actors (Kristofer Hivju) in a key role here, playing a Torstein rather than a Tormund, but essentially reprising the blunt, good-hearted man of action which has made his name worldwide.

Where the film parts ways with the aforementioned series, however, is in its real-life historical basis. The director of The Last King, Nils Gaup, made a Viking-themed film titled Pathfinder in the 1980s (a film I love, though I take issue with some of the characterisation). Well, his most recent feature is far more firmly anchored in realism, though coming from that intersection between myth and history which usually arises with a good yarn. Coming post-Viking Age, the film is set in Norway in the year 1204. Although Norway has been Christianised by this point, as elsewhere in Europe the whole ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ gambit has been ignored in favour of factionalism and brutal attempts to seize power; Norway is divided into small kingdoms, with the East Norwegian/Danish alliance, the Baglers, vying for control over the independent West. Fearing imminent invasion, the king sends some of his loyal Birkebeiners to escort his illegitimate baby son Håkon Håkonson – and the baby’s mother – to safety, ahead of the invading army. Illegitimate or not, the boy is in line to the throne, and will be killed if he’s discovered and identified. However, what seems initially to be a successful mission is thwarted by traitors in the king’s camp, who see the two friends – Torstein and Skjervald (Lilyhammer’s Jakob Oftebro) – taking the child to safety. Skjervald is followed and information as to little Håkonson’s whereabouts is brutally extracted from his young family. There’s our coming vengeance angle, then – but can the Birkebeiners prevent an overthrow of power which seems to come as much from within the country as without? Life at court is just as fraught with risk and duplicitious goings-on…

Firstly, and in common with a rather different Norwegian film that I reviewed lately (The Wave) this film is an absolute visual feast. Maybe I’m biased by my long-standing love of Scandinavia scenery, but quite honestly, who could look at places like this and not feel something? The bleak, beautiful and truly-inclement conditions on display look fantastic and Gaup gets that, even giving the Northern Lights a bit of screentime. Sure, all the skiing was a bit of a surprise, but of course it makes perfect sense in a country completely snowbound for many months of the year, and in fact it’s funny that the Wildlings never thought of it. In keeping with this brutal, yet Sublime landscape, life as depicted in The Last King is itself brutal – though on a workable and smaller scale, with no vast armies pitted against vast armies here, rather a believable number of men in the fight. Whilst the film isn’t awash with blood and grue, either, it certainly makes the point that bloodshed was a matter-of-fact process, where women and children are not let off the hook (Hollywood would have had the girls throwing the men around like matchsticks at some point; Gaup does not).

Outbreaks of violence are matched against far slower sequences, in which we’re invited to understand the key protagonists and their motivations. These are, by and large, plausible and engaging, although on occasion the film feels a little like Two Men and a Baby (or perhaps due to the large amount of scenes shared by the baby himself, Jonathan Oskar Dahlgren, a little like Willow – two films where the baby feels like a person rather than a prop). This is largely Hivju’s and Oftebro’s film, although all of the supporting cast are good; the villains here are a little one-dimensional, something the director decided on in Pathfinder, too, but as a force to be reckoned with they’re more than adequate, if not equally as fleshed-out as the good guys. In fact, only some bizarre oversights with dubbing (a lullaby clearly not coming from the supposed singer; a baby crying when the bairn is in shot and looking perfectly happy) threaten the overall competent handling of all of the elements in play.

Fair enough, nearly all of these historical action films share obligatory elements (like the wafty female vocals on the credits or the aforementioned vengeance plot-line) but The Last King is a worthwhile entrant into the genre. It has its roots in a period of history I’ll confess I don’t know well, but it crafts a decent, accessible tale and supplies an abundance of equally decent performances and settings. Plus, let’s be honest: any more Kristofer Hivju hurtling around in furs brandishing weaponry can’t be a bad thing, now can it?

The Last King is available from 3rd October 2016.

By Keri O’Shea

You know, it’s funny. I’ve spent around fifteen years writing about horror cinema – for a variety of audience sizes from one upwards – but in all that time I’ve never been for a wild weekend in a remote cabin, and nor do I know anyone who has. Perhaps it’s just not a British thing, but were anyone to use the opening gambit of oh-so-many of these films as any sort of indicator of reality, then you’d think a cabin break was some sort of rite of passage; everyone just seems to do it, everyone’s distant relative apparently has a little place in the woods, and there are far more cabins than castles in modern horror. Anyway, considering that The Evil In Us proudly proclaims its pedigree as “Cabin Fever meets Evil Dead”, then we’re already at cabin x cabin, even before the opening credits roll.

When they do, what we see is a fairly robust and stylish set of visuals – based on first impressions, presumably there’s at least some cash and some clue behind this project, as shown by the prettily-shot woman bathing in (and, for want of a better expression, gargling with) blood. Furthermore, there’s an early surprise when we seem to start with urban horror, as police discover a gruesome scene within the confines of an otherwise normal apartment block in Seattle. Still, this turns out to be a parallel plot line: as a detective tries to get to the bottom of what happened in the apartment, an expected group of twentysomethings are indeed getting ready to head into the boonies for a 4th July party. A few unnecessary lines of dialogue tell us that there is limited cellphone signal at the cabin they’re staying in, and as ever I’m unclear on whether this group of old schoolfriends are meant to be hateable or relatable, but feeling called upon to ponder this now seems as ubiquitous a part of cabin-based horror, for me, as the bikinis and the weak bottled beers.

It seems, though, that the events back in Seattle and the party animals in the woods are somehow linked. Key to this is a mystery narcotic, a bag of which has made its way out of the city with the gang of friends; the supplier of this narcotic evidently has plans for those who fall under its influence, and there’s an as-yet unknown reason for wanting to make the people who take it increasingly paranoid, angry and aggressive.

The Evil In Us isn’t a badly-made film, and the shooting style suits the increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere as, one by one, friends fall under the influence of the drug. There’s a fair amount of ambition here in terms of combining several tried-and-tested elements from horror films we may know well, and attempting to link scenes in the cabin to something wider that is going on outside of this situation is a decent idea in terms of adding interest. This does mean that first-time feature director Jason William Lee has to navigate some choppy waters, though; filmmakers have long struggled with filming drug trips, and they’ve often struggled with the ratcheting tension you’d expect from…well, from a bunch of young people losing their minds in a confined space, and there’s no exception to that here, even if it was brave to try and incorporate so much. Ultimately, it’s not the reversion-to-yelling or the drug use scenes which do the film the most harm, however: rather, it’s towards the film’s close. By this point, The Evil In Us is a zombie film by any other name rather than anything really akin to The Crazies or Blue Sunshine, with the same aesthetics and behaviour on display as we’ve seen in any number of other films in the zombie genre.

And as for the ‘big reveal’ of what has been going on, that emerges only in the closing parts of the film, and as such feels very much tacked on for some heavy-handed social commentary. Had there been more of a consistent approach to this political element, then this could have added a much more interesting dimension overall. Seeing the film hailed as ‘a message for our time’ is, I think, overstating it somewhat, unless you want to go fully ‘meta-‘ and comment on how the film’s flailing aggression and conspiracy theory elements give you a sense of deja-vu which is currently being echoed by our global political picture…

The Evil In Us will be released by Studiocanal on 10th October 2016.