On the outskirts of a drab Australian town, we meet new boy Naim (Joe Bird). After what can be gleaned to be a period of isolation, he seems pleased to be hanging out with someone from his school, Ryan (Stacy Clausen) – Ryan seems older and tougher, although he’s a classmate, and he’s definitely got […]
It feels like a while since we had a really good, honest-to-goodness zombie flick. For a while there, there were enough of them that we could debate whether zombies should be able run or not; with a few exceptions, though, the genre has stalled since the ferocious Train to Busan a decade ago (despite the […]
“This is a true story…sort of.” Wasting no time in getting its players on the board and establishing its own sardonic spin on Americana, Valley View Motel (2026) is a love letter to the 70s crime genre cinema with which it shares its setting. We start with what looks like a robbery gone very wrong […]
“You picked Haddaway?” 2012: Jerry’s, somewhere in the boonies, is the self-proclaimed ‘best bar in town’, with a thriving karaoke night taking place – right up until a drunk stumbles over and yanks out the machine’s power cable, blasting the literal eyeballs out of the current performer. I like it when a film makes a […]
There’s a popular line of films and television which consists of finding an idyllic (or idyllic-seeming) retro America, and then menacing it with something bloody horrible – as if to say it was never that good, not really, but also because once you’ve created a weird feeling of audience deja-vu over the clothes, toys and […]
A nightmarish (and as-yet mysterious) opening scene segues into what appears to be something like normal life, as we get started with Night After Night (2026): this is a false impression which persists as a motif throughout this alienating, unsettling film. We meet security guard Andy (Scott Poythress) and his buddy Willis (Johnny Sibilly). They […]
São Paulo party planner Malu (Martha Nowill) has a lot to do, toilet breaks notwithstanding. She has a cake to worry about, there are last-minute arrangements to make, and her twins’ father hasn’t come to pick them up as arranged, which is unhelpful, so she optimises a spare moment by helping to yank out her […]
We start with a shock in the opening moments of A Safe Distance (2026), as a tranquil forest setting erupts with a gunshot – and the film then obliquely reveals a body. Two women silently depart the scene, clean themselves up and then hitch their way out of there, finding their way to the nearest […]
Myanmar is better-known to Westerners for its political situation than for its cinema scene – much less its genre cinema scene – but low budget horror has developed a decent foothold in the country, with The Last Footage (2026) director Arkar Soe Oo already a well-known name domestically. The Last Footage is the country’s first […]
Nightborn (2026) is a film hectic with female and feminine anxieties. In common with director Hanna Bergholm’s last feature film, Hatching (2022), it explores childrearing and infant care through a supernatural lens, and whilst the supernaturalism itself flows parallel to the very real human issues in the story, the supernatural elements themselves are beautifully handled […]
Corpus (2026) is a brooding and subtle horror film which reveals its key ideas very slowly and carefully; arguably, it never allows us to understand everything, preferring to focus on its sensual, uneasy world-building and those who finds themselves there. We start in 1997: there’s an as-yet unseen photographer doing a shoot with a young […]