Mermaid (2025) opens, perhaps deceivingly, on someone living the high life. It certainly looks like the high life at least: here’s a guy, on a yacht, sipping a chilled cocktail and listening to music. It’s textbook high life. The fact that this is a post-divorce celebration mars things slightly, but mainly that happens when a […]
Can horror teach us things? As it turns out, yes – plenty: You’re Not Me (2023) tells us, in no uncertain terms, never to turn up anywhere uninvited, even (or especially) if it’s to see your own family. It’s Christmas Eve: the film starts at a Spanish airport, where Aitana (Roser Tapias), her partner Gabi […]
Although you could easily argue that it’s been around for a very long time, multiverse horror – if we can now call it that – is immensely popular right now. As I have said elsewhere, it seems to be of especial interest to indie horror and fantasy filmmakers, for whom it affords tantalising possibilities, divesting […]
Somewhere in a cramped apartment block in urban China, a little girl plays as her father works. She’s carefully drawing a corpse flower; she then feeds a live mouse to their pet snake; it’s all wholesome stuff. Her father, it seems, is a scientist who has tasked himself with ‘fixing’ the presumably hereditary skin condition […]
Moon (2024) starts in a cage fighting arena: old favourite Sarah Reisinger (Florentina Holzinger) seems to have unexpectedly lost her spark. Losing the fight seems to mean losing her career, too. The whole faded fighter idea might be a recurring motif in film, but the way it’s handled in Moon is altogether more existential, using […]
Peacock (2024) opens with a scene both oddly quaint and chaotic, and as such gives us an early, handy symbol for what is to follow: there’s a lot of quaint chaos here. In a rolling, sunlit golf course, we see a burning golf buggy. This attracts the attention of a young couple who come to […]
“Our younger selves sing on in our hearts. We hear them still.” Thirty years ago, Luo Tong was a member of a choir which achieved a short-lived period of fame during the 1990s, thanks to their performances on a national stage. Now a filmmaker, Tong reunites with her fellow singers and teachers to reflect on […]
*THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS* For this year’s mystery Celluloid Screams grindhouse screening, we were promised something equally as bonkers as the previous year’s Lady Terminator. I was also advised by someone on the CS programming team that I’d probably seen it, which somehow meant to fellow Screamers that I would be able to pluck the […]
Small-time drug dealer Wes (James Nelson-Joyce) has a good thing going in his hometown of Dennings, with a growing stream of punters getting hooked on a form of ecstasy called “Clown.” He’s in a stable relationship with Zoe (Olivia Frances Brown), they’ve recently welcomed a son into the world and, longer term, they’re looking to […]
After being beamed up into an invading force’s spacecraft, a mischievous and resourceful Gigantopithecus called Rufus escapes his captors and hijacks an ongoing scientific procedure, resulting in a dinosaur receiving the brain of a long dead insurgent and becoming Trexx, a courageous T-Rex (well, obviously) who has to deal with a stream of alien thoughts […]
“Never take for granted when someone remembers you.” Beryl Hsu’s maternal grandmother suffers from mild dementia, diagnosed ten years previously. To keep her engaged and active, her family often pulls together to create and perform various skits in which the still formidable nonagenarian plays a starring role. Their latest project is something of a step […]