When vlogger Angus (Charlie Robb) gets an opportunity to enjoy the peace and tranquillity of a remote Northumberland retreat, he jumps at the chance to escape the stresses of everyday life and the thought of a digital detox certainly appeals. Well, until he gets there and sets up multiple cameras in order to record his […]
A teenager awakes in hospital; by the time we acknowledge this and what’s going on, she’s already hiding behind her mobile phone and headphones, which establishes a key motif in The Invisible Half (2024): the use of mobile phone technology to either facilitate, or block out, the outside world. We also see that the mobile […]
A woman awakes, alone, in a woodland clearing. She notices she has some injuries on her bare feet, suggesting she was walking for a while; however, she clearly can’t remember how she got there. Limping to the nearest main road, she is able to get her bearings, following the route back to what appears to […]
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 […]