The cinematic monsters made famous by Universal nearly a century ago continue to appear on our screens today, though often now imbued with much more modern symbolism; the vampire, Frankenstein’s creature (or versions of it) and of course the werewolf are used to represent current predilections, anxieties and fears. You could even say the werewolf […]
Social satire blends with horror in Vincent Must Die (Vincent Doit Mourir), but not – at least initially – in ways your average viewer might expect. It’s a film which starts small and retains that standard of intimacy, always playing out as one man’s struggle against an unprecedented turn of events, even when those events […]
A crisis of belief besets a West African village in Mami Wata, as corruption and greed sweep in behind it. A dark, often cruel story unfolds, painting a devastating picture of the repercussions of change. The film does this without being overly simplistic, and it does it without any chiding, even if its message is […]
The Fantasia International Film Festival is a genuine delight and a highlight in the Warped Perspective year; its organisers definitely have the gift when it comes to selecting intrepid cinema from around the world. If anything, it can be a little intimidating to scroll through the selections: there’s enough there to keep a film fan […]
You don’t have to ask me twice. Warped Perspective covered a number of the National Film Festival for Talented Youth’s horror, sci-fi or otherwise left-field short films last year; not only did this prove to be a good call, but two of the short films featured made it onto my favourite short films of the […]
We seem to be living through something of a golden age for documentary film. With the rise and rise of Netflix and other platforms, there now seems to be endless scope to provide for people’s endless appetite for them, to queue them up; they don’t necessarily only want to see great, momentous events being explored, […]
Plot is not a primary concern in the close-at-hand speculative fiction of Rubikon (2022): that’s not to suggest it’s another of those art installation type films which evades a storyline completely, but it is a slow, quiet, morose kind of film on the whole. It could easily have been done very differently. A few things […]
There’s a surprisingly languid start to 68-minute feature The Underbug (2023), one which belies the brief amount of time which the film has; the camera lingers first of all on a jungle scene, showing an array of insects in their natural habitat, all oblivious to whatever might be going on with mankind. It has a […]
On The Edge sees filmmakers Jen and Sylvia Soska back at the helm: here, writing, directing and producing an original feature once again. You may, if you look around, see it being vaunted as a ‘psychosexual’ piece of work, a film targeted at an 18+ audience and, through its use of nudity, BDSM and kink, […]
When a couple has been together for a “stupid amount of time”, as in the case of Dan (Max Woertendyke) and Jen (Dana Berger), then breaking up is a difficult thing: years of shared history blur into bad feelings, anger obscures rational solutions and it can feel as if you’re going around in circles. In […]
Somewhere in rural Carpathian Ukraine, just before a significant local festival: dad Leonid (Oleksandr Yatsentyuk) is back in his home village after an unspecified period of time ‘working away’, much to the delight of his adolescent son Nazar (Stanislav Potiak). It seems at first that he’s been in jail perhaps, or otherwise prevented from being […]