Independent cinema needs to do a lot with a little, and this has to be one of the reasons it now so often dodges linear narratives, preferring imagined spaces or fractured timelines in order to explore its key themes, particularly if they are large or significant themes. Horror is primed for this by its nature: […]
Bear with me, but here’s a question: how do you connect to other humans when you live in a harsh dystopian future where everyone shelters from the outside world in isolated pods with only apps for company? Phew. It gets answered in a light-touch, quirky kind of way in Future Date (2024), a film which […]
After throwing abusive stepfather figure and local drug dealer Gordy (Bryant Carroll) out of the family home, art student Bella (Alexandra Faye Sadeghian) forlornly hopes that he will stay out of the lives of both her and fragile mother Yeva (Pooya Mohseni). However, he’s back almost instantly, Yeva caving in to Gordy’s pleading and assuring […]
Restless (2024) is a domestic drama which, in places, edges close to the horror genre – with a few scenes and ideas which even suggest some ambitious horror genre-splicing. However, for the most part, it retreats into domestic drama, layering this with a psychological case study of a woman (described in the synopsis as an […]
Orphaned as a result of a smallpox epidemic, siblings Jack (Levon Hawke) and Lula Parker (Esme Creed-Miles) leave their homestead and, with their grandfather, begin a journey across forbidding territory to their aunt’s place. A run-in with notorious outlaw Cutthroat Bill (Juliette Lewis) ends with grandfather dead, Lula kidnapped and Jack needing to rescue his […]
Don’t take medication which isn’t intended for you. Think twice about taking medication which is intended for you. These are the takeaway lessons of Birdeater (2023) – a film which relies heavily on altered states for both its linear and experimental plot points. This is as much of a moral standpoint as anything you get […]
There’s a scene in Vulcanizadora where, in the darkness of the woods, one of the main characters unpacks a Discman and some analogue speakers he’s brought along to entertain his friend on their camping trip. Nothing works; the cable isn’t connected to the speakers at first, but they hiss anyway; the Discman skips and stutters, […]
Misery becomes a literal monster in The Killgrin – a film which nods to a number of established horror ideas and other projects, but benefits from the ambition of director Joanna Tsanis in terms of pulling those ideas together. Airport worker Miranda (Konstantina Mantelos) is just getting off her shift at the beginning of the […]
There’s a moment during the first act of A Desert when one character asks another character, an outsider, ‘You like being a tourist?’ It’s this divided America which forms the unstable foundations of the film, looking at what happens to people choosing to be tourists in their own country, spectators in a version of America […]
In amongst recent press emails, The Caller (2025) stood out for one key reason: it’s a film made by one person (Andy Blithe). What that means here is: one person acts, and the same person makes up all of the crew, too. An interesting fact and no doubt an important project personally, then, but fortunately […]
It’s public domain IP time, folks! After Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey waded into the concept of bringing horror riffs to classic, childhood favourites, a number of projects were queueing up to put their own scary spin on a number of beloved characters as soon as those pesky copyright issues were out of the […]