A viewing of Black Eyed Susan (2024) will, if you have any stomach to get through its blisteringly unpleasant quandaries and implications, leave you with many questions. However, for all of that, the one resounding question for this reviewer is: are we ten years away from this kind of scenario, or five? Let me explain. […]
How do you solve a problem like the Oieans? Dune-like, The Silent Planet (2024) opens with a proverb being spoken in an alien tongue: Earth is now host to an alien species called the Oieans, though they are not the straightforward, superior civilisation which we might expect. Rather, they have arrived to Earth seeking help […]
A fraught, uneasy atmosphere seems to pervade Dirty Bad Wrong (2023) from its very opening moments. There’s something about the ways in which young mother Sid (Michaela Kurimsky) sits, distracted, as her young son Jesse (Jack Greig) fidgets and investigates their surroundings in ways which quickly suggest they aren’t at home. And, as she is […]
Please note: this review may contain mild spoilers, so if you are hopeful of seeing Longlegs with no prior knowledge – be warned. Neon has put together an intriguing, long-game promotional campaign for Longlegs (2024) which has been appearing in tantalising parcels for the past few months. For this, they deserve credit: this film will […]
In the decrepit remains of a fire tower, a locket hangs in close up. A few lines of offscreen chatter leads to said locket being taken: the conversation has hardly faded into the distance before the ground shudders and a hulking corpse rises from the grave. It’s unlikely that he’s going to ask for it […]
As Sleep (2023) opens, we can – appropriately enough – hear someone gently snoring: a couple is in bed. And yet, you get the distinct impression that restful sleep isn’t going to feature heavily here, or even at all beyond this point. The film almost instantly starts to toy with the hazy delineations between sleep, […]
When a film starts with a grand, Gothic peal of thunder, it had better mean it. It had better not be suggesting something it can’t deliver. Well, thankfully, The Vourdalak (2023) very much delivers: it’s a gloomy folktale made even gloomier by writers Adrien Beau and Hadrien Bouvier, and it’s an intimate, though always dreamlike […]
Having recently rewatched the superb Wake In Fright, I was reminded of just how impressive Australian horror can be. That nightmarish classic led me to revisit Picnic At Hanging Rock, Next Of Kin and Long Weekend. All particularly good, all well worth tracking down. Of course, you already know that, unfortunately, this review is of […]
Dystopian cinema – often based on dystopian literature – sometimes likes to centre itself around a special event of some kind. A TV show, perhaps. A day where conventional law goes out of the window. A special competition, or spectacle of some kind – or, if you’re the screenwriters behind Boy Kills World, maybe a […]
We start this short film in the natural domain of the nose-picker: a classroom, where a group of kids are learning all about plant biology. Little Georgie (Leo Adoteye) is not fully paying attention, however: clearly distracted and distant, he’s more engaged by digging things out of his nose than he is the lesson at […]
It’s not instantly clear what you’re looking at as Body Odyssey (2023) begins: perhaps led by the title, my first guess was an Inner Space type scenario, which turns out not to be the case. In a way, this is a very fitting opening for such a strange, unsettling but highly rewarding film: disorientation is […]