A run of cable TV-style advertisements opens Christmas Bloody Christmas (2022), and amongst them is an ad for something called a RoboSanta+, a kind of seasonal cross between a decorative item – and a top-level piece of mall security. And why not?! It’s no detriment to the film that it’s completely clear this bit of […]
‘How long do you think we’ve been here?’ This early line in Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes (2021) perhaps puts us in mind of a classic haunted house story: like The Haunting of Hill House, with its dreaming walls and watchful ghosts, the film is centred on a beautiful, if tumbledown castle, and the people […]
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 […]
It’s the longest day of the year in the small hamlet of Pangnirtung, part of the Canadian Nunavut territory – close to the Arctic Circle. The adults of the village are excited for the special yearly barn dance, but there’s not a hell of a lot for the teens and pre-teens of Pang to do. […]
By guest contributor Darren Gaskell Enthusiastic food fanatic Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) invites Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) on a trip to a once in a lifetime dining experience on a remote island at an exclusive restaurant called Hawthorne, where superstar head chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) has prepared a multi-stage menu full of surprises and an overarching theme […]
Most Horrible Things starts at the end, or thereabouts. Here is a grand house party gone wrong, all blood splatter, discarded underwear and – body bags. We also hear a 911 call, alongside seeing police and scenes of crime moving through the property. Clearly, this party has ended… interestingly. Starting a film like this, well, […]
If Triangle of Sadness (2022) could be rendered down to one message, it’s this: society’s new ‘aspirational’ goals are just as likely to come crashing down as everything else. The film offers up a world of floating wealth, glamour, vanity and privilege, calls the whole shebang into question and then glories in pulling it down. […]
Clues that we are seeing the aftermath of violence are what introduce us to Repulse (2021): shattered glass, a trashed vehicle, a discarded hammer. But no sooner has this eerie calm unfolded, than it’s being disrupted by an angry scream; then we’re elsewhere entirely, now actually witnessing violence taking place. This episodic, fitful structure is […]
The Hellraiser franchise is the thing that won’t die. Decades after its inception in the 80s, and since one excellent sequel in the form of Hellbound (1988), it has morphed and been sold on and changed and spoiled and (partly) redeemed down through the subsequent years. The original story’s Cenobites have walked the city streets, […]
There’s no time wasted in Two Witches: it lays out its approach straight away, making it clear that this is going to be a quick-paced, overblown brand of occult horror, in places almost more of a montage of witchy scenes quite nominally linked together, rather than a film with much of a complex overarching story […]