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 […]
Meet Millicent. She’s a twenty-one year old student working on a thesis about children with severe allergies, which means that a prospective babysitting job could double up as useful research. This is because the child needing a sitter, Johnny (Danilo Crovetti) has a seemingly endless list of issues: he has the mother lode of severe […]
There’s a common theme throughout They Wait in the Dark, clear from the opening seconds, and it relates to the cycle of abuse: how damaged children become damaged adults, making choices which perpetrate further harm – to themselves and others. There’s some room for debate on how convincingly this is done overall in the film, […]
Who’d want to be a teenager today? Sure, for many teens living in the West there’s an immensity of privileges, but these come at a cost: more pressure, more scrutiny than ever. The Jane of this film departs the narrative in its very earliest scenes by committing suicide (off-camera, but clear). Scroll forward in time, […]
Solid Rock Trust starts with purpose and forward momentum: this in itself marks it out from a lot of rather more nebulous fare doing the rounds these days. We start a few minutes out from a significant bank heist, and we start as we mean to go on. Something big is happening, and it’s being […]
To do Skinamarink (2022) credit, all of its tedious blunders are strongly represented in the first few minutes; you don’t need to wait the full one hundred to feel cheated. The warning signs are there, and they’re there good and early: the opening credits which proclaim that it is ‘1995’, though breaking that spell by […]
Friend of the World (2020) starts with a few moments of that kind of angst which can only come from a place of relative practical comfort. Hence, as we see a woman meander back and forth against a beautiful, sunny backdrop, a female voice ponders her own lack of engagement with the world; she wants […]
Teddy Told Me To (2022) comes from that place of oddly warm nostalgia which many horror fans have for the films they saw growing up – as grisly and oddball as many of those films were, they feel comforting and familiar. It also updates things, by adding in the phenomena of YouTubers, live streaming, state-of-the-art […]
By guest contributor Chris Ward Featuring an all-star cast of familiar household names – well, they were household names thirty years ago – Renegades is a British revenge thriller that sees a group of former soldiers take to the streets of London to get revenge for the murder of former Green Beret Carver (Lee Majors), […]
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 […]
Is the climate our enemy? Sometimes it seems so; sometimes it’s represented as such, too, as if the floods, hurricanes, heatwaves and cold snaps we’ve seen in recent years are all doing it on purpose. Perhaps, then, it was inevitable that horror would take the fear of a new relationship with the environment and run […]