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 […]
Editor’s note: this discussion of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities contains some spoilers. Anthology TV series always feel like a tantalising prospect: the same goes for feature films which use the same frame. Even if one, or a couple of the stories aren’t to your tastes, you can usually bet that there’ll be something […]
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. […]
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 […]
There’s a battle of the sexes on its way in Old Flame (2022), as is abundantly hinted by the opening seconds of the film. A woman’s screams immediately cut to a video call between a father, Calvin (Andy Gershenzon) and his two young children; Daddy is away for a few days at a college reunion, […]
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 […]
Investigations of haunted houses or places have been a horror staple since the inception of cinema. And, whilst in many cases (with some notable exceptions) the allegedly haunted house/place itself has remained unchanged, the means of investigation themselves have changed and developed as the years have passed. You could even argue that technological developments have […]
With a title like Pig Killer, you know you’d be mad to expect a philosophical work, some light moral lessons or charming whimsy. That much is perfectly clear. What you may be less prepared for, though, is just how deliberately low the film aims. Wherever the ‘acceptable level’ is, it elects to nosedive past that, […]