A strange, portentous story presses at the edges of reality in Spaghetti Junction (2023). We get minutely-realised everyday life, together with unusual elements of sci-fi and fantasy, but none of this follows expected patterns. Seething, indignant worry opens the film: we see a father’s anguish, as he rushes back to the family home to discover […]
The horrific side of motherhood has been amply explored in films recently, with varying levels of success; Adalynn (2023) takes its place amongst them, and appropriately, its own success is variable. It certainly has excellent intentions, focusing its scrutiny on a new mother for whom the walls start to close in. But it quickly becomes […]
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 […]
An at times odd, somewhat experimental piece of supernatural horror, Sound of Silence perhaps struggles because it tries to do so much. In its efforts, it at times spins wildly between being hectic and being flat, between being an homage and striking out alone. But there are good elements in here, and these deserve credit. […]
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 […]