Sweetie, You Won’t Believe It (2020)

Like a lot of audience members presumably, this reviewer had no idea what to expect from a Kazakh horror-comedy. But it turns out that, however geographically far Kazakhstan might be from many of us, there are many universal features which we can all enjoy; this is an earnest, often puerile and occasionally very gory little odyssey which explores relationships and friendships, albeit through a funny, well-realised and farcical lens. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, and nor should we.

It all starts with young father-to-be Dastan (Daniar Alshinov) and his wife Zhanna (Asel Kaliyeva) who are expecting the birth of their first child – any day now, in fact. As such, they seem to be in that magical phase where they are snapping at each other about pretty much everything. For Dastan, it seems that the travails of imminent parenthood are emasculating him, or it feels like they are; everywhere he looks, he sees himself hemmed in, less of a man. Zhanna doesn’t do a lot to disabuse him of this notion, either; in fact, she chides him continuously for what looks a lot like an entire day, dawn to dusk. Ouch.

Dastan knows what will improve this situation enormously, however, so the next day he organises a nice fishing trip with the lads – a likely bunch, being a cop, and a marital aids salesman respectively. His friends are keen because they see it as an opportunity to mock Dastan for his domestic woes, and they’re actually rather surprised when he insists that yes, he does in fact want to go and fish; it wasn’t just an excuse. That being established, off they go into the countryside. This would all have been well and good, except a gang of local gangster types are engaged on certain business in the countryside too. When a …misunderstanding brings the two groups of men together, chaos kicks in. Fate, we’re told, has a way of doing that.

Sweetie, You Won’t Believe It is a lot of fun. Charming and well-paced, it’s an escapade which has something subtly fresh by nature of its country of origin, but soon feels oh-so familiar. This is by no means a philosophical work: bask in the fact that there is no subtle critique of Kazakhstan and its systems here, at least on any obvious level, and the film tends to stick with that obvious level through and through, to its credit. We have great elements for everyone: oddball local characters, toilet humour, splattery gore and a very well realised comedy of errors.

Whilst deep truths are largely set aside here in favour of gleeful, childish humour then, the film nonetheless has a heart, and it has great characterisation: you really feel for the individual plights each man goes through, even as you laugh at the outcomes. You wince and laugh with them as much as at them. It is also a film dextrous in its edits and camera work – which really helps its best sequences to land – and the direction and writing is really well-pitched at the right level too. At all times, the script and performances pick up the little nuances, the rise and fall of petty squabbles and the trials of trying to find the right words under duress. It’s all nicely done.

Sure, there’s a teeny bit of disparity of threat in some scenes towards the end of the film, but that sort of nit-picking is generally unnecessary. Plenty of laughs and a few OTT grisly moments all come together seamlessly overall in the cartoonish, feelgood vibe which this film readily sustains. It’s even all oddly life-affirming, in its way; think Sam Raimi directing a buddy comedy where he’s given free rein to add some OTT gore, and you’ll be part of the way there; this is director Yernar Nurgaliyev’s baby, however, and it would be great to get more acquainted with his work, if this is a good indication of his style and skill. Sweetie, You Won’t Believe It is a great Saturday night film, and we need plenty more of those.

Sweetie, You Won’t Believe It (2020) will be released by 101 Films on Blu-ray and digital on 21st February 2022.

Those Who Walk Away (2022)

With its very modern sensibilities and a certain level of artistic ambition, Those Who Walk Away has a few decent moments. Then again, the pitfalls of ambition over substance are written all over this (ostensibly) haunted house movie, with the main effect being that, despite some strong visuals and moments of atmosphere, it labours under being very, very underwritten overall.

As life rolls by, a young man called Max (Booboo Stewart, of Twilight fame) waits nervously for his first date with a girl he’s met online. It is, for him, a small return to normal life, having taken care of his mother for the past year. He spends a while chatting to a friend on the phone while he waits for her to arrive – more anon – but the girl, Avery (Scarlett Sperduto) soon turns up, and they begin to talk. A lot. About all that usual pillow talk stuff like enablers, incels, motivations, trauma – that kind of thing. They arrive at the venue for their date – a local cinema – and god only knows what these two bright young things would have made of their chosen screening of The Evil Dead, but sadly for them, a bomb scare (!) means the film can’t go ahead. Avery, who apparently works at said cinema, seems strangely unconcerned by this.

Never mind; they head to a bar instead, where things progress in mere minutes from a buzzword-heavy conversation to her draping herself all over him, and then Avery has a new idea: let’s head to an allegedly haunted house nearby. Incredibly, when they get there, despite it being abandoned years before, the electric’s still on; metered electric in this country is off the minute you’re through your emergency credit. Taking advantage of the improbable light, Avery tells Max the story of a spectre called ‘Rotcreep’ which is said to be attached to the house. Rotcreep requires a regular victim, or else he’ll…or else he’ll break out of the house somehow. It wasn’t too clear, but Max seems a little uncomfortable with the yarn, and he wants to leave. He’s about to feel worse, however.

Horror fans will no doubt spot where this is going, especially once some similarities to a certain other, successful indie horror from 2014 make themselves known – although the film is very loosely based on an Ursula Le Guin short story, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’, rather than explicitly on any film. The Le Guin story is a vague, philosophical piece of work, and at least in that, the film is little different. It begins to reach for some stylistically quirky, surreal moments once our characters are in/around the house, and you wouldn’t deny that some of these scenes are nicely lit and shot, but having filled the first act of the film with talking, talking, talking, it feels like a hell of a jolt. So the surreal elements feel rather muddled and tacked on; horror aside, though, and before we get anywhere near horror at all, the first part of the film offers an interesting glimpse into a version of college-age chit-chat and conversational priorities and, as the director was born in 1988, I can’t even assume that he’s got it wrong due to being on the wrong side of the generation gap. The issue with all this is that first impressions of the few characters on offer are not particularly compelling; the script heaves under its own weight, right from the opening chat between Max and his supportive pal. They wade through an awful lot of abstract nouns and mores, and I certainly don’t envy the actors trying to flesh out this oddball dynamic, before following it into the depths of a haunted house which comes complete with its own, new mythos.

‘Rotcreep’ is a bold attempt at creating a wholly new entity, and credit is always due for making such an attempt; sadly, having talked its way into abstraction, the film then clams up entirely and offers us nothing by way of exposition and as such, Rotcreep is rather a wasted opportunity. He figures but little in the film, and feels underused. There simply isn’t enough here to either endear us to the central players, make us understand them, or sweep us up in the story, of which several intended symbolic readings unfortunately passed me by. Those Who Walk Away is a film very much of two disparate, surprisingly lightweight parts which struggle to fit well with one another. As a piece of entertainment, it is rife with difficulties.

Those Who Walk Away (2022) is available from today, 11th February 2022 in theatres and on VOD.

The Abandon (2022)

The Abandon gives itself an immense amount of work to do; it has sci-fi elements, but it couples these with something akin to an ordeal horror in places. But then, it adds elements of human drama too – elements which become steadily more important as the film progresses. All in, it’s a challenging watch which could be seen as overly ambitious by some, but it deserves credit for pushing itself so hard to bring something quite unlike other films together in one place. Some elements of this kind of existential style have been explored elsewhere, but never quite like this, and it’s hard not to invest in seeing it through to the end.

The First Gulf War – 1991. As a small contingent of American soldiers try to regroup and to survive the night during an ill-fated operation, one of them gets separated from the small number of survivors and finds himself lying, peaceful for a moment, watching the sky. It turns out that what Pt. Miles Willis is trying to focus his eyes on isn’t a US air attack, or anything recognisable. A bright light passes over him; he loses consciousness.

The next thing he knows, he awakens in a sealed cell of some kind. Pulling himself to his feet, his gunshot wound continuing to bleed out, he attempts to explore this new environment. It seems hopeless – the walls are featureless, there’s no discernible exit, or any sense of who has locked him in there. Things get stranger when he sees something etched into one of the walls; in fact, there’s more than one piece of writing here. The cell seems to be a puzzle of some sort, where the rules of physics can be broken and conventional means of communication seem to be off-limits. Or, are they? His satellite phone begins to ring. If he’s a rat in a maze, it seems he’s not completely isolated in it, and when he can answer the call, he begins to work with the woman on the line to try and deduce what is happening to them.

The Abandon could easily have been hamstrung by its chosen elements – a cast of (largely) one person, in a small, closed-off set – as these each beg extra scrutiny from an audience which has no distractions from other characters, events or vistas to draw the eye. One of the ways in which The Abandon survives all of that is via lead actor Jonathan Rosenthal’s performance here. He starts entirely plausibly as a military grunt more equipped for shooting at targets than dealing with more philosophical issues; he looks confused and ill at ease and at first, tries to overcome everything which the situation throws at him by throwing extra testosterone at it. He does change, but the initial awkwardness of watching him simply hurling his weight around is suitably awkward; it’s also worth pointing out that The Abandon is a (perhaps surprisingly) physical role, and some of the ordeals which Willis goes through are gruelling – hence the early reference to ordeal horror above. There really are similarities. So it’s brutal, but yet it seems choreographed, or at least heavily stylised whenever this kind of brutality is going on: overall, it’s an unusual style of viewing experience, and again it deserves credit for layering something like this together. It’s an attractive looking film with enough variety in camerawork to open up its confined space. Viewers may be able to guess at where one of the more scientific elements may be heading, and many may well feel that the added discussions of back stories and character motivations flesh out the more abstract aspects of the plot.

Likewise, these kinds of restricted-set films can be tough to pace appropriately. The Abandon is most of the way there, though the first half of the film is more successful at carefully doling out enough details to keep the plot moving, establishing the mystery to come. Things get a little more uneven as the film heads towards its closing act however, and some of the exposition could have been handled differently, though it keeps a few tricks up its sleeve, and it’s rewarding to finally get there: it also shows that it has no intention of answering every question we may have. This is certainly a different spin on a genre which has come to be rather predictable in some aspects: director Jason Satterlund has dodged this predictability successfully.

The Abandon (2022) has been chosen to close the Mammoth Film Festival on February 6th, 2022 (world premiere).

Slapface (2021)

Whilst Slapface (2021) starts out with very broad strokes – literally showing us big brother Tom (Mike Manning) and Lucas (August Maturo) taking turns to slap each other as some sort of proxy household meeting – it soon becomes something if not altogether subtle, then certainly altogether more considered. Likewise, the opening credits, with their medieval woodcuts of witches and demons, show us a local legend of a ‘woman in the woods’, but Drag Me To Hell, this ain’t. Slapface works by combining a childlike fascination with these folk tales and monsters together with very real experiences of trauma which drive a troubled child towards a fantasy world. How these two spheres meld makes for an often disconcerting, sad story.

So Lucas is very much drawn towards stories of witchcraft and magic, and little wonder: who wouldn’t want this kind of escapism, and of course the hints that there’s more out there, beyond a world in which you are increasingly powerless? Lucas and Tom have recently lost their mother; Tom is doing his best to fulfil the role of parent(s) in their mother’s absence, but has a hard time understanding Lucas: the kid is socially maladroit, isolated and reticent. The closest Lucas gets to a friend group is being bullied by some local girls: one day, they dare him to enter an abandoned institution associated with the myth of the ‘Virago’ – and he sees something. The Virago – a towering female entity who would put the best of the caricature woodcut witches to shame – takes an interest in him, and even seems to want to befriend him. A friend, at last: but at what cost?

The presence of the Virago is important – it’s really key to this film sitting in the horror genre at all – but equally so, the film has a lot to offer on social context, especially in terms of masculinity and femininity. With the glaring gap in their lives left by their mother’s death, Tom (and by extension, Lucas) seem to be coping by becoming hyper-masculine, hence the physically violent ‘game’ they play to sort out their disputes and ‘blow off steam’. Tom has a good heart in there somewhere, but ploughs his energies into being a provider – admittedly, totally necessary – but then drinks his time away in a local bar, hitting on women and making a general nuisance of himself. He’s usually absent from Lucas’s life, and his young brother strays increasingly into his own world: it’s here that he’s fair game for the attentions of the ‘woman in the woods’, who takes every opportunity to get closer, lashing out at anyone else in Lucas’s immediate vicinity. As for the women in the narrative, well, this isn’t a good world for being a decent woman. If you’re not a violent bully or a legendary crone, you’re unlikely to have an easy time here. Anna (Libe Barer), who has a short relationship with Tom, tries her best to instil some sense of normality in the brothers’ household, but her attempts to slot into the ‘mom’ role act more as a catalyst for Lucas’s anger. Reasonably unperturbed when she storms out, Tom takes to driving around town in her car, neatly encompassing the way the two boys are happy to inhabit, or otherwise take an aspect of female identity without necessarily giving much credit to it.

The Virago is an interesting creature – silent, ambiguous, hostile, and focused on her new young charge – but you can always sense something else hanging in the air here. Whatever she is, she clearly fills a gap in a lonely and alienated life, and this is a film rich in alienation, with an uncomfortable, layered mood to match. Is she a symbol, Babadook-style, or a character in her own right? Honestly, the film works just fine with either reading, and though it holds off on an easy sense of closure for most of its running time, the overarching feeling is of a very heavy, unflinching film and an exploration of trauma.

Indeed, the whole film simmers with trauma, particularly with regards to families, and talking openly about family members who are now gone is forbidden by Lucas, who would rather choke on that pain than confront it. For all characters in this particular family and those who come close to it, mothers may be absent, but fathers weigh particularly heavily. Slapface is by no means a fun and entertaining watch, though it’s very good at what it does, offering a horrific, fantasy-ridden exploration of bereavement and the pitfalls of finding the wrong way through it. There’s some similarity to pre-existing films – horror has been interrogating monsters for nearly a hundred years – but this is a worthwhile exploration of monstrosity, and wherever they found August Maturo, he’s superb and fits the bill here perfectly.

Slapface (2021) will be released on SHUDDER on 3rd February 2022.

Subverting the Maternal in Raised by Wolves

The TV series Raised By Wolves follows a battle being fought in microcosm, but the resources which are being fought over surpass the usual struggle for land, wealth and power. Having been forced to abandon Earth – now on the verge of destruction, if not already past that point – a small contingent of militant theists, the Mithraic, have created a vessel called an Ark, which they hope to take into deep space in order to settle another planet. However, their adversaries on Earth, the hardline atheists, are fighting back: a tiny lander, equipped with two androids – ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ – and a number of viable human embryos, has beaten them to a barely-hospitable alien world, Kepler-22b. The territory itself might be contested here, but the real fight is for the future of human life; in such times as these, any notion of a traditional, nuclear family has necessarily been abandoned.

Viable life, and importantly, life which follows the appropriate ideology, takes precedence, and as these two things are hard to come by, it takes precedence by any means. In many respects Raised By Wolves keeps its focus on parenting and the survival of the young, whilst also shining an often unpleasant light on the whole childbearing and child-rearing process, here seen as fraught, duplicitous, flawed – and even circumvented altogether. It’s a pretty bold move, but one which you’d absolutely expect from a producer like Ridley Scott, who has a long history of disrupting the mother/child relationship…

The first scenes of the show give us Mother (Amanda Collin) and Father (Abubakar Salim) busying themselves with what they have been tasked with doing: firstly they need to incubate a number of the embryos, whilst also establishing a rudimentary colony (and despite the hi-tech means which brought them to the planet, there are no ultra mod cons beyond the lander. They elect to eke out an existence which looks little beyond Neolithic.) Of course, Mother and Father themselves are not human – this is made abundantly clear given the way in which Mother incubates the embryos – but Father, at least, has been programmed to be an affable companion and not much more: he bears the children’s antics with patience, he tells jokes, and he acts as a helpmeet to Mother, who dominates proceedings. However, it is Mother who eventually breaks out of her careful programming as a nurturer (and we see evidence of how long this process took, in flashback, later in the show). The arrival of the Ark into the planet’s orbit – and the presence of a theistic landing party, which stumbles upon the settlement – triggers a glitch in Mother’s programming: she is in fact, and in one of the show’s moments of bleak irony – actually a Necromancer, a type of android designed to destroy life and one designed for use by the Mithraic against the atheists. Necromancers have the power of flight, and can use the pitch of their voices (actually a banshee-like scream) to maim and kill; faced with the old enemy, Mother shows herself to be vengeful and unpredictable. You have to wonder at why, exactly, her creator/reprogrammer felt that this model of android was the best model to mould into a cooing maternal figure, but maybe he liked a challenge.

It’s not a perfect revamp, in any case, and Mother takes it upon herself to destroy the Ark in its entirety; although she was reprogrammed not to blindly persecute the ‘wrong’ humans, old habits die hard. But, to restock her own depleted brood, she first kidnaps the Ark’s ‘children’, which seems to mean anyone under the age of eighteen. The majority of her own batch of children have already died as a result of a series of rookie errors: it hadn’t occurred to either Mother of Father to properly test the only food source they’d been able to find and cultivate, meaning a creeping dose of radioactivity (as well as the issue of huge, nearby craters) has done for all but one of them, Campion. In effect, an android purposefully rehabilitated into a matriarch has allowed her family to eat poison or fall to their deaths; when faced with other humans, she has murdered hundreds of them on principle, forgetting her new programming temporarily and terrifying her sole remaining ‘son’, as well as kidnapping a number of young Mithraic, with the aim of deprogramming them. It doesn’t seem to occur to either her or Father to plunder the remains of the Ark for any resources which would help them; Mother’s sole interest in the Ark relates to herself, as she chooses to interact with a simulator – in order to access her own, carefully-stored and hidden memory files. It’s telling that Mother, for all her maternal strengths, is so flawed: she gives her name as ‘Lamia’, a mythical monster believed to prey on human beings and drink the blood of children. Is this a moment of self-awareness, even humour on her part? Or is she aware that she is still a risk to the children, as well as everyone else? What we see here is a being redesigned to nurture, but deviating from her path in a series of ways, either by incompetence or design. This adoptive mother is usually well-intentioned, but challenged. She feels compelled to do the right thing, but often struggles.

There is another adoptive mother in the show, this time human: the aptly-named Mary (Niamh Algar), who alongside husband Caleb (Travis Bickle). These two atheists killed a man and a woman whilst fleeing the Mithraic on Earth; they then realised that these two were Mithraic officials, with a place on the Ark reserved for them. Using the means at their disposal, they decide to alter their facial features to look like the two deceased, and manage to trick their way onto the vessel. But the people they have replaced, Marcus and Sue, have a young son, Paul: at this stage, he is none the wiser that his real parents have been murdered by the people tasked with looking after him. Both the adults feel a pang of responsibility for Paul, now orphaned by their hands, but it soon becomes more than that, with a sense of affection springing up – one which we are led to believe was wholly lacking from Paul’s life with his real parents. Elements of this story arc are genuinely quite touching; Paul and his ‘father’ discover how to play, and the boy gets showered with affection. But the straightened circumstances on Kepler, not to mention the hints at something seemingly supernatural at play, begins to sway Marcus, making it increasingly difficult for him to inhabit his old identity. He begins to believe that ‘Sol’, a version of the monotheistic God we’re probably all familiar with, is really speaking to him; rumours of a prophecy, which he at first thought might alight on Paul, he now begins to claim for himself. This has a dark influence on his behaviour, towards both his wife and his son, and it also leads to him becoming indiscriminately violent, killing several of the handful of Mithraic who have survived – in times when the survival of the human race is paramount, this looks as deranged as it is.

The show’s only human nuclear family unit, then, flawed as it is, quickly comes apart at the seams, with Sue/Mary fleeing her now-unpredictable husband, leaving him to his now dissatisfied, suspicious body of soldiers. As for Paul, Sol allegedly tells him the truth, leading him to attack Mary; he sees her now only as a killer, and this obliterates what has gone before. This is particularly sad, as Mother – who correctly ascertains that Mary is not Paul’s biological mother, and seems even to taunt her momentarily for it – had only just, grudgingly, told Mary that she was nonetheless a ‘good mother’. Mary had also revealed that she is infertile; the injury Paul causes to her abdomen is perhaps symbolic.

In Season One, we only see one human, biological pregnancy taking place – and, in another of the show’s uniquely dark twists of the knife, it is the result of a rape. The girl in question, Tempest (Jordan Loughran) was assaulted whilst in stasis, and so unable to fight back; she is also part of the group of stolen Ark children, so it’s assumed that she is below the age of consent as we’d understand it, but perhaps in the 22nd Century this differs. Needs must. Regardless, Tempest is very young, and extremely traumatised; Mother’s immediate, borderline obsessive interest in her pregnancy upsets her greatly, and the girl is so desperate to abort her foetus that she attempts suicide. Mother, as representative of her programming, wants to support Tempest through this pregnancy by any means and her well-meaning attempts to get the girl to put her experience behind her comes across as extremely, if unwittingly crass. Mother fails to understand, in the ways that lots of humans fail to understand. The rapist in question, a ranking Mithraic, is also still alive, having survived the Ark’s crash; he is being punished for his actions, but he still finds a way to get around this, threatening Tempest and attempting to escape. His defence, that Sol wanted him ‘to be fruitful’, is a particularly sinister touch, given that this uses religious tenets to override consent. At least the Mithraic were having none of it, though this is small comfort to Tempest, and although she gets her moment, it doesn’t rid her of the pregnancy.

There is of course one more pregnancy in Season One, and thankfully it isn’t the standard sci-fi ‘whaddya know? You CAN have a baby!’ curveball which it seemed to be at first – a plot device as old and weary as time. Mother herself – as a result of interfacing with her memory files – undergoes an experience where she seems to become pregnant; apparently, this capacity was always in-built, and she comes to understand via the interface that her human brood was only ever intended as a kind of practice run. This, though? This is the real deal. This plot development had the capacity to be a tad disappointing; one of the series’ most interesting aspects is in watching Mother navigate her maternal feelings as a ‘creation’ and not a ‘creator’, so to suddenly turn her into the thing she thinks is impossible could have been a rather obvious move. But it’s not so: Mother’s pregnancy is horrific; whatever is in there needs plasma for food, so for instance Mother has to ransack the Ark for sources of this – it’s hardly a picture-book pregnancy, and there are some graphic sequences as Mother tried to balance the foetus’s needs against her own rising sense of concern. However, the survivors of the settlement attempt to help her as her pregnancy develops; there’s a sense of wonder hanging over it, perhaps a belief that this is, in any measurable sense, a miracle.

The ways in which the show’s writers quite abruptly scupper this is a great tour de force. With some ideas clearly in keeping with the Alien franchise – perhaps particularly Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection – Mother’s baby is no baby at all, android or human. It is instead likely to be a being which no one on the planet has yet seen, except as fossilised remains; one of the great snake creatures, presumed extinct (but never make that assumption on Kepler – there seem to be a few species lurking in the shadows). Or is it? The show gives little away. Here, a wealth of prophecy seems to have come to the fore, and there are hints that Mother, Father and the others are predestined in this; Mother’s horror at what she has created leads to her taking the initiative, attempting to kill herself and the creature. Is it successful? The show closes with a certain level of ambiguity over that, but what is certain is that Mother seems to be about to die replaying memories of Campion, not her ‘birth child’; her human brood did not seem to be some less-worthy experiment in the end, if it is the end at all…

Raised By Wolves, right down to its symbolic title, is about world-building, but key to that process is nurturing and raising children. To do this, traditional models of parenting may be present in some aspects, but they are also overthrown, at least to an extent, for a range of reasons: fate, necessity, emotion, guilt, lack, loss and in Mother’s case, as a means of exploring her sense of ‘selfhood’, her programming, and what it all means. The answers to these questions have not yet been given, and doubtless this will be explored in Season Two, but just as old ideas of marriage and family life are becoming obsolete, traditional ideas about caregiving and nurture will remain crucial.

Raised By Wolves – Season Two – will premiere on 2nd February 2022.

Below The Fold (2021)

It’s a crime thriller, but Below The Fold starts with what could easily be a horror film opening. It’s an ominous take where it seems something sudden and shocking has happened: the TV is left on, showing nothing but dead air, a telephone receiver lies abandoned. What is this? We’re not told immediately – we’re not told anything immediately – but we cut to a slow news day in the press offices of Maryville, Missouri, where there’s some debate about covering a tractor pull competition. That gives us some sense of the relative peace and quiet here, but it turns out there might be a story worth covering. Turns out that, ten years previously, a young girl went missing in neighbouring Skidmore but the case went cold. Journalist David (Davis DeRock) gets the job of following it up, though it’s no tractor pull (the term ‘below the fold’ refers to stories printed in the bottom half of a newspaper page, and so automatically less visible, or deemed less interesting, to readers).

This is all complicated somewhat when a new reporter joins the team, and it is immediately apparent that David and new girl Lisa (Sarah McGuire) have some history. Nonetheless, she soon wants in on the Skidmore story, and so they go to speak to the missing girl’s sister – who explains that, age twelve, Susie went to the car to retrieve her Bible one evening and simply vanished into thin air. A later incident suggested that someone, likely the responsible party, was still watching the family: significant and annotated pages from the Bible were delivered to their home. And is someone watching the journalists, too? As they go on with their investigations, they meet a very tangled web of silence, proffered clues, red herrings and dead ends, but it seems that something sinister is at play here. Suggested links between Susie’s disappearance and the murder of another local girl complicate this picture further.

All of this unfolds slowly, and this is by no means a good choice of film for people into high action. Consider yourselves warned. The suspense here is doled out very carefully and steadily, and though some of the film’s initial drive subsides a little in the last thirty minutes or so, overall the pace is handled well; it’s in keeping with the tone and style overall. There are some genuinely unsettling scenes along the way, and the film is rich on mood. A lot of its success in this aspect stems from the strong camera work: there are no wasted or needlessly wheeling shots, and the edit is equally strong. Shots of rural decay in this neck of the woods – abandoned and tumbledown homes, beautiful but remote and barely-populated landscapes – makes some links to American Gothic with its own mysteries, isolation and secrets. The most frightening aspect of the film is in the horror of remote communities, but this comes across without resorting to caricature. It more focuses on what happens to people living this way when the threads that hold them together – Christianity, for example – begin to come apart? Linked to this is the question of when close-knit becomes constrictive; there’s certainly some class commentary in here, though, again, it’s kept on the downlow. Don’t expect acres of exposition, as that is left to the audience.

If the themes and motifs here have been seen elsewhere in other films, albeit perhaps looking a little different or playing out differently, then so be it. This is a good piece of filmmaking in any case, by a first-time feature director and writer, made on an indie budget with (I’m sure) all of the subsequent issues and hurdles to get past. Perhaps the biggest sticking point for viewers used to the kind of denouement they’re used to – even the kind that they demand – will come with the ending, and I’ll admit to a moment of real surprise myself at that point. It’ll be divisive. On reflection, I think it’s actually very brave, not to mention worldly – Below The Fold is a piece of fiction, but it comes with a reminder that life doesn’t follow any narrative rule book.

The Last Thing Mary Saw (2021)

There have been a fair few gloomy period pieces floating around over the last few years, and though it’s somewhat beyond the scope of this review, it would be interesting to ponder why: what is it about oppressive religious belief and isolated family groups which has such ready appeal for writers? We can’t possibly hand every credit to the pandemic. But, for whatever reasons, the likes of The Witch, The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw and The Family spring to mind; The Last Thing Mary Saw has some similarities with these, but – despite early suggestions – it sidesteps the perhaps expected supernatural aspects, instead opting for a character-focused tale where any horror is equally attributable to them.

Early use of a quote by professional nerk John Calvin (“All events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God”) clues us in to the brand of Christianity which is on offer. The year is 1843: in Southold, NY a young woman is brought before an impromptu court and executioner, charged with being in league with the Devil. It may have been relatively late for beliefs in witchcraft or secret covenants, but these kinds of things tend to persevere in remote or otherwise isolated communities, where there’s no fun or ease to wash them away. Things certainly look bad for the girl, Mary: she is blindfolded, but her eyes are streaming with blood. To test her affiliation or otherwise with Old Scratch, the men ask her to recite The Lord’s Prayer – something which those who have gone over to the devil were thought not to be able to do. Mary (Stefanie Scott) nails it first time. The men lower their loaded weapons.

So what has happened to her? Why has she been brought to this place, under arrest? The film begins to backfill her story, returning to the trial proceedings here and there. We first see Mary’s desperate parents asking for help from the family’s fearsome matriarch (Judith Roberts). Mary’s sin seems to be, ahem, fraternising with the housemaid, Eleanor (Isabelle Fuhrman, probably best known as Esther in Orphan). Unusually, and perhaps given the insular nature of this extended family group, they don’t just ship the maid off to an unwitting household some distance away, or marry off their daughter. Instead, they deem it fit that both girls should be punished. This only seems to strengthen the girls’ resolve, and they have to think more creatively to find time together – but it’s dangerous in a house where everyone seems to be lurking and watching. Their best efforts clearly have a limited timespan ahead, and so they have to escalate matters in an appropriately mood-laden, sombre way, of course.

Spying, surveillance and moral judgement are so strongly foregrounded in this film that they very nearly crowd out everything else: on the flip side of that, the film is also largely about the perils of curiosity, which in its way reflects the austere Christian values cherished by the family. Curiosity affects almost everyone here, and the film is rife with people peeping around corners, through ceilings, or rifling through items not their own. It’s fair to say that nothing particularly good comes out of any of it either, for anyone. Whilst taking lesbianism as a key plot point is an unusual one as much as it’s a somewhat thin one, the film is just as interesting in its treatment of class – because there’s no equality in the eyes of God here. Eleanor is treated mercilessly differently on account of her status in the household.

The film is chaptered, because every film which purports to have any moral weight seems to be – it’ll be as easy to age this clutch of films as it is to age someone by a tribal tattoo – but the importance of literacy and reading at least offers some links to this motif. Furthermore, there are lots of excellent stylistic choices which look good. This is a very tactile film, which lots of close-ups on hands. The period detail looks good – there’s lots of that soft candlelight which was front and centre in The Witch – and understandably, given the title, the film focuses closely on Mary herself. Stefanie Scott successfully enacts a look of barely-suppressed sadness and rage very well. Eleanor (Fuhrman) is good too, though they are more plausible as individuals than – crucially – smitten to the point of madness with one another. The sense of rapport does develop as the film progresses, but overall it’s a little tricky to accept, which is a shame, as so much hinges upon this.

Still, overall The Last Thing Mary Saw comes together very well. Whilst it does have aspects in common with other period dramas and horrors, it has a lot going for it in terms of its deliberate, morose pace, strong visuals and determination not to simply ape a gazillion supernatural yarns. It’s not what you’d call an uplifting experience – it feels a lot like getting rained on in a cemetery – so despite the fact that there just may be a small handful of pitch dark humour in some moments, there’s no real let-up in the gloom here, making The Last Thing Mary Saw a pretty effective slab of quasi-historical bleakness. Think the weightiest elements of The Go-Between mixed with Wisconsin Death Trip.

The Last Thing Mary Saw is out on Shudder from 17th January 2022.

Nocturna: Side A – The Great Old Man’s Night & Side B – Where The Elephants Go To Die

“What am I doing here?” – it’s a simple line, but this early line in Nocturna: Side A sums up the terror and disorientation of old age, particularly when old age is accompanied by dementia – something which the film excels at. When you are losing even the merest anchors of your identity, right down to the reason why you are stood in your own hallway on a particular day, then that is – without a doubt – true horror. The film offers up a terror of – and respect for – the vulnerability of old age, its recriminations and regrets, and it finds varied and unsettling ways to explore a ‘dark night of the soul’. This really is a staggering film, which left me inconsolable at certain points.

From the moment the film starts, then, particularly where it conflates the young boy with the old man, this film is minutely focused on the plight of an elderly man, Ulises (Pepe Soriano) – in his nineties, and now struggling with the details of the everyday. The sense of sadness and empathy is somehow immediate, the strained patience of his neighbour/superintendent self-evident when Daniel (Lautaro Delgrado) finds Ulises, dumbfounded, outside his door. The older man makes his way back to the apartment without the groceries he set out to get; his wife, Dalia (Marilú Marini) is irritated with him, but forgets this particular irritation to focus on a greater worry: that their days in the block are numbered, and that the housing association is going to find a way to get rid of them; they ‘don’t want old people there’. On a similar note, they both live in fear of intruders, thieves, anyone forcing their way into their home, a home which is their whole world. The world grows very small when you are elderly.

Both of these people are frustrated with their lot, but Ulises differs from his wife because he feels he has more left to do – he wants to live, he wants to put things right in the limited time he has remaining to him. He mentions an estranged daughter and grandchild; the memory of them reinvigorates him, but Dalia is scornful of them, and of him. However, for all this, it seems that their fears of their home being infiltrated by outsiders may be coming true when, in the early hours of the morning, there is a noise outside. Then someone begins hammering at their apartment door, claiming to be a neighbour in need. Ulises tries to handle this situation, but he can scarcely keep it together – he quickly grows anxious and confused. The whole thing becomes an ordeal, but as it unfolds, it reveals far more: what is real? Who can be trusted?

The relationship between Ulises and Dalia and the outside world is a sad, fractious and often frightening one: their anxieties impinge more and more upon their small sphere, and drive a wedge between them at times, too. But, in following Ulises closest of all, the film in some aspects reminds me of Death of a Salesman. Although Ulises is far older than Willy Loman from the Arthur Miller play, the sheer relatable nature of the tragedy of an everyday man, struggling with hallucinations and flashbacks as he reflects on his errors – the standard of observation is similarly acute, and the emotional weight is huge too. However, the growing emphasis on pure fright, with possible supernatural elements introduced, adds a particular, different colour to the pathos being generated. Ulises’ uncertainty and his inability to cope with someone trying to batter their way into his home reminded me strongly of my own grandmother who, as dementia took her, repeatedly claimed that someone was trying to break into her house. It frightened her but we brushed it off. Forgive the personal detail – this just feels like a deeply personal film, which I hope excuses it – but the film made me understand her anguish in a different way, and as such it’s quite the emotional gut-punch, and rightly so. It is scary.

The film retains its meticulous eye for the personal impact of ageing and dementia throughout; it’s unflinching, but it’s tender, and it achieves this from the very beginning with even the easiest moves (the close focus on Ulises’ face for example, and Soriano’s effortless performance, is enough to generate empathy). In a genre-busting piece of work, it also includes the great frustrations that ageing can cause to everyone affected. It can be maddening and frustrating – but making a humane film means you have to be honest about everything which makes us human. The film can be difficult to bear, it’s an agonising watch, and the addition of scares only underlines that, with an added complication to bring to bear on the key players.

Nocturna Side A is phenomenal, and certainly one of the greatest I have seen on this topic (if I may, I’d also recommend the short film ‘Ark’ by Grzegorz Jonkajtys; it’s another heartbreaker). Whilst it could absolutely stand alone, it forms part of a double bill: Nocturna B is being released alongside the first. As for Nocturna Side A, it is very definitely a recommended film, if with the proviso that it packs an unprecedented emotional punch.

Nocturna Side B: Where The Elephants Go To Die is, though, an oddity – one which doesn’t work except as an experimental shadow of the first film; it’s definitely no standalone. It covers the same timeframe as Side A, though taking a rather art-house approach to the characters and themes, revisiting them through a highly-edited and filtered array of alternative perspectives: shots zoom, frames jump, scenes repeat. A voiceover addresses many of the by-now recognisable themes, albeit it in quite abstract language (which is, dare I say, rather lofty, with a lot of hyperbole and platitudes). There’s a possibility that, given the sheer amount of voiceover used in Side B, some things have been lost in translation, which perhaps has an impact on how significant all of this feels. It’s not an unattractive film, but it’s a strange film, and it has none of the power or pathos of the first – its existence is a curiosity, all told. However, anyone wishing to observe the events of the first film refracted through a very different style and approach may find something to love here. For the rest of us, Nocturna Side A neither gains nor loses anything through the presence of the second part, and it’s Side A which deserves all the praise.

Nocturna Side A: The Great Old Man’s Night and Nocturna Side B: Where The Elephants Go To Die are available on digital from 18th January 2022 with The Nocturna Collection released on February 1st.

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2020)

Most of the time, when a film engages with the theme of time travel, it tends to be a bit po-faced. Sure, it can be epic, but the basis of that is usually dystopian futures, mercenaries, world-ending wars and glimpses of horrific alternatives – and no, I swear I’m not just thinking of Terminator. It doesn’t need to be this way. It really doesn’t. Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is the definition of a low-budget film; it has limited sets, a small cast and no flashy SFX whatsoever. And it doesn’t need any of that; it has the nous to present a wholly different kind of time travel film, though, which turns out to count for a lot.

We’re in Kyoto, Japan: café owner Kato (Kazunari Tosa) lives a simple life. When he’s not in work, he’s at home (he lives upstairs, so it’s a short commute) and he passes the rest of his time playing music. This is all well and good, and the film wastes no time establishing Kato as a kind of pleasant, harmless everyman – but things are about to get more interesting for him, whether he wants it to or not. In his flat, he sees himself on his computer monitor: he’s…downstairs, and apparently, addressing himself from the future. The lag between computer monitor and shop cam is two minutes, hence this is a whole two minutes ahead of the present. So Kato explains this to Kato, and then asks him to come downstairs. He does this, just in time to see himself, upstairs, where he explains this to the past version of himself…

Confused? Confusing? Will this loop go on and on? Never fear: somehow the film manages to steer the time travel aspects very well, and – as other people appear and discover what is going on, right down to conversing with themselves – they realise that they have Time TV on their hands. Time TV! Oh, the possibilities! All of this unfolding – with the characters in the film working out what’s going on at about the same rate that the audience is, with the camera acting like one of the gang – is a lot of fun, with a nice, engaging focus on the smaller details of all of these goings-on. It gives a different spin on more than a few very everyday social dilemmas, too, with future selves giving advice on what to do (in the next couple of minutes, at least). And this is where it begins to get more interesting; as people begin to think of new ways to play with their newfound skills, the scope for mishaps grows and grows.

This is a very cleverly put-together film with what feels like a very light touch, and I could be wrong, but I feel sure this took some fairly strenuous writing and re-writing, and it pays off. The story emerges very steadily, but the tone is always sparky and lively, and the presiding mood is glee – for the most part, anyway. This is an interesting thing that’s happened, and people want to play around with it. Of course they do. This film has a running time of just one hour ten minutes, and this is fine; it means that things never slip, or lapse into a dull middle chapter – there’s no time for that, and things move forwards in just the right way. The dialogue is very funny, too, losing nothing in translation, and the way in which that script unpacks the finer points of the goings-on is a joy in itself. It’s an aspect that’s normally wholly missing from any use of time travel. After all, as an example, would you not try to prank yourself, if you got to talk to yourself in the past?

There’s some peril, sure, and the film probably does need a bit of that to add some extra variety, but this is still in keeping with the rest of proceedings, sticking close to a comedy of errors. For all that, the film keeps something up its sleeve…a few head-scratching moments do occur, but overall, Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes takes a quirky, refreshing approach to its subject matter, and it’s a refreshing experience. Here we are then: a feelgood, low-key sci-fi, and a joyful tribute to some fine writing and acting. Thank god for wireless monitors, too: now they really are the future. Take a look at this film when it hits digital release – you’ll be glad you did.

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2020) will be available on Digital HD and Cable VOD from January 25th 2022. Physical copies are available via Third Window Films.

I Hear The Trees Whispering (2022)

I Hear The Trees Whispering is a strange experience. It’s certainly the case that there are ideas in here, but whether these land is quite another matter. The film comes off as a bit of a cut ‘n’ shut, with a first two thirds or so which comes across as a standard, and dare we say, tedious ‘found footage’ style film, though it slowly becomes apparent that there is something else afoot. The final act of the film moves into something else entirely, which is clearly intended to shed new light on the first hour or so. And does it? It does not. You have to build a very secure foundation to be able to launch into something meta, which simply isn’t the case here.

We start with a long, radio-accompanied car ride through autumnal rural roads (the film was made in Hungary, but is seemingly intended to come across as North America, at least to judge by the American English radio channels which the driver skips through, as well as an early mention of ‘mountain lions’. But then there’s a …castle.) It takes a good few minutes, but then we’re out of the car – no dialogue just yet – and tramping, tramping, tramping towards a cabin in the woods, all the time with a man’s eye view, which we will depend on for most of the rest of the film. He, our guy, eventually finds a key and heads into the cabin; it’s decidedly rustic, but with a hi-tech headset left for him on the table, which he immediately uses to contact someone. Through this, as he chats to what is apparently his new boss via the headset, we find out his name is Will, and he’s taken a new job here as a ranger. It’s a job which has, apparently, been vacant for well over a year.

In rather stilted accents (this is clearly someone speaking in a second language) Will (Gábor Varga) discusses his reasons for taking this job in the middle of nowhere: along the way, he takes it upon himself to be fairly rude to his (American) boss, June, perhaps guessing that he’s unlikely to get sacked? So far, it looks like your standard found footage outing, with someone incomprehensibly filming their every waking move as they wander around the woods, but there are clues that something else is going on here – even if these clues render the entire exercise pretty problematic, i.e. as you persist in seeing this as video footage, because this is what it seems like, you have to wonder how dream sequences suddenly crop up – but crop up, they do. These seem to be flashbacks to a happier time, a standard kind of family life which, for reasons Will will eventually elaborate on, are now past tense. We also have heavy use of title cards, six in total, which is a lot given the film runs for just over an hour and a quarter: as is by now usually the case, these just pause the film and pre-empt a few lines of dialogue for us, without offering any real reason for doing it.

During one of his interminable sojourns outside the cabin one day, Will hears a chainsaw: he investigates, and finds both the chainsaw and an abandoned rucksack. Hmmm. A bit of a mystery, but not one which immediately changes the course of the film: we’re soon nonetheless back to walking, driving, walking. Things eventually take a turn, though, as we glean, through the headset conversation of course, that a bad guy is on the loose and may be in the vicinity. Here, the film could have segued quite easily into horror – the ground work seems to have been done for it – but this isn’t to be, at least, not as such. We’re instead encouraged to see this event as a factor in Will’s soul-searching, as he gradually talks through his trauma and, later, we are launched into something entirely different, which elects to override everything up until that point as an event contained within another, framing narrative.

Films, whatever their shooting style, wherever they end up going, have to build a solid framework – a plausible narrative, plausible characterisation and an engaging script. Without these things, the minutes bloat and meander. I Hear The Trees Whispering first of all misses the chance to create any engagement between characters by reducing them to voices only – we never see either June or Will, so we resort to simply listening to them talk, and this isn’t zingy, or otherwise effective enough to hold attention. Language and intonation is an issue. It also doesn’t help that these conversations quite clearly aren’t taking place at the same time, or on the outside chance that they are, it certainly doesn’t sound that way; there’s no real relationship here, accordingly. Even given the ‘twist’, it doesn’t make sense that Will is clearly wandering through the woods for much of the film – that is the premise, at least – but you cannot hear him breathing, getting out of breath, or reacting in any way to his environment. He continues speaking over a cut in one instance, too, which may be intended to disrupt our expectations – if I’m being charitable – but just seems clumsy. And, having failed to establish a relationship between Will and the audience, it suffers even more once the shift takes place, and the same audience are asked to cast doubt on the already doubtful, i.e. everything up until that hour mark. It’s a big ask.

In terms of plus points, there’s no question that this is a very attractive locale, and the autumnal woodland looks nice on screen at least. I can oh-so nearly see what director József Gallai is trying to do here, but there are too many issues and basic mistakes for the twist to work; by that point, patience had long been exhausted, which, at a running time of 77 minutes, is not a good thing. It feels for all the world like someone had a brief window of time to make a film and just decided to go for it, script and plot be damned: this is the result. It’s a shame, as I quite liked his earlier film A Guidebook to Killing Your Ex (albeit with some reservations) but it seems many of the same pitfalls I noted then, are still present now.

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021)

The phenomenon of ‘folk horror’ has been with us for some considerable time – you might argue for as long as storytelling has existed – but, at least in terms of folk horror cinema, there does seem to have been a real explosion of interest in the last decade or so. This has found expression in a spate of books, articles and other more academic pursuits, as well as in newer filmmaking, which perhaps has a sense of continuing this tradition. There’s even a certain amount of ubiquity to it all now, as interesting an area as it is. The documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: a History of Folk Horror has set itself the mammoth task of looking at all of this – fandom and analysis – via looking mainly at film and TV. As you might imagine, there’s an awful lot to consider, and this is borne out by the sheer length of this film: at well over three hours, it’s not a casual sit-down watch, and its running time is its greatest sticking-point. Still, there’s no doubt that this is a love letter to an expansive, important and enduringly creepy genre, with plenty of care and attention shown throughout.

The first ninety minutes or thereabouts is the tightest section of the film: with a well-selected opening montage of scenes, it is quick to posit something which seems fairly well accepted, that folk horror represents the ‘return of the repressed’, with old ways and practices finding their way to the fore. As such, it has a clear shape and sense of direction at the start. It also offers a useful history of the term ‘folk horror’ itself, which is great, with lots of old newspaper articles and such which had likely been unseen by most people up until this point (reviewer very much included). The film then moves in a largely chronological way through the heyday of British folk horror cinema and the ‘trinity’ of films usually agreed on as seminal. It lingers on, for example, The Blood on Satan’s Claw and its nihilistic, jagged anxieties about sexuality and belief, offering interesting context from 1970s Britain and suggesting how contemporary events could have fed into the horrors being imagined.

Heading back in time to look at examples of both British literature and television, the film offers up a theme to which it returns several times: the importance of the land itself to folk horror. From here, it spreads its net ever wider, and begins to do what it does a great deal thereafter: reference a number of titles which are not widely known. There are simply scores of films, not just from the English-speaking world but elsewhere, and so many clips that these begin to feel a little overwhelming, even though the commentators always do a good job at suggesting reasons for their inclusion. The film goes on to walk us through sections on witchcraft, American folk horror, and finally, folk horror around the world. By this last section, which seems to operate as a catch-all for any other intriguing clips and themes which had or hadn’t been included yet, it begins to feel like a series of diminishing returns, causing a kind of snow-blindness to all the slinking witches and shadowy rituals. You can have too much of a good thing.

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched certainly has an impressive roster, with Lynda Hayden and Ian Ogilvy on board for poetry reading (!) as well as a serious array of talking heads, going beyond just the usual suspects – taking in, for example, Geraldine Beskin, proprietor of the Atlantis Bookshop; Alice Lowe, Pete Tombs and Jeremy Dyson. Other speakers are other authors, directors, actors and presenters, and amongst these, writer Jonathan Rigby comes across as particularly listenable and knowledgeable, with a knack of conveying what he has to say in a very straightforward manner. The film’s director, Kier-La Janisse, also appears in the film as well as providing some voiceover in places, though the film keeps this to a minimum and usually lets the footage speak for itself.

The film is undeniably well made, not just busy with clips and commentary, but also collage and animation sequences, plus a great use of fitting dark folk music and recitation to add some texture to proceedings. It’s chaptered, but in this case, this absolutely has a purpose; you could suggest that, particularly once you get to the catch-all Chapter 7, this may have worked better as a standalone documentary with more of a shape and sense of direction, and this approach could have worked as well in other parts of the film, too. But, as it stands, these are useful points to pause and really do mark a shift in focus.

Whilst a late claim that folk horror’s appeal stems from its links to what cannot be analysed – given we have three hours of the analysis of folk horror here – might just raise an eyebrow, there’s a lot to admire and enjoy. If nothing else, you will come away with a whole list of obscure films to seek out. Given the amount that’s gone into this film, it’s difficult to call it anything but definitive, all told.

Woodland Dark and Days Bewitched premiers on Shudder on Monday, January 10th 2022.