Blue Whale is a film which very much starts as it means to go on, throwing the audience into a high-paced, often frenetic online world where we quickly meet two teenage sisters – Yulya and Dana – who are fighting over a device, dropping it and breaking the screen as their long-suffering mother attempts to […]
An exploration of Indigenous folklore and myth offers rich and often unknown, or lesser-known potential for horror stories. Don’t Say Its Name (2021) interweaves aspects of folkloric belief with real-time concerns and anxieties afflicting a small First Nations community; in doing so, it has many merits, though in time resorts to very broad strokes and […]
By guest contributor Caitlyn Downs The Fantasia 2021 Radical Spirits shorts block showcases six films that focus on belief systems and ancestral connections, using genre as a gateway to the unique nature of spirituality and ritual. Often complex and frequently contested, these films all offer powerful representations of concepts frequently difficult to put into words. […]
Short films are always a highlight of the film festival calendar, and as we’ve been saying on this site for years, it’s such a shame that they don’t often get seen outside of the festival circuit – with the odd exception, such as ABCs of Death. Hopes were high that this would kickstart a new […]
Hotel Poseidon (2021) begins with an almost-mute man listening to some strangely motivational speech-making from the room next door; hard to imagine why someone would be quite this optimistic, given the dilapidated environs, but then this is a strange film and Hotel Poseidon itself is an odd, decrepit place, the sort of place Possum‘s Philip […]
This kind of crime thriller isn’t standard fare at Warped Perspective, but Baby Money has a great deal to recommend it: it’s well-paced, well-developed and carries enough surprises to maintain interest. Beginning with a young woman, Minny (Danay Garcia) having an ultrasound scan, it’s clear immediately that this is a wanted baby but – Minny […]
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that adapting Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) as a drama project would be completely mad idea, and you’d be correct. Step forward a group of bus drivers and amateur dramatics enthusiasts from Dorset, England, who were determined to do just that (and for the record, they considered doing Kill Bill). The documentary […]
There’s been some great cinema coming out of Argentina in recent years, now joined by On The 3rd Day (2021), a clever and carefully-structured horror film which successfully incorporates several horror tropes without settling into a rut. Taking first one route and then another, the film makes you doubt your allegiances and presents several narrative […]
Because the world has altered so rapidly over the past twenty years, with new ways of analysing, modifying and recording human behaviour, it’s already quite usual to see this reflected in cinema. The thing is, it’s more often than not treated as a grave concern, coming to us via technological horrors which plump for a […]
Balancing a dark sense of humour against several other themes and elements of genre, King Car offers an adventurous look at the relationship between man and machine. Sure, we’ve seen sentient vehicles before, but not quite like this. It’s a smart, if zany piece of work, busy, but (just about) giving us something which brings […]