De Afspraken van Anna (Chantal Akerman, 1978)

First released in 1975, Chantal Akerman's jaw-dropping masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles has since been voted the greatest film of all time; she followed it up with an avant-garde documentary, News from Home, before returning to narrative film with 1978's De Afspraken van Anna.  Variously known as Les Rendez-vous d'Anna and The Meetings of Anna, this introspective and contemplative film wasn't well received upon its initial release, but the decade since her death has seen much, if not all, of Akerman's work reappraised—hence Jeanne Dielman's meteoric rise in critical popularity—and De Afspraken van Anna has recently been restored in 4K by Belgium's Cinematek.

De Afspraken van Anna is an exploration of loneliness, disconnection and the search for meaning in a transient world.  The film focuses on, yep, Anna (Aurore Clément), a Belgian filmmaker and proxy for Akerman, as she treks across Europe to promote her latest movie.  The narrative structure is episodic, with Anna meeting various people over the course of her endless train journeys, including friends, strangers, lovers and relatives; each encounter reveals a different facet of Anna's interior life, but her sense of isolation remains constant.  These lengthy conversations are often marked by a lack of emotional connection—at least on Anna's part—reflecting the title character's own detachment from the world around her.

The film's pacing is glacial, which does allow the viewer to immerse themselves in Anna's world and experience her ennui.  A real strength of the movie—one it shares with Jeanne Dielman—is its ability to capture the quotidian and transform it into something profound and meaningful.  Anna's existence is one of rootlessness and impermanence—quite the opposite of that of Jeanne Dielman, who is more or less confined to her Brussels apartment.  But despite the itinerant Anna's ostensibly glamourous jaunts on the film festival circuit, which are far removed from Jeanne's stultifyingly repetitive domestic chores, Anna has somehow reduced her own life to a level of mundanity that sits on a par with Jeanne's.

Yet De Afspraken van Anna contains nothing in the vein of Jeanne Dielman's shocking dénouement, and the film ends much like it begins.  Akerman's direction is characterised by long, static takes and a minimalist style, which create a sense of stillness, and the film's mise-en-scène is both beautiful and disciplined—qualities which are much more apparent in this newly restored print.  Clément has to carry the entirety of the film, and her Anna is something of a blank canvas, a cipher who seems as interchangeable as the hotels and train stations she pinballs around.  By turns fascinating and exhausting, this austere semi-autobiographical work has taken on an added poignancy since its maker's untimely death.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Raindance 2025: Snatchers (C. Alexander/S. Higgs, 2025)

This debut feature from husband-and-wife team Craig Alexander and Shelly Higgs received its world premiere on Saturday at the Raindance Film Festival, and their film has much in common with another title in Raindance 2025's horror strand: Dejan Babosek's Hole.  Each film is a three-hander centring on a corpse which, rather inconveniently, comes back to life; but while there aren't a surfeit of laughs to be had from Babosek's grimly effective film, humour serves as a cornerstone in irreverent horror-comedy Snatchers.  Alexander and Higgs' film is a riff on Robert Louis Stevenson's 1884 short story "The Body Snatcher", itself inspired by the string of real-life murders committed by two Williams, Burke and Hare.

Snatchers transplants the story from one capital city to another, with the action relocated from 19th-century Edinburgh to a dystopian near-future Canberra.  As a student, I misspent half a decade in Auld Reekie and can provide confirmation, if any were needed, that it's a fine place to live when the Fringe isn't on.  But I've also visited Canberra and consider it to be one of the world's more underrated capitals, so it's pleasing to see a movie that's proudly set and filmed there.  Two of Snatchers' main characters share names with their counterparts in Stevenson's story, although Macfarlane is truncated to Mac, and Fettes—in a move that will make many of the author's fellow Dunediners wince—is pronounced as a single syllable.

Mac (Alexander) and Fettes (Justin Hosking) are hospital orderlies who plan on escaping their impoverished lives by entering the burgeoning black market organ trade.  Given their jobs, the pair have reasonable access to a supply of dead bodies, and when the immaculate, unclaimed corpse of a young Jane Doe (Hannah McKenzie) turns up in the hospital, Mac and Fettes think they've won the jackpot.  With the aid of a surreal dance number, the duo smuggle the body to a warehouse where they prepare to harvest its organs; but just before the first incision is made, Jane comes back to life.  From this point on, the wily Jane gets inside the heads of her rattled abductors and proceeds to play them off against each other.

Snatchers is not the first comedic take on this material—John Landis' unfunny yet oddly watchable Burke & Hare and a 1972 film of the same name both tried to reconcile these hideous murders with cheap laughs, and the results in each case were predictably atonal.  But Alexander and Higgs have delivered a well-judged effort here, and by basing their film on Stevenson's story they place a much-needed buffer between these characters and the real-life crimes (setting the film on the other side of the world also helps).  The performances are likeable, with Alexander proving good value in front of the camera, while McKenzie and Hosking keep things bubbling along nicely as the film heads towards its terrific final twist.

Darren Arnold

Images: Little Train Creative

Raindance 2025: Saturnalia (Daniel Lerch, 2025)

Daniel Lerch's feature debut Saturnalia—which on Friday received its world premiere at the Raindance Film Festival—wears its influences on its sleeve, and anyone with a passing interest in genre cinema will immediately recognise the film's main touchstone as being Dario Argento's 1977 masterpiece Suspiria.  Argento's film was remade, rather loosely but to good effect, by Luca Guadagnino in 2018, although Lerch appears to have little to no interest in that version as he constructs a work that occupies the fine line between homage and pastiche.  Certainly, Lerch's film is the most overt riff on Argento since Brussels-based duo Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani served up The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears in 2013.

Just like Argento's Suspiria, the 1970s-set Saturnalia begins with a taxi ride on a rain-lashed night as a female student heads to her new boarding school.  Lerch's protagonist is Miriam Basconi (Sophia Anthony, excellent), an orphaned young woman who has been sent to Alstroemerias Academy, an exclusive and elite Virginian college presided over by the bellicose Ms. Hemlock (Velvet), who predictably makes life very difficult for her feisty new charge—as do two other girls (Maddie Siepe, Morgan Messina) in the cohort.  As the hazing continues, the only potential allies for the new arrival take the form of Hemlock's louche enforcer Holden (Dante Blake) and the mousy, victimised Hannah (Amariah Dionne).  

Here, as in Suspiria, it's clear that the crimes of those running the school extend way beyond their harsh treatment of some of the boarders, and Hemlock makes little attempt to disguise her viciousness.  The mystery here is not who, but why, and Lerch sets about whipping up an atmosphere of dread and anxiety as the student population starts to decrease, and he's aided by some fine cinematography from Max Fischer, who also doubled as the film's producer.  Suspiria is often misidentified as a giallo, which is perhaps understandable given Dario Argento's prominence in the genre, but its no-surprises nature is one it shares with Saturnalia and marks it out from the likes of Deep Red, Tenebrae and The Cat o' Nine Tails.

Fischer's camerawork does a good job of approximating the look of Suspiria, a film whose vivid colour palette served as a last hurrah of sorts for the Technicolor process in Italy—Argento used the company's last facility in Rome for his film—as cheaper alternatives were becoming available.  But Saturnalia's biggest coup is securing the services of the legendary Claudio Simonetti to provide the score; Simonetti and his band Goblin composed the music for many an Argento film, including, naturally, Suspiria, and his perfectly calibrated contribution to Saturnalia augments the film without ever being showy.  This is an assured, well-crafted horror, one that will hopefully enjoy a long life on the cult movie circuit.

Darren Arnold

Images: FilmFreeway