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

Raindance 2025: God Teeth (Robbie C. Williamson, 2025)

God Teeth, the debut feature by Robbie C. Williamson—AKA Double Diamond Sun Body—is a dazzling, innovative slice of experimental cinema, one that shuns conventional narrative in favour of a hypnogogic journey set on a drifting, abandoned ship, where four recently deceased souls share the details of their untimely deaths.  Williamson's film has already played at several international festivals, and it's nominated for the Discovery Award for Best Debut Feature at this year's Raindance Film Festival, where it screens on Thursday and Friday.  Friday marks the end of this year's festival, with the closing night gala taking the form of the international premiere of Camilla Guttner's The Academy (Die Akademie).

God Teeth’s protagonists—a 10-year-old girl named Boom, biker Albert, sports agent Rose, and family man Campbell—tell their stories piecemeal: Boom, a keen swimmer who excelled at holding her breath, attempts to come to terms with the death of her father while negotiating an underwater world populated by magical creatures; Albert recalls both a dark secret and his final moments speeding through a tunnel in his adopted home of Hong Kong; Rose, who formed a famous power couple with her footballer husband, outlines the mistake that led to her current state; and Campbell escaped a forest fire by climbing a 10,000-foot pole, but appears doomed to both stay there and refer to himself in the third person.

The quartet are up against the clock—incidentally, God Teeth runs to a wonderfully crisp 60 minutes—as a school of manta rays are circling the ship, intent on devouring the four souls' memories; with no realistic way of stopping this, it's vital that the stories are told before the rays descend on the vessel's inhabitants, else anyone who's failed to recount their demise will spend an eternity in purgatory (although drifting at sea on a ghost ship already seems suitably purgatorial).  As these tales unfold, there are occasional glimpses of a disembodied smile featuring the divine teeth of the title, with this disconcerting image recalling the equally unsettling mouth that forms the focus of Samuel Beckett's monologue Not I.

Made over the course of several years, this singular vision, quite remarkably, consists almost entirely of material Williamson found on the internet, with the characters' eerie voices created by text-to-speech software.  It's a clash of form and content, one that probably shouldn't work nearly as well as it does, but Williamson's painstaking efforts have resulted in a haunting, strangely moving piece of experimenta.  The film's ethereal, oeneiric nature sits completely at odds with the overconsumption of social media and fidgety browsing habits that were, presumably, necessary for its creation.  It's all very counterintuitive—as is the notion that the most original film of the year contains barely a frame of original footage.

Darren Arnold

Images: NYC Independent Film Festival

Raindance 2025: Our Happy Place (Paul Bickel, 2024)

For his feature debut, the Raindance-selected Our Happy Place, Paul Bickel has proved to be an extremely hands-on filmmaker, and a brief glance at the end credits reveals the extent of his involvement; beyond Bickel's duties as actor-writer-director, his responsibilities include editing, producing, makeup, cinematography, art direction, and recording the sound.  Bickel's multitasking is a direct result of the constraints imposed by COVID-19, as opposed to a rabid desire to control virtually every aspect of this handsome-looking production.  We should also note the fine contributions of Bickel's on-screen (and real-life) partner, Raya Miles, who not only impresses as the film's star but also serves as one of the producers.

Our Happy Place sees Miles and Bickel play, yep, Raya and Paul, a couple living in a remote cabin in the woods while the pandemic rages on; it's a beautiful house, one surrounded by jaw-dropping scenery, and there are certainly far worse places to spend lockdown.  But Raya and Paul's domestic situation is not a happy one: he's catatonic and bedridden, while Raya is his sole carer, and it's clear that she's mourning the carefree life the couple once enjoyed.  While the days may be rather gloomy, the nights are flat-out terrifying as Raya is plagued by a series of gruesome nightmares, each of which ends with her waking alone in a nearby forest, lying in a freshly-dug grave whose exact location changes with every bad dream.

In a bid to break the cycle, Raya, in a FaceTime chat with her worried friend Amy (Death Proof's Tracie Thoms), hatches a plan to stay awake until dawn, but this and subsequent efforts make no difference in terms of stopping Raya's nightly ordeal.  At Amy's prompting, Raya maps out the various grave sites, extrapolating that these plots are gradually getting closer to Paul and Raya's home.  Where this is all headed is quite the mystery—indeed, the film generally proves as discombobulating for the viewer as this experience is for Raya; only once, in a scene where Raya goes to pick up her mail, does Bickel show his hand a bit too much, but little is telegraphed in a work that keeps us guessing for the bulk of its runtime.

Some will struggle with Our Happy Place's somewhat repetitive nature as Raya endures night after night of torment, but it's a film that's worth sticking with.  The payoff is nicely rewarding, with Bickel eventually pulling the disparate threads together in a way that makes for a satisfying dénouement, one that put me briefly in mind of the very last scene in Twin Peaks: The Return.  There is no deus ex machina ending here, but rather a carefully thought-out conclusion that feels earned by all the groundwork laid out in the previous 80 minutes.  Filmed entirely in and around Bickel and Miles' eerily quiet southern Californian home, this tense low-budget horror stands as a robust example of pandemic-era indie filmmaking.

Darren Arnold

Images: Strike Media

Raindance 2025: Dui Shaw (Nuhash Humayun, 2024)

Bangladeshi filmmaker Nuhash Humayun's horror anthology Pett Kata Shaw deservedly won Best International Feature at the 2023 Raindance Film Festival, and his sequel, Dui Shaw, has been selected for this year's edition of the festival.  This unsettling work is set to screen on Sunday at London's Vue Piccadilly, which serves as the main venue for this year's Raindance.  Like its predecessor, Dui Shaw is formed of four creepy stories, each of which puts a modern slant on traditional Bengali folktales.  Also as with Pett Kata Shaw, Dui Shaw has played on Bangladeshi streaming platform Chorki, but the Raindance screening will provide a rare opportunity to see this handsomely mounted production in a cinema.

Dui Shaw begins with "Waqt", an episode in which a group of five young men are paid to desecrate a temple.  Following the crime, a pattern emerges in which daily prayer time coincides with the violent death of one of the perpetrators, until the last man standing thinks he's figured out a way to cheat fate.  Destiny also forms the basis of the second segment, "Bhaggo Bhalo", where a poor fortune teller is desperate to find the money to pay for his mother's kidney transplant.  The third episode, "Antara", centres on the housewife of the title, who seems to lose her memory in the wake of a tragic accident.  Finally, "Beshura" tells the story of a girl ostracised by her village on account of her lack of singing ability.

Of these episodes, "Waqt" is undoubtedly the pick of the bunch, although all are worth seeing; there are many small details here, including references to other episodes in both anthologies, that make Dui Shaw a good candidate for repeat viewing.  Having set a high bar with Pett Kata Shaw, Humayun's second foray into this territory doesn't quite live up to what came before, but perhaps that's because what was a highly novel setup now feels a bit more familiar.  That said, horror films from the subcontinent are still far from commonplace, and it's always refreshing to see such material evoked from a non-Western point of view.  Its lack of reliance on jump scares also sets Dui Shaw apart from most current genre offerings.

As with Pett Kata Shaw, a strong streak of black humour is common to all of the stories told here, and Humayun never overplays his hand when it comes to gore, opting for fleeting glimpses of gruesome scenes when other directors might be tempted to linger over the carnage.  Nuhash Humayun is a confident filmmaker who knows how to exercise restraint, and in a sense both Dui Shaw and its forerunner feel as if they have more in common with early 70s TV anthology series Dead of Night than they do with anything in contemporary screen entertainment.  Far from being a superfluous imitation of the original, Dui Shaw is a clever slice of story-driven supernatural horror; another instalment would be no bad thing.

Darren Arnold

Images: Raindance

Raindance 2025: Hole (Dejan Babosek, 2024)

Hole, the new film from Dejan Babosek—whose previous features include WW2 tale Winter War and heist-gone-wrong flick Exit—screens at this year's Raindance Film Festival on Saturday.  Hole (original title: Jama) sees the Slovenian filmmaker take on the horror genre, and the result is a generally impressive if slightly over-familiar effort.  Horror is well represented at Raindance 2025, and for a very reasonable £75 you can obtain a pass that will give you access to all 16 horror films screening at the festival; Hole aside, these include Argento homage Saturnalia, Pett Kata Shaw sequel Dui Shaw, Australian horror-comedy Snatchers, interactive movie The Run, and ambitious slow-burner Our Happy Place.

Babosek's film is a three-hander in which his co-writers Lea Cok and Marko Plantan star as criminal couple Mia and Kevin, whose carefully-devised plan to rob the wealthy Ema (Darja Krhin) goes badly wrong when Mia goes off-script and brutally murders the woman, leaving the pair with a body to dispose of.  After driving to a secluded forest, Mia mercilessly taunts Kevin as he digs a hole, but when the time comes to place the corpse in the shallow grave, it has vanished from the car.  This, unsurprisingly, causes great panic as the pair frantically search the expansive woods for Ema, who, it transpires, isn't dead; despite her severe wounds, she's mustered just enough strength to instinctively edge away from her assailants.

From this point on, the film settles into its cat-and-mouse game as the injured, frightened Ema tries to evade her complacent pursuers—who have a gun to aid them—but as time progresses, Ema's senses begin to sharpen and she's able to use her meagre resources to good effect.  Conversely, Kevin and Mia's numerical advantage is essentially cancelled out by his drug use and her blind rage, leaving the contest finely balanced as the pair close in on their prey.  Babosek takes this limited setup and fashions a story that contains some real moments of tension, and there are several nice flourishes, particularly the striking scene in which the ailing, exhausted Ema comes face to face with an angel of light (Katja Fašink).

Clocking in at just over 70 minutes, this lean, taut film never outstays its welcome, and for the most part it's an admirable exercise in low-budget horror, one that is only slightly let down by a rather underwhelming ending—although that's the sort of, ahem, hole that many a film from the genre has fallen into.  It's a well-crafted work which boasts excellent cinematography, with Gregor Kitek—who also shot Winter War for Babosek and will return for the director's next film, Zadnji dnevi—expertly capturing the lush green forest in which the bulk of the film is set.  Much is demanded of—and indeed depends on—the three actors, but their committed performances ensure that Hole is never anything less than watchable.

Darren Arnold

Images: Jinga Films

It's Not Me (Leos Carax, 2024)

Leos Carax's magnificent, striking essay film It's Not Me is an experimental piece that delves into the mind of its elusive maker; one of cinema's most enigmatic auteurs, Carax has made just a handful of films in a career that spans more than four decades.  This 42-minute film—whose running time sees it classed as a feature in the US and UK but not in its director's native France—offers a welcome glimpse into Carax's private and professional worlds.  The film is a reflective, byzantine journey in which Carax mixes excerpts from his and others' movies with newly shot footage to create a patchwork view of his career and influences.  Carax has experienced his share of tragedy, but a more uplifting aspect of his personal life is represented by the inclusion of his daughter Nastya among It's Not Me's eclectic cast.

The film also features Denis Lavant, an actor who has starred in four of Carax's six previous feature films, who here reprises his role as the unnerving Monsieur Merde from anthology film Tokyo! and Holy Motors.  It's Not Me's narrative is at once chaotic and controlled, a testament to Carax's ability to weave disparate elements into a cohesive, satisfying whole.  The film is littered with nods to his earlier works, such as Les amants du Pont-Neuf, Annette and the aforementioned Holy Motors, as well as references to several cinematic luminaries, particularly Jean-Luc Godard, whose essay film aesthetic greatly informs the look, feel and sound of this self-portrait.  Like Godard's final film—the coruscating The Image Book—It's Not Me is a densely packed work, one whose brevity belies its depth and scope.

In terms of visual style, It's Not Me is almost slavishly Godardian, with its choppy edits, bold intertitles and occasionally confrontational imagery serving to recall the work of the most obtuse member of the New Wave—yet Carax's film possesses a warmth that was never present in the oeuvre of his cantankerous idol.  As Carax offsets black-and-white clips against hyper-saturated colour sequences, the film's diverse soundtrack—which includes several Bowie classics, one of which is hidden in a post-credits scene—further enhances the emotional impact of these eye-popping images.  Yet one of the most moving aspects of It's Not Me is Carax's own voiceover, which is both illuminating and self-deprecating as it offers some insight into this singular filmmaker's working methods and artistic touchstones.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Cannes Film Festival 2025: IFFR-Backed Selections

A spread of films and talent presented at IFF Rotterdam's CineMart and backed by the Hubert Bals Fund are once again a fixture of the Cannes lineup in 2025. Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón brings her family trilogy to a close with Romería, a moving story of love, yearning and family anguish, this time through an adolescent lens as orphan Marina travels to meet her grandparents in Spain. Erige Sehiri's second feature Promised Sky focuses on a pastor whose home becomes a refuge for Naney, a young mother seeking a better future, and Jolie, a strong-willed student, before an orphan girl arrives and tests their solidarity.

Italian-American filmmaker duo Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis continue their investigation into the legends and myths of Italian folklore with the surrealist Italy-set Western Testa o croce? (Heads or Tails?). The name derives from a bet between Buffalo Bill’s American cowboys (who visited Italy with their Wild West Show in 1890) and Italian cowboys over which team was better at taming wild horses. The film follows two young lovers on the run, played by rising French star Nadia Tereszkiewicz (Red Island) and Italy’s Alessandro Borghi (The Eight Mountains), with John C. Reilly co-starring as Buffalo Bill.

Renowned Japanese filmmaker Koji Fukada has made a number of highly acclaimed features across the last fifteen years dealing with “domestic disequilibrium”, including Harmonium (2016)—which won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes—A Girl Missing (2019), The Real Thing (2020) and Love Life (2022). Inspired by real cases in Japan, his latest, Love on Trial, follows Mai, a rising J-Pop idol whose big break is threatened when she falls in love, violating the “no love” clause in her contract. The project was presented at CineMart in 2022, where it picked up the IFFR Young Selectors Award.

March is mourning his wife Nat—who has recently passed away due to dust pollution—when he discovers her spirit has returned by possessing the vacuum cleaner. So begins the premise of Thai filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s unique, playful, genre-mixing debut A Useful Ghost (pictured top). Boonbunchachoke’s short Red Aninsri; Or, Tiptoeing on the Still Trembling Berlin Wall won the Junior Jury award at Locarno in 2020. A Useful Ghost was supported by the HBF+Europe: Minority Co-production Support scheme in 2023, where it received €60,000 of production financing.

Source: IFFR

Image: THE PR FACTORY

Cannes Film Festival 2025: Belgian Selections

Several Belgian-funded titles will be screening at this month's Cannes Film Festival (13–24 May), including Cédric Klapisch's Colours of Time, Sylvain Chomet's The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol and Momoko Seto's Dandelion's Odyssey. In Colours of Time, four cousins discover they share a mysterious family history; in 1895, their ancestor Adèle, then aged 21, leaves her hometown to search for her mother in a Paris bustling with newfound avant-garde creativity. As her descendants retrace her steps, they unravel Adèle's past. The two timelines of 1895 and 2024 intertwine and collide, confronting the cousins’ contemporary attitudes with life in late 19th-century Paris, leaving everyone’s future forever changed.

Animated Luxembourgish co-production The Magnificent Life of Marcel Pagnol focuses on the eponymous author. At the height of his fame, Pagnol is commissioned by the editor-in-chief of a major women’s magazine to write a literary serial, in which he is free to recount his childhood. As he pens the opening pages, the child he once was—little Marcel—suddenly appears before him. In fellow animated title Dandelion's Odyssey, four dandelion achenes that survive a series of nuclear explosions are propelled into the cosmos. After crash-landing on an unknown planet, they set out in search of soil where their species might survive. However, they must face countless obstacles: the elements, fauna, flora, the climate.

Source/images: THE PR FACTORY

Summer's Camera (Divine Sung, 2025)

Divine Sung's feature debut Summer's Camera, which had its world premiere at this year's BFI Flare, is a charming coming-of-age tale that examines the themes of first love and grief.  This Korean-set film follows Summer, a teenager who becomes enamoured with Yeonwoo, the standout football player at her high school.  Summer—who has a wonderfully analogue hobby in the form of film photography—is seldom spotted without the camera of the title, which once belonged to her father and houses a roll of film he began before his untimely death.  Quite understandably, Summer can't bring herself to take the final few photographs.

This changes, however, once Yeonwoo quite literally enters the frame, stirring emotions in Summer that inspire her to click the shutter of the Nikon until the film runs out.  Once the photographs are developed, Summer studies both her shots of Yeonwoo and the pictures taken by her dad, and in the latter set she notices a man she doesn't recognise.  It's not exactly the severed ear that kickstarts the events of David Lynch's Blue Velvet, but given that Summer seems unconvinced by the official version of her father's death—it's said he died in a car crash—the stage appears to be set for a mystery in which she will play detective.

Yet Divine Sung proceeds to wrongfoot her audience by having Summer track down the mystery man—who, it transpires, owns a hair salon—in short order, leaving the film to unfold as a character study, one that deftly captures the peculiar combination of joy and awkwardness that is so often a feature of first love.  Sung is aided by a note-perfect performance from Kim Si-a as Summer; hitherto best known for her prominent supporting role in the Netflix film Kill Boksoon, Kim is entirely convincing as the high schooler attempting to reconcile the emotions of a grieving daughter with those of a new girlfriend.

Sung's movie is beautifully shot, with much emphasis on the warm, tactile nature of "real" photography as Summer carefully handles her camera equipment.  The film possesses an oneiric quality that serves to place Summer in a tolerant, gracious society, with this ethereal atmosphere only undercut by the incongruous punk rock songs that bookend the film.  Yet such dissonance reflects both the protagonist's jumble of feelings and the difficulties of navigating those oh-so-tricky teenage years.  Summer's Camera may look controlled and measured, but an undercurrent of divine chaos lies beneath its sweet, stately surface.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Departures (Neil Ely / Lloyd Eyre-Morgan, 2025)

Lloyd Eyre-Morgan and Neil Ely's largely Amsterdam-set Departures, which screened at last month's BFI Flare, is not for the easily offended.  This horribly watchable film presents an unflinching look at toxic behaviour as it follows Benji, played by co-director Eyre-Morgan, who meets the conceited Jake (David Tag) in a departure lounge at Manchester airport.  Both men are heading to Amsterdam, and end up spending a chaotic few days together.  This trip proves to be the first of many, with Benji and Jake nipping off to the Netherlands on a regular basis, where their conduct sees them firmly adhere to the stereotype of Brits abroad.

But, at Jake's behest, contact between the two needs to be limited to these Dutch excursions, and radio silence fills the gaps between the pair's hedonism-filled jaunts.  Benji appears both baffled and rather unhappy with this arrangement, but goes along with it as he cherishes his time with Jake.  We have a pretty fair idea of where this is all heading, as the film opens in medias res with Jake berating Benji at what is quite clearly the terminus of their relationship.  But quite how they got to that point is the question on which Departures hinges, and we witness the frequently unpleasant events that have left Benji so broken.

Despite this grim journey, Ely and Eyre-Morgan's film is by no means without humour.  Yet it is slightly problematic that the controlling, manipulative Jake's almost invariably dreadful behaviour is often masked by comedy, which somewhat dilutes the impact of his deeds.  But weirdly, the film never feels atonal, and it's made with such spirit and energy that it is only upon stepping back that the viewer can see Jake's actions are far from amusing.  Departures is a highly immersive film, one whose raucous demeanour tends to distract from the insidious way in which Jake tightens his grip on the smitten Benji before casting him aside.

As Departures winds towards it conclusion, there are signs of green shoots of recovery for the traumatised Benji in the form of Kieran (Liam Boyle), a man who has recently grappled with his own demons yet cautiously looks to brighter days ahead.  Both Tag and Eyre-Morgan give brave, committed performances—the film really wouldn't work if they didn't go full bore—and they're ably backed by a fine supporting cast, of which Tyler Conti and Kerry Howard, as Benji's friend and Jake's aunt respectively, provide the most eye-catching turns.  As uncomfortable as it is compelling, Departures is a film destined for cult status.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Hot Milk (Rebecca Lenkiewicz, 2025)

Hot Milk, the directorial debut of Ida screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz, is a beguiling adaptation of Deborah Levy's eponymous Booker-shortlisted novel.  Lenkiewicz's film, which premiered at the Berlinale and was selected for last month's BFI Flare, examines the knotty relationship between Sofia (Emma Mackey) and her controlling single mother Rose (Fiona Shaw), who are staying in an apartment in the Spanish coastal city of Almeria.  But despite the sun-dappled locale, this is no holiday: Rose is receiving treatment from a local doctor, Gómez (Vincent Perez), for an undiagnosed condition that confines her to a wheelchair.  

As Sofia seeks some respite from her rather suffocating domestic situation, she encounters—and becomes enamoured with—flighty bohemian Ingrid (Vicky Krieps), yet this dalliance eventually proves as frustrating as the fraught relationship with her mother.  Sofia decides to mix things up by heading to Greece (which is in fact where the entire film was shot) to visit her father (Vangelis Mourikis), who now has a new family and is unable to provide much in the way of the fulfilment she so obviously craves.  In a development that underlines Rose's extremely manipulative nature, Sofia is abruptly recalled from her Greek sojourn.

Clearly, Rose is a very damaged individual, and it's implied that her symptoms are largely psychosomatic.  Yet Shaw's immense, nuanced performance leads us to both pity and scorn this troubled soul, who dismisses the incremental academic progress made by Sofia while simultaneously cherishing it as a means to infantilise her daughter, therefore preventing her from growing up and flying the nest.  For her part, Sofia—whose doctorate is currently on hold, at least partly because of Rose's treatment—alternates between dutifully caring for her mother and barely tolerating her endless, grating requests for suitable drinking water.

Mackey, hitherto best known for the Netflix series Sex Education, responds to the marker laid down by Shaw and delivers a turn to match that of her seasoned co-star, while Luxembourgish actress Krieps is good value in a rare supporting role.  Given that Levy's book is one in which much hinges on Sofia's interior life, translating it to the screen is no easy task.  When reviewing a title from last year's Flare—Orlando, My Political Biography—I wrote about the challenges of adapting such novels; as with that film, the haptic, hypnotic Hot Milk takes a sideways approach to adaptation, and the results are highly impressive.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI

Brussels IFFF: Hello Stranger (Paul Raschid, 2024)

Hello Stranger, which will have its Belgian premiere on Saturday evening as part of this year's Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival, is a new psychological horror-thriller interactive film from Paul Raschid (The Complex, Five Dates, Ten Dates, The Gallery).  Coming to Valve's PC service Steam next month, Hello Stranger tells the chilling story of a man trapped in his smart home by a masked stranger who forces him to play three games to survive.  Hello Stranger boasts a cast including Sir Derek Jacobi, George Blagden, Danny Griffin, Christina Wolfe, Kulvinder Ghir, Laura Whitmore and Yasmin Finney.

The film centres on Cam, who conducts life exclusively from his smart home—work, shopping, entertainment and, most notably, socialising.  Cam interacts with strangers on the Hello Stranger platform, a randomised video chatting application.  Eventually, he encounters a masked stranger with an altered voice.  Unnerved, Cam leaves the call only to find the stranger has hacked his smart home and locked him in.  The stranger tells Cam that he must win three rounds of games, or it is ‘game over’.  Viewers must make decisions and play the three games for Cam to survive—but one wrong move could lead to a grisly end.

Paul Raschid wrote and directed Hello Stranger—which features over four hours of filmed content and 10 possible endings—and is one of the world’s most prolific interactive filmmakers.  Before focusing on interactive films, Raschid was a linear feature filmmaker; his most notable credit is as writer-director of sci-fi thriller White Chamber, for which Shauna Macdonald won Best Actress at BAFTA Scotland 2018.  It was released on Netflix following selection for 10 film festivals worldwide, including Brussels IFFF, Edinburgh IFF, BiFan (South Korea), FrightFest (London), Sitges IFFF, and Mumbai FF.

Source/images: Polymath PR

The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2024)

David Cronenberg's new film The Shrouds is a highly personal and strangely moving meditation on grief, love, and the double-edged sword that is technology.  Inspired by the 2017 death of the director's wife, Carolyn, the film follows Karsh (Vincent Cassel), a bereaved Toronto-based widower who invents an intricate camera system that allows people to observe their loved ones in the grave.  This unnerving innovation becomes both the centre of Karsh's funeral business and a marker of his monomaniacal desire to cling to the past, with his devotion to the dead recalling that of Julien in François Truffaut's The Green Room.

While Truffaut cast himself as the lead in that Henry James adaptation, Cronenberg, who has stepped in front of the camera on a number of occasions, stops short of such a move in The Shrouds—although he does goes as far as to furnish Cassel with a coiffure that bears an uncanny resemblance to the director's distinctive shock of white hair.  Cassel, collaborating with Cronenberg for the third time following the pair's work on A History of Violence and A Dangerous Method, makes a fine job of balancing cool detachment with simmering obsession, as Karsh is sucked into a world even darker than the one he signed up for.

Diane Kruger, who replaced Léa Seydoux just a month before filming commenced, is equally impressive in her triple role as Karsh's wife, sister in-law, and AI assistant, and Guy Pearce is very good value as a jittery IT whiz.  But when the film changes gear and moves into areas such as industrial espionage and corporate conspiracy, these admittedly fun elements prove slightly distracting.  Visually, The Shrouds is stunning, with cinematography (from Douglas Koch, returning from Cronenberg's previous feature Crimes of the Future) that frames characters in a way that underlines the crippling isolation that accompanies mourning.

David Cronenberg's calling card, body horror—an important, if sometimes overstated, aspect of his work—is present here, although it never overshadows the film's emotional core.  Given that the past year has seen The Substance comprehensively out-Cronenberg the Canadian auteur (at least superficially), it's refreshing to witness how latter-day Cronenberg only employs body horror to serve the narrative.  The Shrouds, which was originally envisaged as a Netflix series, is a richly compelling work, one that prompts viewers to carefully consider both the normative emotions of grief and technology's relationship with human values.

Darren Arnold

Images: Pyramide Films

BFI Flare: I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun, 2024)

Hands-down the finest film of 2024, Jane Schoenbrun's jaw-dropping sophomore feature I Saw the TV Glow is included in BFI Flare's Best of Year strand, where it plays tomorrow alongside Queer, Will & Harper and Power Alley.  Schoenbrun's debut feature, the lo-fi experimental horror We're All Going to the World's Fair, was an unsettling and narratively challenging effort that centred on a sinister online game; while that ambitious, creepypasta-like film heralded the arrival of an exciting new talent, it only hinted at what the filmmaker would achieve with their next feature.  In many ways, We're All Going to the World's Fair feels more like a precursor to Kyle Edward Ball's Skinamarink than it does to I Saw the TV Glow, despite some obvious thematic connections between Schoenbrun's films—which form part of a trilogy that will be capped by the director's debut novel Public Access Afterworld.   

I Saw the TV Glow wears its influences on its sleeve, and the core of the film's DNA can be traced to Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko, the work of David Lynch in general and Twin Peaks in particular, and The Smashing Pumpkins' track "Tonight, Tonight" (and its Méliès-inspired video).  Schoenbrun's film begins, almost in medias res, in the analogue mid-90s, when teenagers Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and Owen (Justice Smith) bond over young adult TV show The Pink Opaque, which centres on two girls who share a psychic connection they use to fight evil; Owen isn't allowed to stay up to watch the programme when it airs, so Maddy supplies him with grainy VHS tapes of the episodes.  When Maddy suddenly goes missing, presumed dead, the series is cancelled; but she resurfaces eight years later, prompting a confounded Owen to rewatch the frankly terrifying finale of The Pink Opaque.

Looking to explain her disappearance, Maddy takes Owen to a bar called the Double Lunch, a venue that appears in both reality and The Pink Opaque, and as such seems to serve as a nexus between worlds; in an overt reference to Twin Peaks: The Return's Roadhouse and its musical guests, we watch Sloppy Jane perform the mesmerising "Claw Machine" on stage before Maddy embarks on her story.  The detached, dissociative Owen, who once reneged on plans to run away with Maddy, again loses his nerve as she outlines what he needs to do in order to emerge from his torpor, and Maddy subsequently vanishes for good.  Years and decades pass as Owen works at a cinema, then an indoor amusement park, while Maddy and the series seem all but absent from his thoughts—until one rainy, restless night, when he decides to stream The Pink Opaque, which is now quite different from how he remembers it.

In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer-like The Pink Opaque, one of the protagonists, Tara, is played by singer-songwriter Lindsey Jordan, whose band Snail Mail contribute a cover of "Tonight, Tonight" to the film's soundtrack; moreover, Amber Benson, who played Tara Maclay in Buffy, appears here as the mother of one of Owen's schoolmates.  Yet this meta-trivia never proves distracting; somehow, the haunting I Saw the TV Glow manages to be both immersive and self-reflexive, and its beguiling crepuscular world(s) may make the viewer as obsessed with the film as Maddy and Owen are with the unnerving YA show.  This eerie, near-unclassifiable work is no mere pastiche; it's a heartbreaking, highly singular piece of mise en abyme cinema, one that gets under your skin and stays there for days.

Darren Arnold

Images: A24

BFI Flare: Black Fruit (Elisha Smith-Leverock, 2024)

Black Fruit (German: Schwarze Früchte), which screens tomorrow at BFI Flare, is an eight-part series from Germany's ARD1 that centres on two black twentysomethings in Hamburg.  The series dips into themes of friendship, identity and loss as it follows Lalo (played by series creator Lamin Leroy Gibba), an ex-architecture student floundering after the death of his father.  When his relationship with the conceited Tobias (Nick Romeo Reimann) ends, Lalo finds comfort in his best friend Karla (Melodie Simina), who is enjoying a successful and steady career in finance but nonetheless struggles with discrimination in her workplace.

The series gets off to a strong start, but its back half is horribly uneven; the low point comes in the form of the fifth episode, which is when directing duties transfer from Elisha Smith-Leverock to David Uzochukwu.  This part is more or less a chamber piece, one in which the players aren't given much of interest to work with.  With better writing, this stark change of pace might have worked, but instead it highlights how the show thrives when it's out on the streets of Hamburg, capturing the sights and sounds of the city's vibrant nightlife; without such momentum, this turgid episode places the dialogue under a scrutiny it can't bear.

Following this episode, Black Fruit gets moving again, but it never fully recovers from this misstep.  The remaining parts feel very lopsided, focusing on Lalo as Karla is all but sidelined until the series finale, when an engrossing storyline centring on her professional difficulties is hastily wrapped up.  Given that Lamin Leroy Gibba is also the show's head writer, perhaps this shouldn't be too surprising, but it's jarring to find that Karla's story arc is neglected for so long; while flashbacks to Lalo's childhood are both engaging and well-wrought, the adult version of the self-centred protagonist could use a bit less screen time.

The cinematography, courtesy of Claudia Schröder and Malcolm Saidou—as with the directors, they get four episodes apiece—is perhaps the strongest element here, with a range of bright and muted tones reflecting the characters' various moods.  Despite its flaws, Black Fruit retains a messy charm, and its exploration of German society, in which it addresses, inter alia, racism, sexism and homophobia, makes for refreshing viewing.  There's the sense that the team involved—a writers' room was set up to develop the script—will have learned a great deal from the experience; with this in mind, a second season would be no bad thing.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI