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