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