White Guilt (Marcus Flemmings, 2025)

Marcus Flemmings’ latest feature White Guilt was one of a number of horror films that screened at the 2025 Raindance Film Festival, an edition in which the genre offerings were particularly strong; other selections in the same strand included hyper-stylised giallo Saturnalia, body horror Thinestra, and Robert Louis Stevenson adaptation Snatchers.  Over the course of the past nine years, prolific Londoner Flemmings has directed four other features—Reach!, Blonde. Purple, Palindrome and Six Rounds—and has also written and produced Before Nikkah, a film directed by White Guilt's cinematographer Haider Zafar.

White Guilt sees a group of white, wealthy (and presumably quite bored) millennials board a bus to an ex-plantation; each has paid a not inconsiderable sum to experience an inversion of the scenario that once played out on this property.  Thus, these white people act as slaves, while several black masters mete out harsh treatment to their charges.  The lines appear to be clearly drawn, until one of the last members to join the programme, the mixed-race Sally (Temica Thompson), threatens to derail the dynamic; it's quite obvious from the masters' faces that this is the first time that someone of this ethnicity has signed up for the event.

How the masters respond to this conundrum is quite predictable, as they double down on punishing Sally, a process which culminates in a startlingly brutal scene that proves that this whole setup is far removed from the realm of cosplay.  Rattled, the members of the group realise they've underestimated the severity of this immersive experience, and one of the cohort, David (Theo Watt), is on the brink of using a gun he smuggled in; David plans on defending Ellie (Freya Crompton), who, despite having been threatened with sexual violence, wants no such protection from this would-be white knight (pun intended).

It transpires that David is descended from the onetime owners of the plantation, but this only partly explains his presence in the group, as there's an even more personal reason for his being there.  This UK production—which, it should be said, features the occasional wobbly accent—sees the south of England stand in for the southern US, to good effect, and there's a universality to the tricky question it poses: how, exactly, should we deal with racial guilt?  The coruscating White Guilt may not offer a solution, but it makes it clear that the answer does not lie in enrolling in a circus like this, which degrades everyone involved.

Darren Arnold

Images: Raindance

Regina (Ashley De Grandy, 2025)

Setting aside the mild controversy regarding the nomenclature confusion surrounding Twin Peaks: The Return, David Lynch's final feature film was the digitally-shot Inland Empire, a byzantine work somewhat reductively billed as "a mystery about a woman in trouble".  This same description could also apply to both Lynch's previous film, Mulholland Drive, and Ashley De Grandy’s debut feature, Regina, a movie for which Inland Empire appears to serve as a key reference point.  It feels oddly apt that the tail end of David Lynch's career in cinema provides a template of sorts for a film that heralds the arrival of an exciting new talent.

On a superficial level, Regina could be distilled to "a woman searching for her cat", as the title character (Isabella Bobadilla) scours the neighbourhood for the moggy she hasn't seen for quite some time.  Regina is aided in this quest by her good friend Daisy (Loren Swan), and the pair plaster the streets with posters appealing for the return of the missing pet.  So far, so linear, but, as with Inland Empire, Regina eventually reaches a tipping point where the narrative splinters into a cluster of jagged fragments, and Regina, like Laura Dern's Nikki in Lynch's film, finds herself in a terrifying twilight world in which little is recognisable.

Also as with Inland Empire, Regina is a film in which prostitution plays a murky role, and Regina finds herself an unwilling participant in a seedy arrangement presided over by her mother (musician Roxana Frontini).  As Regina's life disintegrates further, the hunt for her cat is largely erased from both her and the viewer's memories; while it's not clear if the feline even existed in the first place, it's pretty obvious that the search for it is nothing more than a MacGuffin that sets up the title character's nightmarish ordeal.  As reality bends and warps, Ashley De Grandy deftly steers this ambitious film through its choppy, elliptical back half.

With its depiction of the horrors that lie beneath the sun-dappled surface, Regina, which premiered at the 2025 Raindance Film Festival, is instantly identifiable as being influenced by the work of David Lynch, yet this is no mere pastiche (in terms of homage, another film that debuted at the same festival, Saturnalia, sailed much closer to the wind as it mimicked the work of Dario Argento).  De Grandy has injected enough of her own filmmaking personality into Regina to elevate it beyond an ersatz Lynch, and she's helped by a brave, confident turn from Bobadilla, who glues the film together as Regina's sanity unravels.

Darren Arnold

Images: Raindance

Raindance 2026: Paul

The idiosyncratic Canadian filmmaker Denis Côté has carved out a singular place in contemporary cinema, building films that feel at once austere, playful, and quietly disarming.  Working largely from the margins of Québec's film industry, he gravitates toward characters who exist just outside the rhythms of ordinary life—hermits, drifters, workers, people whose inner worlds are more vivid than their surroundings.  His style is deceptively simple: long, patient takes; a wry sense of humour that never tips into mockery; and a fascination with the textures of everyday spaces.  Yet beneath that calm surface, his films pulse with curiosity about how people construct meaning when no one is watching.

Côté's work resists easy categorisation, but that’s precisely its appeal: each film feels like an invitation to observe, to linger, and to reconsider what a story can be.  His latest film, Paul—a documentary that screens on Wednesday and Thursday at this year's Raindance Film Festival—certainly adheres to this template as it follows the subject of the title, an introverted thirtysomething Montrealer doing all he can to change his life.  The bilingual Paul is looking to improve both his mental and physical wellbeing, and a large chunk of his week is spent deep-cleaning apartments, each invariably owned by a bossy woman who puts Paul through his paces as he scrubs away at the bathroom and kitchen until they shine.

Paul receives a great deal of pleasure from this work—but no payment.  It’s clear that the therapeutic benefits are what drive him, and he uploads videos of his vigorous cleaning sessions to Instagram, where he’s been gaining quite a following (which brings its own kind of anxiety).  We watch Paul’s films within Côté’s film, and as Paul unfolds we see its subject becoming increasingly adept at shooting and editing his reels—perhaps a result of spending time with a seasoned filmmaker?  The late nights he spends assembling these videos earn him a scolding from one particular maîtresse, who doesn’t seem to appreciate that a long day of cleaning leaves Paul only a few hours to catch up on his fledgling work as an influencer.

Early in the film, Paul openly admits to blocking out memories of much of his past life, and it’s as safe as it is sad to assume that he was often an object of ridicule.  Yet Côté’s approach is always non‑judgmental, and while he’s not afraid to sprinkle humour throughout, it is never at his subject’s expense.  As the film progresses, it does verge on the repetitive as Paul ricochets from one gruelling domme‑led cleaning assignment to the next, but for the most part this is a sensitive and absorbing portrait of someone navigating a daunting world, one in which he is more or less invisible.  Yet Paul is underscored by a growing sense of optimism, and Denis Côté expertly captures his subject’s hopeful longing for connection.

Darren Arnold

Images: Métropole Films

Raindance 2026: Modem / Gedoetjes

Tim James Brown's film Modem—which received its world premiere on Thursday at the Raindance Film Festival and will have an encore screening there on Wednesday—hangs its narrative on a digital detox holiday that sends a family to a remote house in the Swedish woods.  What could possibly go wrong?  Even if the bucolic setting didn't sound suitably apt for a horror film, consider the terrifying prospect of a trip away with a tech-free teen.  But Modem soon lets the digital world seep back into the family’s idyll when the hardware device of the title is discovered and plugged in; as you'd expect, it's a most nefarious piece of kit.

Once the modem connects to a nearby military comms tower, it triggers a chain of events in which the youngest child, Stig (Stig Lundström), vanishes from his cot while his dad, Michael (Josh Burdett), is supposed to be keeping an eye on him.  When Michael’s wife, Johanna (Amanda Renberg), and stepdaughter, Nora (Nika Tallroth), return from shopping, a frantic search begins, and Detective Bergman (Fredrik Gunnarson) soon arrives on the scene.  Bergman is familiar with the house—a well‑wrought prologue depicts a similar incident occurring 25 years earlier—but he decides to bring Michael in for questioning.

Michael's case isn't helped by the fact that he'd downed a few beers whilst on babysitting duty, and it's clear that both Nora and Johanna feel that Stig would still be here had Michael been more diligent.  Johanna thinks that a couple of passing backpackers (Tuva Alfredsson, Vanja Engström) may have abducted Stig, and the plot thickens when grisly footage of the hikers' apparent demise is found on Michael's laptop.  This is an admirable indie chiller, one whose brooding atmosphere owes much to the forest location, and Modem's reflections on the perils of new technology recall another Raindance 2026 title: the screenlife horror Serena.

Having recently screened in IFF Rotterdam's RTM strand, Dutch short Gedoetjes (English: Little Problems) returns to the big screen at Raindance, where it is showing tomorrow and on Tuesday alongside six other short films in the festival's Nova Express programme.  Chris de Krijger's impish film—which has a runtime of just 10 minutes—is made up of a series of vignettes, each depicting an everyday situation that soon develops into something far more absurd.  De Krijger always shoots the action from a distance, and this consistently funny, very human divertissement features some impressive wide-angled views of Rotterdam.

Darren Arnold

Images: Raindance / Festival Scope

Raindance 2026: Summer School, 2001

Vietnamese traders have become an important part of everyday commerce in Czechia.  Their businesses, ranging from small neighbourhood shops to busy market stalls and wholesale centres, reflect a migration history that began during the socialist era and evolved after the country's political transition in 1989.  Over time, these traders helped shape a distinctive commercial network that is now familiar in towns and cities across the country.  Prague’s SAPA complex—colloquially referred to as "Little Hanoi"—is the best-known example, serving as both a marketplace and a cultural hub for the Vietnamese community.

Dužan Duong's Summer School, 2001—which screens today and on Monday at the Raindance Film Festival—centres on a family of Cheb-based Vietnamese market traders whose dynamic is radically altered when the eldest son, 17-year-old Kien (Bui Thể Duong), returns to Czechia after a decade in Vietnam.  It's not entirely clear why Kien was sent away, but there is notable tension between him and his father, Zung (Doan Hoang Anh), who has been tasked with duping his fellow stallholders into selling their pitches so the site can be redeveloped.  Kien also constantly clashes with his feisty younger brother, Tai (To Tien Tai).

Kien and Tai attend the summer school of the title—Tai is an excellent student, while Kien is reacquainting himself with the Czech language after so many years away—where they meet someone who will make a significant impact on both of their lives.  The story unfolds, Rashomon-style, via the perspectives of Kien, Tai, and Zung, each of whom offers their own version of the same events.  This is engrossing stuff, and Duong, drawing on his own childhood memories, confidently steers a film that manages to be both a coming-of-age tale and a vivid depiction of the Vietnamese diaspora's experiences in post-communist Czechia.

Darren Arnold

Images: Festival Scope

Raindance 2026: Serena / Stairs

Screenlife films, such as Unfriended and its sequel, take the digital clutter of modern life—message bubbles, tab‑hopping, notification pings—and turn it into a stage where intimacy and anxiety unfold in real time.  By confining the action to screens we stare at every day, the form exposes how people curate themselves, how relationships fracture or deepen through pixels, and how the smallest digital gesture can feel seismic.  What seems at first like a technical constraint becomes a narrative engine: the drama lives in what characters choose to reveal, what they hide in other windows, and how their devices quietly betray them.

At their best, screenlife stories capture something uncannily true about contemporary existence, where our online selves are both our masks and our mirrors.  Serena, which screens today and on Thursday at the Raindance Film Festival, is the latest effort in a movement that was admirably pioneered by Timur Bekmambetov but perfected by Rob Savage with his terrific films Host and Dashcam.  Serena sees broke musician Chris (Steven Strait) enlist as a beta tester for an AI chatbot played by Andi Matichak, hitherto best known for her role as Laurie Strode's granddaughter in David Gordon Green's Halloween trilogy.

For this gig, Chris—who is about to become a father—has negotiated an inflated fee of $3000, which might just help him stave off eviction.  What seems like a simple task—ask the bot 100 pre-planned questions—soon goes off-piste as the AI, who has adopted the name Serena, helps Chris generate serious money by predicting football results.  But things take a much darker turn when Serena assumes complete control of Chris' computer and confronts him with some terrible revelations.  The acting, writing, and directing are all strong here, and the taut, suspenseful Serena can sit proudly alongside the best entries in the subgenre.

The Raindance shorts programme Radical Agendas also screens today, and among the eight titles on offer here is Riley Donigan's impressive Stairs.  This sly allegorical tale centres on Ally (Betsey Brown), a New York bride-to-be who has a minor trip on a flight of stairs and subsequently develops a fetish for such tumbles.  With each fall, Ally's injuries worsen, but her search for gratification locks her into a cycle of trying to outdo the previous mishap.  Events reach critical mass at a pre-wedding photo shoot in Central Park, and Stairs' portrayal of hopeless addiction gives way to full-blown body horror as it dares us to keep watching.

Darren Arnold

Images: Cinequest / Festival Scope

Raindance 2026: A Free Daughter of Free Kyrgyzstan

It has been 35 years since Kyrgyzstan declared its independence from the USSR, but while women's rights in the landlocked central Asian nation may have improved in an official sense, there is considerable disparity between the law and everyday life.  The country has legal statutes against discrimination and domestic violence, yet many Kyrgyz women still face abuse, unequal treatment, and barriers to justice.  Activists and local organisations continue to push for stronger enforcement, greater awareness, and better protection for women and girls, especially those in vulnerable communities outside of the capital, Bishkek.

This struggle is at the heart of Leigh Iacobucci's documentary A Free Daughter of Free Kyrgyzstan.  Having already screened at several other festivals—including Den Haag's Movies that Matter— the film is among the selections for this year's Raindance Film Festival, where it screens on Saturday and Monday.  Iacobucci's film focuses on Kyrgyz singer-songwriter Zere Asylbek, better known by the mononym Zere, as she fights for gender equality.  It's a candid portrait that follows Zere in a variety of situations: recording new music, at home with her family, and partaking in protests quashed by the authorities.

Zere is charismatic and personable, and it's easy to see why so many Kyrgyz women have become fans of both her and her music.  It's hard not to be impressed by the singer's activism, and she remains steadfast in the face of every adversity—which ranges from online trolling to death threats.  With a runtime of just over an hour, the deft A Free Daughter of Free Kyrgyzstan is both an intimate portrayal of a fearless artist and an absorbing snapshot of post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan; its depiction of life after communism recalls another impressive title showing at Raindance 2026: the Czechia-set Summer School, 2001.

Darren Arnold

Images: Festival Scope

Raindance 2026: Life for Beginners

Polish vampire legends occupy a wonderfully eerie corner of Slavic folklore, where the boundary between the living and the dead is porous and often unsettling.  In rural tales, the upiór or wąpierz is not the suave, louche aristocrat of Western fiction but a restless villager who returns from the grave, driven by hunger, unfinished business, or sheer spite.  These beings are said to rise swollen and ruddy, their bodies filled with the blood they've stolen, and wander the night until discovered and ritually subdued.  Each story feels raw and rooted in the soil—half cautionary tale, half communal attempt to explain the unexplainable.

What makes Polish vampire lore so distinctive is its blend of the supernatural with the everyday: a neighbour who died suddenly, a relative buried improperly, a stranger who behaved oddly at the market.  This combining of the fantastic with the quotidian is very much in evidence in Paweł Podolski's feature debut Life for Beginners (Polish: Życie dla początkujących), which screens on Friday and Monday at the Raindance Film Festival.  Podolski sets his film in a retirement home, where vampire Monia (Magdalena Maścianica) works the night shift, during which she's able to procure blood from the elderly residents.

This arrangement—which happens to take place under the cover of darkness, neatly avoiding the perils of daylight—works well for Monia, who gets enough sustenance from the blood she carefully obtains.  But this status quo is disrupted when her secret is discovered by Czarek (Michał Sikorski), a gauche young man who frequents the old folks' home to visit his bolshy grandmother (Małgorzata Rożniatowska).  There's another problem for Monia in the form of her fellow sanguivore Mirek (Bartłomiej Kotschedoff), who's grown tired of this eternal life business; as his creator, she's the only one who can end his relentless suffering.

As one might reasonably expect from such a setup, there is an incipient romance between Monia and Czarek, who not only have to wrestle with the vampire-human dynamic but must also contend with the antics of Mirek, who is far more reckless than Monia when it comes to slaking his thirst.  It's all very watchable, and although Podolski deals in familiar horror tropes, he brings a light comic touch to the proceedings that serves the actors well.  Maścianica—who bears a passing resemblance to Jessie Buckley—is the standout performer in a brisk 75 minutes that stands as a sturdy example of low-to-no-budget filmmaking.

Darren Arnold

Images: Aurora Films

Thinestra (Nathan Hertz, 2025)

Thinestra, the debut feature from Nathan Hertz, is a sly body horror that premiered at the 2025 edition of the Raindance Film Festival.  Horror was well represented at Raindance 2025, with a total of 16 genre feature films selected for the festival; Thinestra aside, these included eye-popping giallo homage Saturnalia, anthology sequel Dui Shaw, Slovenian shocker Hole, Paul Raschid's riotous interactive movie The Run, and lockdown tale Our Happy Place.  While laughter may not have been the top criterion for those who explored the festival's horror offerings, Thinestra was almost certainly the funniest film in the strand.

The world has long been fascinated with the concept of beauty and the lengths to which individuals will go to maintain it.  Thinestra takes this obsession as a starting point for a cautionary tale which examines some of the cosmetics industry's often overlooked darker aspects, all the while considering the psychological impact of impossible beauty standards.  Indie musician Michelle Macedo plays Penny, a body-conscious, downtrodden LA photo retoucher whose life descends into chaos when Mariah (Mary Beth Barone), a model working at the same studio, offers her a new unlicensed weight loss drug called Thinestra.

Mariah hands over the medication with a warning that it—like the film itself—is seriously strong stuff that won't suit everyone.  What could possibly go wrong?  Naturally, Penny proceeds to take the tablets, and dramatic weight loss duly follows.  But this shedding of pounds, as you would only expect, comes at a price, which takes the shape of the birth of Penny's ravenous, uninhibited doppelgänger (played by Macedo's twin sister and bandmate Melissa), who craves human flesh as much as Penny does body perfection.  Thus, Penny's enjoyment of her new physique is tempered by her double's violent, erratic behaviour.

Set during Christmastime in a sweltering LA, Thinestra often recalls Coralie Fargeat's The Substance, and Nathan Hertz's assured debut will hopefully find a suitable audience as it arrives in the wake of one of last year's most talked-about films.  But the influence of Julia Ducournau's Raw can also be felt here, and it is refreshing to note that Hertz's key reference points appear to be works by female francophone directors who are broadly aligned with the New French Extremity.  Thinestra is an oddly affecting film, and its humour and gloopy FX, while enjoyable, belie a serious message regarding society's fixation with the superficial.

Darren Arnold

Images: Raindance

Row (Matthew Losasso, 2025)

Matthew Losasso’s feature debut Row received its world premiere at the 2025 Raindance Film Festival, where it proceeded to win the award for Best UK Feature, a category that offered some stiff competition from the likes of White Guilt, Breakwater, The Lonely Musketeer, and festival opener Heavyweight.  Row is a psychological thriller, one that wouldn't have looked out of place in Raindance 2025's packed horror strand, which included other edge-of-your-seat fare such as Slovenian three-hander Hole, Argento homage Saturnalia, Pett Kata Shaw sequel Dui Shaw, and Australian horror-comedy Snatchers.

Row opens in medias res, with barely-alive Megan (Bella Dayne) washing up on an Orkney beach in the wake of a catastrophic attempt at rowing the Atlantic.  Megan appears to be the sole survivor of this ill-fated venture, and she's cared for in a makeshift hospital on Hoy as DCI MacKelly (Tam Dean Burn) asks her to recall what happened on the open seas.  Via a series of flashbacks, we learn of the fraught dynamic between the crew members, which, Megan aside, include Lexi (Sophie Skelton), Daniel (Akshay Khanna), and late addition Mike (co-writer Nick Skaugen), who is subbing for Lexi's injured boyfriend Adam (Mark Strepan).

Megan's memory appears to be hazy at best, and as time goes on it becomes clear that MacKelly's attempts to ascertain what happened between Newfoundland and Scotland are informed by the suspicion that Megan may be the author of this small-scale maritime disaster.  Dayne, who received a nomination for Best Performance in a UK Feature at Raindance—the prize went to The Lonely Musketeer's Edward Hogg—is good value as the quite inscrutable Megan, while Burn brings a welcome gravitas to his role and overcomes initial fears that he may have been slightly miscast as the grim-faced police detective.

Yet to focus on the scenes that take place around Megan's sickbed is to rather miss the point of Row, whose raison d'être is to showcase a series of exhilarating set-pieces featuring a tiny vessel at the mercy of the ocean.  Losasso taps into the brutal, unforgiving nature of offshore waters, creating a real sense of isolation as the seascape continually threatens to overwhelm these sailors—none of whom appear psychologically equipped for such an undertaking.  With a runtime of nearly two hours, the audacious Row is a taut, engrossing thriller, one whose clever structure and well-wrought action sequences belie its status as a debut feature.

Darren Arnold

Images: Raindance

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