Tag: horror

Hex

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Holidaying in Cambodia with Isaac (Ross McCall), Ben (Kelly Blatz) is getting over his father’s death. He runs into and falls for fellow Bostonian holidaying abroad Amber (Jenny Boyd) who after getting rid of him as fast as possible when he first attempts to pick her up, makes amends and comes on to him in a bar, where he’s hanging out with male friends.

She takes him back to her room for an unexpected topless exposure, a scantily clad embrace and no actual sexual congress.

The next day, Ben spots Amber having a spat with another Westerner and quickly gets into a fight with the latter – which situation swiftly escalates as Ben and Amber are walking away and the other man snatches a meat cleaver off a local and races after them. Cue a breathtaking chase through various narrow back alleys. Amber drags Ben in through a doorway and to his surprise, in a scene that would probably have made Hitchcock extremely happy, unbuttons Ben’s belt and gives him a blow job. It’s difficult to believe it’s the same woman.

And of course, that’s the twist – Amber has a scar indicting she was separated from her then twin at birth: she lived, her twin died. Yet lurking within Amber is another entity… her twin sister?… or something else?

One odd sequence has Amber sexually assaulted in one location (buttons being undone by an unseen force as she writhes and squirms, clearly having an unpleasant experience, while elsewhere in his car the meat cleaver-wielding assailant from earlier is locked in his vehicle – again by unseen forces – and subjected to loud music bursting from the car radio and subjected to an unpleasant fate. But that doesn’t prevent him from later spotting Ben at a local dance bar, getting him drugged (with Amber’s help? – it’s not clear) and attempting to exact revenge on Ben later on.

As Isaac and friends head off North and Ben stays behind, Amber’s behaviour becomes increasingly polarised, with the film throwing in for good measure her epilepsy and a Cambodian couple running a local medicine shop.

It’s a funny mixture of a white man’s Western view of Cambodia – beautiful Western females to sleep/fall in love with, evil spirits, medicinal hocus pocus and more, an outsider’s view of the culture rather than an insider’s.

The script provides a number of elements that might explain what besets Amber and while the finale wraps everything up neatly, a number of the elements present never really lead anywhere. The characters are believable and the performances adequate, the whole thing working well enough as a once only view on download without being anything truly memorable. The result is an efficient horror that succeeds in item modest aims but has little to say beyond satisfying its (white? male?) audience as an efficient yet vacuous exercise in generic horror.

Hex plays in the Raindance Film Festival. Watch the teaser swimming pool scene film trailer below:

What Keeps You Alive

Posted on by victorfraga

How much do you truly know about the person you love? One way of finding out more is by taking a trip to a remote location together. You could learn new things you never knew before, but this approach carries with it an inherent risk. What if those secrets were never meant to be exposed?

This is the premise of What Keeps You Alive, an elegant Canadian thriller-mystery centring around a couple spending a romantic weekend in a remote, picturesque location in the woods. They are Jules (Brittany Allen) and Jackie (Hannah Emily Anderson) and they’ve come up here to celebrate their one year anniversary. At first everything seems to be going well, with both women commenting on how beautiful the location is, joking about how they could stay there forever, and getting ready to spend a romantic, sexy evening together. Then a knock on the door changes everything. It’s Sarah (Martha MacIsaac) from across the lake, an old childhood friend of Jackie’s. At first it seems that this might be a past lover, but the secret Sarah hides is far darker than that, and threatens to destroy both women.

What Keeps You Alive is one of those films that anything after the first third counts as a spoiler, its first twist changing the dynamic of the movie completely. Let’s just say that it isn’t outside threats that either girl needs to be afraid of, with the thriller, Hitchcock-like, centred around the bonds of their love. It asks a key question of the viewer: Why has Jackie taken Jules here in the first place if it is such a source of sadness for her? This mystery powers the stripped-back narrative, leading us to its inevitable, deadly conclusion.

An enigmatic wide-angle is used for filming, allowing the vast mountain scenery and bucolic lake surroundings to do a lot of the emotional heavy lifting. Veering between an old-school psychological drama and a cat-and-mouse chase thriller, What Keeps You Alive boasts strong performances by the two leads, who sell both the romantic and survivalist sides of their personalities. (Martha MacIsaac and Joey Klein, who plays Sarah’s husband, don’t fare as well — perhaps the movie would’ve been tighter if their underwritten roles were cut.) These performances are complemented by a diverse soundtrack, ranging from classic rock to some choice Beethoven cuts — yet most importantly, the film knows when to go deathly quiet, allowing the action to speak for itself.

Sadly, What Keeps You Alive runs out of steam by the end, forcing situations for the sake of spectacle instead of letting the plot play out naturally. While building up a great sense of foreboding in the beginning of the movie — using a mixture of chilling anecdotes and gorgeous scenery to create an uneasy yet enticing vibe — the final stages falter significantly, circling back to the same tired tropes instead of saying anything new. It could’ve done much better to milk that feeling of uncertainty for longer, really allowing us to delve deeper into the distorted psychology of its protagonists.

Nevertheless, managing and subverting genre expectations can be a tricky tightrope to walk. Too much subversion and it’s hard to find a rhythm, too much deliverance and a film can end up being too predictable. Credit has to go to writer-director Colin Minihan for taking what looked like a traditional cabin in the woods horror story and finding a different, smarter way to tell it. Here’s hoping next time he manages to stick the landing.

What Keeps You Alive is out in cinemas and also available on VoD on Friday, August 24th (US). UK viewers can catch it at FrightFest on August 25th. The director Colin Minihan is one half of The Vicious Brothers, known for their cult horror films.

The Lodgers

Posted on by victorfraga

In thus classic ghost story set in rural 1920s’ Ireland, two orphaned twins share their house with sinister unseen entities that forbid them from leaving. Rachel’s encounter with soldier Seán sparks an insatiable urge within her and she acts to break the curse that traps both her and her twin.

This is a tale of two people growing in the natural world of the supernatural. As a model of the horror genre, The Lodgers still maintains the necessary chilly atmosphere an abandoned house should aspire. David Bradley, Charlotte Vega and Bill Milner star in a piece where desolate curtains flow without reason or rhyme, the ever growing cascades of stairs feels fittingly austere as the camera rises with the unease of Bunuel/Hitchcock of yore.

The hint of sexualised yearning of horror classics is pointed to as Rachel (Vega)’s encounter with war veteran Seán (Eugene Simon) sparks a sexual awakening within her. This is done with pertinence without resorting to crass performance and effect. David Turpin writes with cerebral prose and does his job of setting the horror within the claustrophobic interiors of a creaky house with nuance. The imaginative uses of angles in a shower of cavernous cuts and edits is also worth a mention. Cinematographer Richard Kendrick is the real star here.

Story-wise, the film shares much in common with Ryan’s Daughter (1970), David Lean’s seminal drama of an Irish married woman embarking on a sultry affair with a British soldier. Seán, a returning soldier, bears the brunt of being a British soldier in his hometown that no longer welcomes him. It’s all dubiously passé for a film set in 2018 and does little to advance the horror provoked in some of the genuinely scary scenes the film offers. It’s frustrating that another Irish film has a predominantly English cast, which takes from the realism the film should offer.

But there’s enough on display here to merit a watch from a visual standpoint. The decors are tastefully Gothic in design, the visually muted colours add to the viewer’s growing sense of unease and fear, while the film’s score is awash with Bernard Herrmann like cerebral strings, fitting for a horror film. With only his second film Brian O’Malley has proven that he knows how to put a niftily cut film together, but he is hampered by an unoriginal script and may be better off in future replicating a country he and I know with a better put together cast.

The Lodgers is out on DVD on Monday, June 25th.

Hereditary

Posted on by Alasdair Bayman

Branded as one of the ‘scariest movie’ in years, Ari Aster’s directorial debut has induced a premeditated petrified reaction from viewers who simply know they are going to see the film. Slowly building the ‘hype’ through a steady marketing campaign – including the genius creation of an Etsy page for the daughter of the Graham family – A24, as with Robert Egger’s The VVitch (2015), have ingeniously added to their growing catalogue of masterful modern horror film, whilst shifting the way we perceive film marketing. Still, it helps when the film itself plays a wickedly genius cloak and dagger rotation into the audience’s emotional psyche, as well as spiritually channelling classics horror narratives as The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973) and Polanksi’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968).

Adorning the hashtag for the film on social media, Toni Collette portrays the grieving Annie Graham who must support her family through a period of mourning the death of her mother. Ominously lingering from the first frame, Ellen Taper Leigh, the grandmother, feels uncannily still in this world, even though we see her earthly body at an open casket funeral. Gazing with melancholy, 13-year old Charlie (Milly Shapiro) is as distraught as her mother at this passing. Accompanied by an irritable ticking noise she inherently produces, the loss of her grandmother weighs heavily upon on. Unlike their other half of the family, Steve (Gabriel Bryne), with his son Peter (Alex Wolff), seem abject from true sadness towards the death. Unravelling as a tight family drama that deconstructs the roles we all must play in such a group, Ari Aster holds nothing back when approaching how inextricably bound we all are to our family ties.

Adorning an oversized ragged orange hoodie, Charlie comes to discover the secrets of her grandmother – inevitably leading to dire repercussions for the family. Always equipped with a chocolate bar in her pocket, its consumption similarly leads her down a stray path. Starting out as it means to go on, an initial scene with Charlie resourceful making use of a pair of scissors and a dead pigeon builds an uncanny platform for the film to then build upon. Heightened in the ominous tones deployed in the ghostly presence of the grandmother, the visuals ambience is matched in Colin Stetson’s deep Gothic choir music.

Central to the success of this disconcerting feature, Toni Collette delivers an emotive performance that could in other instance feels showy and over boiled in constantly frightened facial features. Placing the relations all the family share, Aster’s writing aids Collette’s acting in allowing her protective matriarchal qualities to override any possible stereotypical feverish potentials in the character.

Aesthetically, the cinematography follows through with its original conceit on framing action from a side on perspective, as though peering into a dolly house. Repeating the allusively of this tale occurring with the opening dollhouse, or some strange world, is not to the determent of the family driven drama. Operating with a certain genre, the true horror of Hereditary rests in witnessing a family, on that was once filled with love, eat itself from the inside out.

Much like canonical horror films, Hereditary infuses the viewer into its terrifying ambience through the pillars that make cinema such a unique artistic expression. Possessing some of the darkest imagery I have witnessed since The Devils (Ken Russell,1971) Aster’s first film strangely leaves you wanting to experience the whole thing again, whilst paradoxically deeply troubling one’s self. Further hype will develop upon its UK release (date tbc), still such extensive terror and delight are justly so for a film of this ghoulish magnitude.

Hereditary premiered in the UK at Sundance London, when this piece was originally written. Out in cinemas on Friday, June 15th (2018). On Netflix in July (2020).

Pyewacket

Posted on by victorfraga

Slow-burn suspense-horror Pyewacket is most aptly described as a cautionary tale of the dangers of impulsive feelings, the failure of familial communication and the isolating and fractious nature of grief. Shrouded within an eerie suspense that delights one’s salivating hunger for that tense and nerve-shredding experience, it echoes the dual inclination of storytelling as both entertainment and parable.

Following the death of her father, teenager Leah (Nicole Munoz) is forced by her mother (Laurie Holden) to up sticks and move to a house in the woods somewhere in rural Canada. Obstinately facing the reality of having to leave her school and friends behind, in anger she turns to black magic and naively performs an occult ritual that summons the otherworldly Pyewacket to kill her mother. Upon realising her error, she desperately attempts to reverse the spell, but in order to undo the original spell, she must repeat it.

By way of the fractious internal and external family dynamic of a grieving mother and daughter, the story pulses with the telltale heart of emotional authenticity. Thematically this struggle to mourn amidst the transformation of the family following the death of the patriarch emerges with a strong resonance, symbolised by the relocation of the family and the spatial contrast of the woods to the urban. More significantly, it reveals the innate conflict within the collective bonds of friendship and family, offset by our individual needs and sense of belonging. Yet the internal angst of the film’s protagonist coupled with the emotional authenticity of the personal drama, highlights the skill of MacDonald the storyteller to tap into that which lies beneath the story, the characters and its audience.

Pyewacket’s nature to take on many forms casts this supernatural entity as a reimagining of Christianity’s great deceiver, who similarly to the devil, its true identity is unknown. Hence the evil Leah awakens is the purest form of terror, that which is unseen, existing only as a spiritual entity without a permanence of physical form. In as much as cinema is a visual medium, what is unseen is of paramount importance. MacDonald understands the power of inference, using our imagination as a tool to create anticipatory fear, rather than exhausting the onscreen space and actions. He evokes our imagination, using our negative associations of black magic and spells, of the afterlife, and memories of creaking floorboards, as well as the disquieting feelings of being watched or followed to create suspense that is borne out through our feelings.

Here the camera movement and sound are a means of manipulating our emotional or sensory reactions. This practice asserts the filmmaker’s understanding that a film lives inside the minds of his audience, the onscreen a gateway to the real stage upon which fear manifests. It is not an external but an internal one, echoing Leah’s internal angst, who in turn draws us into her web whilst MacDonald looks to that which lies beneath with a deft hand.

The appeal of Pyewacket and its very simple plot could – with all due respect – be labelled an effective Friday night horror film. Yet look a little closer and there is something appealing about its simplicity. Unlike The Orphanage (J.A. Bayona, 2007) and more recently The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014), which also dealt with themes of grief, painted with a richness of detail and colour, Pyewacket is a black-and-white rough sketch. It lacks the finesse touches yet retains a raw thematic and narrative simplicity that the others forego.

Here is a film that will be dismissed by those with a desire for a more intellectual realisation of its themes, yet it is misguided to dismiss MacDonald’s methodical slow-burn execution, offsetting emotional family drama with an unsettling, and in moments oppressively suspenseful and disquieting atmosphere. The extremes of entertainment and intellectual exploration of the themes aside, Pyewacket is a modern parable, haunted by the spectre of this tradition, in just as much as its lead protagonist enters into a Faustian dance with her own supernatural antagonist. Therein, the simplicity is justified, serving the two masters of cautionary tale with an entertaining and suspenseful horror.

Pyewacket is released on HD VoD on April and DVD on 23rd April 2018 from Signature Entertainment.

Three horrific short movies

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The first short film of this horror triptych by British filmmaker Neville Pierce is the psychological terror Lock In (2016, pictured above). It boasts a clever little script concerning a gangster Jimmy (Nicholas Pinnock) visiting a pub just after closing time ostensibly to ask Richard the landlord (Tim McInnerny) for protection money. Richard, meanwhile, is soon to be a granddad: his pregnant daughter Lucy (Sing Street’s Lucy Boynton) is working behind the bar and hits Jimmy over the head with a bottle, knocking him out. Unbeknownst to Lucy, Richard and James have a history as former school teacher and difficult pupil.

Aside from some in car shots and a few exterior pub moments, the whole thing takes place inside the pub. The script packs in a lot in its 10 minutes and is a real gift for a director. Pierce responds with some fantastic casting: McInnerny, a prolific actor who deserves much wider recognition, plays a character who seems to change as revelations alter our perception of him. The catalytic Pinnock lends the whole thing an edge while Boynton is terrific as the daughter confronted with unpleasant home truths (or are they lies?) about her father. Pierce also has a striking feel for pace: the whole thing never lets up and moves along very nicely.

The second short Bricks (2015) adapts Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Cask Of Amontillado in which one nobleman lures another to his wine cellar to exact a cruel revenge. The Russell/Pierce adaptation shifts the tale to the present day and the two characters to stockbroker William (Blake Ritson), the owner of the wine cellar, and builder Clive (Jason Flemyng), his unsuspecting victim. Which means that the script has the virtue of consisting of just two characters on one set, which makes it reasonably easy to produce as a film. But that virtue could so easily be the film’s downfall: hard to imagine anything potentially more boring than two people in a room.

Fortunately for us viewers, as the two characters from their very different worlds talk, Russell avoids that pitfall and delivers a taut sparring, a game of cat and mouse. Pierce again demonstrates astute casting skills and elicits from both actors performances among the most memorable of their considerable careers. Flemyng claims this film is one of the few times a director has actually given him direction – and you can feel it as you watch. The short has also been championed by no less a director than David Fincher (who directed Flemyng in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, 2008).

For this writer, however, the best of the three films here is the black and white photographed Ghosted (2016). Again, Russell’s script posits a deceptively simple idea. A widow in search of love and romance visits a restaurant on a series of five dates (the fifth is a man who happens to be at the next table when date number four goes wrong) accompanied by the ghost of her late husband whom she alone can see. It’s an excuse to explore male foibles – narcissism, personal baggage, obsession with tech, earnest intellectualism.

The five dates are beautifully cast, among them Jason Flemyng as a man unable to forget the woman who left him, a very different but arguably equally impressive performance to the one he gave in Bricks. Christien Anholt projects just the right amount of wry observation and world weariness as the dead husband, but the actor who really brings the tale to life is leading lady and comedienne Alice Lowe (Prevenge/2016, Sightseers/2012) who is as good here as she’s ever been (which is saying something). Pierce pulls his various elements together brilliantly: comedy is a notoriously difficult genre to do well, and this one is very funny indeed.

So, an intriguing horror story adaptation, a tense gangster genre outing underpinned by relationships and an hilarious romantic comedy with supernatural overtones. Quite an impressive range of material and all three well executed which makes me, for one, want to see more by this writer-director team. I have no idea what Russell and Pierce will do next (the latter has already made another short with a different writer, unseen at the time of writing) but if they can come up between them with a feature length piece as good as these shorts, we want to see them make it. Meanwhile, the three shorts just released are something of dirty treat.

The Three Neville Pierce Shorts are available to view on Vimeo from Monday, February 5th. Find them here.

The films will also screen on YouTube channel Tall Tales, the new online home for indie films. Lock In will play on Tall Tales from February 6th, Ghosted from February 13th and Bricks later in 2018.

The Unseen

Posted on by victorfraga

A toddler dies, a family cries and by a stroke of strange luck, a woman is saved when she is failed by her eyes. Thus begins Gary Sinyor’s The Unseen, a 12-year project that changes charming Cumbria’s Lake District into a site of blurry bereavement and tense psychological thrills. But with so many films called The Unseen, it remains to be seen whether Sinyor’s vision will find a high perch among its cinematic compatriots.

The scene of The Unseen is perfectly set in the opening moments of the film. We are introduced to voice artist Gemma (Jasmine Hyde) and Irishman Will (Richard Flood), a happy couple with a young toddler and a comfortably middle-class lifestyle. Indeed, their homely comforts prove to be catastrophic when their child crawls into the basement swimming pool and drowns to death. This inflicts deep psychological wounds on both parents.

While Will retreats into religion and its ethereal promises, Gemma experiences anxiety that triggers temporary blindness, a rare neurological condition known as amaurosis. During her first episode of blindness, Gemma panickedly stumbles out of her house and is taken to the hospital by a concerned passer-by, Paul (Simon Cotton). The three form a relationship bound by bereaving vulnerability and Paul’s empathetic kindness. Soon enough, Gemma and Will accept an offer to stay at Paul’s calm Lake District guesthouse, where the majority of the plot unfolds.

Although the grieving parents hope to find silent solace in this distant lakeside retreat, their psychological horror intensifies. Will is haunted by apparent auditory hallucinations of his son, which in turn take their toll on his sanity as he struggles to disentangle reality from fiction. Gemma’s panic attacks also escalate and her vision blurs time and time again. In a nice optical touch, the audience shares Gemma’s amaurosis with the help of digital effects. The first time this happens is truly terrifying and disorienting, as the viewer is forced to rely on vague visual outlines and frantic auditory clues. The dualistic representation of bereavement works well in its exploration of how the mind can play tricks at the worst possible moments. This sense of mental confusion is aided expertly by the delightful dread of Jim Barnes’ score. Snappy strings give a chilling accompaniment to the secluded setting and ratchet up a riveting atmosphere.#

As a concept, The Unseen is full of excellent potential. Unfortunately, its execution is far from Hitchcockian and ultimately disappoints. The film was made with an eight person crew and a low budget. This is evident all too often through recurring bouts of inauthentic acting. Himesh the taxi driver seems to be a pleasant enough man, but his delivery feels more at home on a daytime soap opera. Similarly, Will’s madness is frequently played with frenetic melodrama that leads to unintended laughter rather than horrified sympathy. The plot also has a few too many holes. The relevance of Gemma’s pregnancy remains unclear, as does Will’s erratic behaviour and Paul’s wanton intentions.

While the imposition of Gemma’s blindness onto the viewer has an initial impact, it starts to wear into a thin gimmick by the fourth or fifth incidence. In fact, the pacing of the film is let down by its overwhelming length of 108 minutes. Too much time is dedicated to showing Gemma’s visual deficiencies, yet Will’s character isn’t given enough development for his psychological breakdown to convince. The final sequence is then resolved in a quick, fortuitous fashion that can only disappoint when the muddled middle is so lengthy.

The Unseen provides a fascinating snapshot of bereavement and the ways in which grief can alternately manifest itself. As a psychological thriller, it feels somewhat drawn out until the final third. Likewise, the strange lack of motive in the big plot twist, as well as some sub-par acting, break the mood just as the tension is cranking up. The Unseen is by no means a bad film, but it may have been better suited to a 70 minute Saturday night television release. The Unseen is out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 15th.

The Lure (Córki Dancingu)

Posted on by victorfraga

A naïve mermaid feels the aching tug of first-love on her heartstrings and sings her way to a pair of human legs, so that she can marry her adoring prince. If this story sounds at all familiar, fear not. Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s debut feature film The Lure bites a siren-shaped hole in Disney’s sugary singalong classic The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements/ John Musker,1989) and pushes Hans Christian Andersen’s original tale to a bloodier – and more feminist – climax.

Local Polish legend claims that two mermaid sisters were swimming through the Baltic Sea; one swam to Copenhagen, but the other swam down the Vistula river and later became the symbol of Warsaw. Smoczyńska adds a small twist to this mythology by making the sisters, Silver (Marta Mazurek) and Golden (Michalina Olszańska), turn up on the tree-lined river banks of the city. After serenading a local synth-pop band, Silver and Golden get a gig singing and dancing with their new friends among the kitschy glamour of an underground burlesque club.

Plus, this isn’t just a mermaid horror movie – it’s also a musical!!!

Their young skin and sweet tones stir the passions of many male regulars, as well as their young-looking bandmate bassist (Jakub Gierszał). But in a nod to Homer’s Odyssey and the sisters’ fierce independence, they’re not just a pair of pretty faces.Beneath their innocent veneer, there’s a distinctly asexual androgyny, a monstrous set of scales and enough sharp teeth to tear out a few hearts. Eventually, their paths part. Fair-haired Silver represents a more idealistic understanding of adolescent romance. The darker Golden uses her body in as free a way as possible and has fun with it. Both sisters are prepared to act and are primarily motivated by their own will, rather than pandering to the desires of men around them. This culminates in an end bleeding with revenge, very different to its Disney counterpart and far more in line with contemporary culture.

Sisters Basia and Zuzia Wrońska, better known as electro-pop duo Ballady i Romanse, craft a captivating original score that manages to acknowledge both theatrical musical conventions and the film’s dark poetic exploration of identity. While The Little Mermaid’s Ariel wallows in Prince Eric imposed despair, wishing she could be part of that world, Silver and Golden dance past Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science, confident that the city will reveal to them exactly what’s missing in their lives. The songs’ English subtitles seem to do complete justice to the original Polish. They display that vivid melancholia reminiscent of Adam Mickiewicz, the romantic national poet who inspired Ballady i Romanse’s band name. Visually, Smoczyńska displays supreme directorial flair, from department store backflips to kinky police leather eroticism. Each number works on its own as a solid music video, but nonetheless slots seamlessly into the overarching narrative.

Ballady i Romanse also contribute a number of covers to the soundtrack, notably Andrzej Zaucha’s 1988 pop hit Byłaś Serca Biciem. This, alongside an encounter with street milicja, gives rise to the fact that the film is set in the communist Polish People’s Republic (PRL). There is undoubted importance – and cinematic beauty – in the bleak palettes of Krzysztof Kieslowśki’s pre-89 Poland, or Andrzej Wajda’s allegorical critique of cultural censorship. However, Smoczyńska opts to show an alternative side to the PRL, one in which an exciting life could be danced away in a vodka-fueled communal dancehall, if only for an evening. This in itself is a commendable and illuminating turn from tradition.

In a nutshell, The Lure ties together a wealth of elements of Polish culture, such as dystopian surrealistic paintings, the camp musical joys of the communist era and Warsaw’s own infamous mermaid folklore. It’s also a universal and magically brutal coming-of-age fairytale. An impressive debut and a splash of subversion on Disney’s mermaid.

The Lure was release as part of the Criterion Collection just in time for Halloween – click here for more information.

The Ritual

Posted on by victorfraga

What’s the best way to honour the memory of a dead friend? Take a hiking trip deep into the dark and creepy woods of Sweden! This is more of less how four old college friends from Britain decide to reminisce and to commemorate their mate, who was the fatal victim of an extremely violent assault in an an off-licence somewhere in London (pictured below).

Luke (Rafe Spall), Hutch (Robert James-Collier), Phil (Arsher Ali) and Dom (Sam Troughton) make a clumsy and cumbersome foursome. They argue and quarrel constantly during a trip. Luke feels guilty because he did not help his late friend while he was being attacked, and Dom is never hesitant to point out his friend’s failure. The friends soon begin to collapse both physically and emotionally, and they become too tired to return to civilisation on the same day. They take refuge overnight inside a mysterious and apparently abandoned hut, and that’s when it all begins to go awry.

Blending element from The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo Sánchez, Daniel Myrick, 1999) and The Hill Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977) in the first half, The Ritual suddenly turns into a completely different beast in the second part. I can’t say too much without spoiling it. All you need to know is that elements of alleged Scandinavian superstition are suddenly thrown in, as well as a device which you might recognise from the emblematic British horror Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973).

The visuals deserve a special mention: the CGI creations at the very end of the movie are quite fascinating. Plus there are some good scares. The problem is that the plot becomes too ambitious and eventually goes entirely off-rail. I think it tries to convey some message of failed camaraderie, but I’m not entirely sure what it’s trying to say. The bits and bobs just don’t gel together at the end. In a nutshell: not a terrible film at all, but the “huh?” feeling might linger with you as you walk out of the cinema.

The Ritual is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, the 13th. On Netflix in March 2o20. On Shudder on Monday, March 7th (2022). Also available on other platforms.

The Vault

Posted on by victorfraga

One big star producing and starring in the movie? Tick. Two strong female protagonists? Tick. Innovative genre device? Tick. Major twist at the end? Tick. Predictable moral message? Tick. The Vault has all the ingredients of a highly formulaic 21st century horror. It will surprise and scare you, but it’s in no way a memorable film that will stay with you for a long time.

Estranged sisters Vee Dillon (Taryn Manning) and Leah Dillon (Francesca Eastwood) decide to rob a bank with the support of some accomplices. Later in the movie we realise that they are, in reality, kind-hearted people engaging in a crime for a very altruistic reason: in order to help their mother. Despite their good intentions, they fall prey to a vengeful entity inhabiting the bank’s vault. The institution saw a robbery-turned-massacre decades earlier, and the evil spirit of the dead criminal and his victims just refuse to budge. Will they now impose the same horrific fate on the two sisters and their associates?

There are some very good jump scares in the movie, and some very disgusting gore. The problem is that the storyline becomes a bit hackneyed after a while, and the twist at the end is highly predictable from the moment James Franco’s character (the bank manager) first shows up in the movie. The very last scene is the biggest conceivable cliché of horror, and you might find it funny rather than scary.

This is uncompromising entertainment, still fun to watch. Eastwood is very good, particularly with wig on (pictured above): she deftly blends moral hesitation with criminal determination. Taryn Manning is also very convincing. The two sisters deliver a passionately dysfunctional duologue. And Franco is very sexy with his corporate moustache, in the skin of the ultra-good guy who will risk everything else for the security others.

The Vault is in cinemas across the UK on Friday, September 8th (2017). On Amazon Prime on Friday, August 27th (2021).

The Ghoul

Posted on by mjbstaging

A police inspector investigating a bizarre shooting incident in a London house goes undercover as a mental patient to investigate his prime suspect: a psychiatrist. The nature of mental illness being what it is, after the policeman has gone undercover it becomes increasingly hard to distinguish whether he’s really a policeman undercover as a mental patient, as was initially suggested, or whether he is in fact an actual mental patient with delusions of being an undercover policeman.

The Ghoul was executive produced by Ben Wheatley who gave British actor-turned-director Gareth Tunley a small role in dirty gem Kill List (2011). The Ghoul weaves a complex web of relationships between policemen and colleagues, policemen and suspects, psychiatrists and patients. Real and assumed identities. And this web takes the form of a Möbius strip. As psychiatrist Morland (Geoffrey McGivern) explains it to his patient Chris (Tom Meeten), it’s a strip of paper twisted then joined so that if an insect were to land upon it and walk its length, it would come to be on the other side from where it was previously without in any way crossing over from one side to the other. Proceed for the same distance in the same direction again, and it would be back where it started. As pictured here:

In his role as a policeman, Chris has driven down by night from Manchester to London in order to help to investigate an attempted double shooting. Lengthy discussions with colleagues Jim (Dan Renton Skinner) and Jim’s partner Kathleen (Alice Lowe) point to Coulson (Rufus Jones), Chris assumes the role of a man with mental health issues and takes up counselling sessions with psychiatrist Fisher (Niamh Cusack) so as to gain access to Coulson’s file at her office. She passes him on to another psychiatrist, the aforementioned Morland, who is currently counselling Coulson.

Morland talks to Chris at great length about various obsessions including a bottle “of which the outside is the inside” and explains the Möbius strip. Meanwhile, Chris has been following Coulson around the streets. Eventually Chris finds himself driving from Manchester to London again, traversing the Möbius strip, back where the film started.

Like that other Möbius strip movie Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997) this opens and closes with a point of view shot of a road from a car driving along it at night (those familiar with Lynch’s work will probably notice a resemblance between the road markings at the beginning of the 1997 film and the art work above). It has much in common too with B-movie thriller Shock Corridor (Sam Fuller, 1963) in which a Pulitzer-prize-hungry newspaper man goes undercover as an asylum inmate in order to solve a murder that has taken place there. While Shock Corridor plays out as a linear narrative, albeit one in which deluded characters occasionally shift into lucidity, The Ghoul constantly shifts in terms of the identities of its characters.

A number of questions are raised. Is Chris a cop or a loner with mental problems? Is Kathleen his superior on the force or the girl he’s fancied since his Manchester student days? Is Coulson the subject of an investigation or Chris’ best mate? These games the piece plays with its audience and the way it folds back upon itself are ultimately what make it worth seeing.

The Ghoul is out in cinemas across the UK on August 4th. It was made available on BFI Player the following month.