Three Films Make A Post: From Oblivion to Oblivion!

My Dearest Assassin aka Lueat Rak Nakkha (2026): Taweewat Wantha’s action movie about the vagaries of having a rare blood type reminds rather effectively of how great action in Thai movies can be – there are great stunt performances, choreography that isn’t obsessed with grappling but actually features punching and kicking, gun fu, as well as a director who knows when to get out of the way of his performers, and when he can make things more intense or interesting.

I was rather reminded of Hongkong’s heroic bloodshed movies by the way the film mixes heavy melodrama with its awesome violence, while it ignores boring facts like how anaemia or blood transfusions work to squeeze more tears out of the audience. And with this kind of movie, blood and tears truly belong to each other.

Pater Noster and the Mission of Light (2024): With Christopher Bickel’s movie, we are entering the world of really indie indie horror, but the kind of ultra-indie project that puts all possible effort and energy in. So here, when a young record collector (Adara Starr, who is one of the most enthusiastic screen presences I’ve encountered in quite some time) and her friends stumble into the world of a cult of the elderly people that was once also a Ya Ho Wha 13-style cult band, we get a full-on Mission of Light album beyond what’s needed for the soundtrack.

Also, rather a lot of increasingly freakish and wonderful gore, an eye for the hallucinatory, fountains of fake blood, and the sort of H.P. Lovecraft meets John Keel lore that’s like catnip to me. Bickel and his collaborators make a lot of limited means here.

Khitrovka. The Sign of Four aka Khitrovka. Znak chetyryokh (2023): Karen Shakhnazarov’s Russian adaptation of the other fully readable Holmes novel by Doyle has at least an interesting set-up. It puts the plot into a lovingly recreated Moscow of 1902, replaces Holmes and Watson with historical figures Konstantin Stanislavskiy (Konstantin Kryukov) – yes, the man with the Method – and crime reporter Vladimir Gilyarovskiy (Mikhail Porechenkov), adds other historical cameos (Chekhov knows a lot about India) and a sexy singer/thief (Anfisa Chernykh), and then proceeds to amble through the novel with little sense of tension.

Clearly, Shakhnazarov is more interested in showing off his talents at historical recreation, which leads to a film that is certainly interesting to experience but never really does much with the novel its working with. Hell, it doesn’t even try to reduce the weirdest bit of racism of the book nor does it understand how to have less than three endings.