Nachtschatten (1972)

Businessman Jan (John van Dreelen) stumbles upon a lonely house belonging to a village in the Lüneburger Heide (heath/moorland in Germany’s Lower Saxony). He feels drawn to the woman living there, Elena Berg (Elke Haltaufderheide), for she’s mysterious, seems in turn vaguely seductive and vaguely defensive, and speaks mostly in vague sentences while using the long, empty stares with lack of eye contact beloved of German filmmaking. A habit Jan shares, incidentally.

Elena wants to sell her house, apparently, and Jan might be interested in buying it, but once it comes to inquiries about concrete details like a price, vagueness sets in again. Jan is also interested in getting into Elena’s pants in the dubious ways beloved of 70s toxic masculinity. She keeps rebuffing him, but she also appears to want him to stay with her for as long as possible and makes many an oblique remark about her brother (wherever he is), death, and love.

Niklaus Schilling’s Nachtschatten – which translates so nicely to “Nightshade” it even keeps its ambiguity - is one among the very manageable number of German sort of arthouse horror movies. Neither the Autorenfilm (West Germany’s version of arthouse) nor the country’s movies made for an actual audience were very keen on delving into Germany’s deep well of the fantastical, so there’s no coherent tradition of this kind of filmmaking here post World War II, and thus the few films of the kind that were somehow made all feel somewhat disconnected from each other.

By virtue of the leaden pacing and disconnected acting style dominating the Autorenfilm, and in something of an ironic twist, Nachtschatten feels related to the kind of film Jess Franco or Jean Rollin were making, though without these directors’ sense of personal obsessions, and only a very mild kind of eroticism instead of full-on obsessive kink. It does manage to feel languid rather than stodgy for most of its running time, though, and from time to time, its slowness and unwillingness to say anything directly if it can instead have a character stare into empty air for a bit takes on a quality of poetic, dreamy unreality I’m unsure Schilling was actually going for.

Visually, this is a curious mix of the Gothically coded – the Heide is about as gothic as my part of Germany gets – and drab 70s interiors shot as if the director were willing them into becoming something more fantastical, dream sequences and characters that go through their daily life as if they were dreams – until it becomes some stiff German art business for a couple of scenes again.

It’s certainly an interesting effort, at least halfway towards becoming something special.

Landlocked (2021)

Following the death of his father (Jeffrey Owens), Paul (Paul Owens) returns to the old family home. His father had sent him a video message recorded on actual videotape in which he explained that Paul and his brother Mason (Mason Owens) had exactly a year after his death to take from there what they wanted or needed – afterwards, the building would be pulled down, as already arranged by him.

In the house, Paul finds a strange video camera that apparently has the ability to show and record videos of the past when you look through its viewfinder. Between bouts of grieving, reconnecting with Mason, and soaking up the house’s negative atmosphere, Paul re-experiences parts of his own past with his father, as well as some of the moments he has been absent for. However, the longer he uses the device, the more other things seem to drift into the backgrounds and unexplored spaces of the past, things that seem if not actively inimical to Paul, at least unwise and horrifying to engage with.

This piece of American liminal art house horror (really the sort of thing the French made the fantastique label for) by Paul Owens (and family) about grief and an increasingly weirdened past was partially constructed from actual family videos of the Owens family. It is quite the experience: slow, somewhat meandering in its middle part even with a short running time of 75 minutes, it is also drenched in an atmosphere of genuine strangeness, like very abstract weird fiction turned movie. The film starts from a point of naturalistically exploring grief yet becomes increasingly strange and even horrifying without ever leaving the realm of believable human emotion. In his treatment of the material, and despite the slow pace, Owens shows a great amount of control while also being highly imaginative inside of the borders he has set himself.

At first an effective exploration of grief as absence, the turn towards supernatural horror suggests a slight influence of Lovecraft’s “From Beyond”, once the things Paul (the director/writer also being the lead actor here) sees and increasingly experiences become strange and threatening and not just heart-breaking, and might begin noticing him noticing them.

There’s an authentically haunting quality to the film, a sense of reality that makes the eventual turn towards the more traditionally supernatural – though not traditionally scary movie-like – particularly effective in a way M.R. James might have approved of, though never done quite this way, as well.

Super Happy Forever (2024)

Sano (Hiroki Sano) and his friend Miyata (Yoshinori Miyata) visit a coastal resort motel in the last days of its existence. Sano is clearly beside himself, walking around in something of a fugue, looking for a red ballcap lost there five years ago. Soon enough, we learn he has good reason for his state of mind, for he has lost his wife Nagi (Nairu Yamamoto) just a couple of weeks ago. The hotel and the town are where they first met five years ago, and Sano appears to still half be looking for Nagi, or signs of her passing.

After forty or so minutes, the film turns back to the past of five years ago. Now, shown from Nagi’s perspective, we see how the couple first met and learn to understand some of the echoes of their encounter left five years later during Sano’s return.

Beginning slowly and not terribly interested in explaining itself at first, Kohei Igarashi’s Super Happy Forever turns out to be a film about loss, love, the physical presence of the past in the now, and the small, hidden connections between people and places. It is also a love story told through absences: at first, we can only perceive the shape of Nagi’s absence in the now, Sano’s moments of short memories and the things about their relationship his behaviour hints at. But then, the flashback, while filling in some of these holes also doesn’t fill in any of the actual relationship between Sano and Nagi (which apparently wasn’t all that happy) – we’re only ever witness to its beginning and its aftermath, and none of the joy or pain in between.

There’s nothing sentimental about the film’s approach to this, or of the patness of esoteric bullshit Miyata has fled into, but nor is there any cynicism here. Instead, this is a film of genuine sadness, genuine love and a genuine longing for human presence and connectedness – coming together into a form that feels quite special, in a way that’s self-contained and lacks showiness, and never indulges in the painful overintellectualization arthouse cinema can fall into.

Hollywood 90028 (1973)

By day, loner cameraman Mark (Christopher Augustine) shoots porn reels – not even proper porn movies – for the low-rent outfit of one Jobal (the impressively named Dick Glass). He’s clearly not happy with this state of affairs and dreams of less morally dubious work. When he’s not dreaming of his traumatic childhood, that is, which has caused some pretty major issues with women.

So by night, mark picks up women in bars, lets them take him home, and strangles them to death. Which doesn’t even seem to make him any happier, adding sad-sack-ism to his deadly misogyny.

Things change when he meets accidental porn actress Michele (Jeanette Dilger). They start on a courtship made less than ideal by the fact the audience knows about Mark’s more typical nightly endeavours, and Michele clearly sometimes catches a vibe from him that suggests more to her than “somewhat difficult guy”. Mark is curiously seriously about their relationship, though. Why, he even stops murdering women, in a somewhat ironic twist on monogamy. Of course, these things can’t last.

Christina Hornisher’s Hollywood 90028, unfortunately her only feature film, has long been underseen and undervalued but thanks to some champions in the film world it is now available in a restoration that look better than it will ever have looked when it hit the grindhouse circuit, and is now presented in environments sympathetic to a film that treats pretty typical early 70s grindhouse-style exploitation material with a low budget arthouse style and rather a lot of feminist subtext.

If you’re of the film school interpretative shape of mind, you’ll find much to think about here concerning the male gaze, the camera as a method of male domination, the problems with the porn industry; if you’re somewhat more bread and butter you might be astonished by Hornisher’s willingness to still treat her male serial killer as a complex human being without ever forgetting/or letting us forget, that he’s also a horrible one.

Obviously, this never tries to be a straightforward serial killer thriller, but there’s a heft and believable violence to the murders that keeps this a horror movie; just one where the violence is equalled by an ability to portray softness as well as paint a picture of a very specific part of Hollywood at a very specific point in time.

Visually, Hornisher often shows her background in experimental film, breaking up moments that feel verité through edits and dissolves that are anything but, very consciously tunnelling under the reality she has at first established so well. There is a slightly disorienting quality to this approach, as if time and place were slightly out of joint, or as if we were subtly pushed into sharing some of the wrongness that lurks in Mark.

Then, there’s that incredible final shot that belongs high up in the pantheon of final shots in (sort of) horror cinema finishing up a film that has been quite a revelation to me in an area of film history I thought I’d pretty thoroughly exhausted by now.

Trompe l’oiel (1975)

aka The Broken Mirror

There are strange thing happening in the life of Anne Lawrence (Marie-France Bonin), who usually spends her working day restoring paintings in the Belgian mansion where she lives with her husband Matthew (Max von Sydow). She’s four months pregnant now, but she suffers from more than just wobbly hormones. Some time ago – the film loves to be vague, so I couldn’t tell you if this means a week or four months – Anne just disappeared for a day or so, returning without a memory of what happened to her, or what she did during that time. When she reappeared, she was clinging to a painting picturing a woman being devoured – well, at least pecked at – by a bird of prey in front of a body of water. Now, Anne doesn’t even want to look at the picture.

Anne has fallen into a grey depression, leaving Matthew struggling to connect to what she feels or wants, spending her time working or walking very slowly and randomly through the streets of their town. She feels as if somebody is watching her – a man is indeed standing in the window of the mansion opposite all day – and has feelings and impulses she doesn’t understand, as well as difficulty discerning between reality and dream, things and metaphors.

There appears to be something less obscure going on as well, for someone is sending her – of course vague – anonymous threat letters, and there’s an indelible sequence where Anne is being threateningly followed by a slow driving car.

Eventually there will be an explanation for the more actual elements of this, though the symbols and metaphors of Anne’s inner state, you’ll have to make sense of yourself.

Though, to my eye, the final sequences do suggest a childhood trauma connecting to Anne’s father, his hunting habits, sexuality, and death that should make Freudians very happy, if one feels the need to interpret the mass of symbols and metaphors Claude d’Anna’s waking dream movie offers.

I’m just not that kind of viewer, so while I’m perfectly able to do that sort of thing to a film, I’m really more interested in the way d’Anna creates the world of colour, shape and mood, with sudden blares of orchestral music Anne inhabits, that is only broken by scenes of arthouse style psychodrama between her and von Sydow – can’t hire Max for this kind of European arthouse/weirdness project and not let him stretch these specific actorly legs – and some painfully realistic feeling scenes between Anne and her mother (Micheline Presle) whose love presents very much like hatred.

There’s a languid, sometimes a bit stilted quality to proceedings, the haziness of dreams and altered states of mind, a wandering quality very appropriate to a film whose protagonist spends her free time wandering as well. In the film’s later stages, this languidness makes way for proper surrealism and quite the final shot, with little of any day-to-day reality to hold onto.

Presented differently than in the language of weird arthouse (the kind of arthouse movie that’s weird fiction minus the pulpiness), you could have made a giallo out of some of the material, adding a handful of murders and some sex, but d’Anna clearly cannot approach his material in a manner as comparatively straightforward, so instead throws Anne into loops of obscuring gestures.

This does obviously make The Broken Mirror a film whose attraction is much based on a viewer’s mood and patience – seen in the wrong state of mind, this will be like watching paint dry – but when this kind of film hits, it can take a viewer to a special place more straightforward fare will not be able to reach (and is not aiming for), a place that’s beautiful, a little disquieting, and somewhat confusing.

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The Black Water Vampire (2014): This piece of POV horror directed and written by Evan Tramel is a bit of a strange one. At times, it is a clever bit of myth-building, and culminates in a surprisingly exciting climax with actual special effects. At other times, it mindlessly reproduces beats from The Blair Witch Project regardless if they actually fit into its plot and concept or not.

It’s a genuinely confusing mix of the inept, the effectively creepy and the clever, and one’s liking for it will most probably be based on how little that first bit turns one off.

Nightmare (2000): This South-Korean movie directed by Ahn Byeong-ki (who would soon go on to the much superior Phone) attempts to ride two of the horror waves of its time at once. There’s certainly a world where you could mix the Asian ghost movie revival following Hideo Nakata’s Ringu with the American teen slasher revival, and have a successful little movie.

Unfortunately, this drab concoction isn’t from that world and has little to offer beyond its dark, moody photography and an ensemble whose prettiness gives any US teen slasher cast a run for its money. The pacing is too slow and the supernatural elements and the I Saw What You Did Last Summer business don’t really do much for each other. Worse, the film’s narrative structure with flashbacks inside of flashbacks is way too much for the very basic plot to carry, and the only thing it does is hold back that our supposed protagonists are even more horrible people than they at first appear to be for an hour or so.

I was rooting for the ghost, and not just because she is played by Ha Ji-Won.

Coma (2022): In some scenes, Bertrand Bonello’s mix of essay film, science fiction and COVID induced coming of age fantasy is nearly brilliant, attempting to feel its way into the mind of an eighteen year old girl (Louise Labèque), suffering from a particularly bad case of teenage desperation at a world that’s clearly made to make us all desperate and what I’d describe as a parasocial infection. In others, it is that kind of nearly insufferable type of French art house movie which hides its intellectual simplicity by expressing its simple ideas in as complicated and obtuse a manner as possible.

And let’s not even start on the film’s start and finish, when Bonello explains exactly what his film is supposed to mean - which may lead the more cynical among us to the suggestion he may have tried to make a movie whose themes viewers can understand by watching it and thinking about it.

Possession (1981)

The marriage of Mark (Sam Neill) – vaguely involved in the kind of espionage business one expects in a film set in Cold War era Berlin – is on the skids.

While Mark has played the usually absent dad and husband, his wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) has started an affair with macho new age weirdo Heinrich (Heinz Bennent). She sure as shit didn’t learn any yoga from the guy though, for she and Mark proceed to work through their crisis through shouting, writhing and a bit of self-mutilation or spousal abuse when the mood strikes.

And that’s before Anna births a tentacled thing in the subway she’s starting to feed with human blood.

So much has been written about Andrzej Zulawski’s much-beloved arthouse psychodrama horror masterpiece by some of the more insightful critics, there’s certainly very little new I can add to the corpus. But from time to time, just jotting down personal impressions can be a bit of fun – at least for this writer; my imaginary readers are long-suffering anyway.

I find it rather interesting how closely related Possession is to a kind of arthouse movie I can’t stand at all, the type where everyone communicates in pseudo-philosophic portentous sentences that aren’t as deep as the writers appear to think they are. Really, the dialogue here is mostly exactly this, but is heightened in effect and meaning through the brutally physical performances – particularly by Adjani, who sometimes appears to drag Neill bodily into the mind space of insane intensity and actual madness the film takes place in – and direction that goes all out in every aspect.

Zulawski working though his own demons by way of European 70s horror influences as much as the more classy stuff he imbibed is a sight to behold, or actually, feels like a director conjuring up aspects of himself any sane person would hardly want to acknowledge, certainly not show to an audience in a form feeling this raw. This is not the work of an edge lord flirting with the dangerous life by acting like an asshole child – this is much darker, much more genuine, and, perhaps, actually dangerous. At the same time, this is also a movie featuring a scene where Isabelle Adjani fucks a tentacle monster, and Sam Neill drowns a guy in a toilet, so Zulawski is certainly not afraid to let his genre arthouse movie actually be a genre movie, not too far from the traditions established in Italy and other parts of Western Europe.

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Supermarkt aka Supermarket (1974): If you know German director Roland Klick mostly for his psychedelic noir western Deadlock or his Dennis Hopper coke freak-out White Star, you’ll be in a for a whole world of pain in the form of an hour of very earnest Hamburg-set naturalism pasted onto the beginning of a pretty great, naturalist, heist film. Needless to say, simple guy as I am, I don’t appreciate this approach much.

However, it’s not that Klick isn’t good at the earnest naturalism bit – one could imagine him going on to become a German Ken Loach figure in a more interesting German cinema – the problem is all mine. I just find earnest naturalism the least interesting mode for a fictional narrative possible and have never seen the point to it. Surely,if you want to go for straightforward representation of the world as it is, why not make a reportage or a documentary? Hell, I might even praise you for that one (if only with backhanded remarks that I prefer Herzog style documentaries all about poetic truth, of course). As it stands, this just isn’t a film for me.

Only the River Flows aka He bian de cuo wu (2023): Speaking of films that aren’t for me, this arthouse crime drama for the Cannes crowd by Wei Shujun suffers from what I see as a weakness of most of the minor wave of mainland Chinese arthouse noir cop films of this style: an attempt to make genre films so critical of their genre they go out of their way to extract all joy and excitement from it. No thrills in our serial killer thriller, sir! No excitement to finding the killer! Hell, not actually finding the killer clearly is the way to go.

This particular example of the form eventually descends into a vague kind of surrealism, akin to Lynch without a sense of humour or a heart (so not very much like Lynch at all), without the power to actually make its surrealism feel like anything of substance or with a point; indeed, things are so opaque in the end, I have no idea why the film exists at all.

Admittedly, it is very well shot, and decrepit 90s China is evoked just as well – I don’t have any idea why, though.

Fantomas (1947): This second attempt to drag Fantomas into the sound film era after one in 1932, as directed by Jean Sacha, certainly has no ambitions at being anything more than a potboiler.

As such, it has decent entertainment value eighty years later: there are a handful of nice, mad science-y sets, some of the action is staged on a more than decent level, and after pacing issues early on, things zip along nicely, and mindlessly. The whole affair suffers from a very flat Fantomas performance by Marcel Herrand, but kinda makes up for it with a very young Simone Signoret running circles around every other actor as the villain’s virtuous daughter Hélène.

In an uncommon move for 1947, Hélène is a rather competent heroine who even takes part in the physical parts of the plot, which obviously is the sort of thing I like in my pulpy nonsense films.

Friends of Friends (2002)

Original title: Die Freunde der Freunde

Gregor (Matthias Schweighöfer) is a boarding school pupil, a couple of months before final exams. To be precise, he’s going to a Gymnasium, the type of school you’d go to in Germany when college is a realistic proposition for you. In combination with the boarding school, and the way the kids in the movie relate to money, there’s a class assumption here – none of these kids has parents working in a factory, that’s for sure. Gregor’s closest friend is his roommate Artur (Florian Stetter), and these two are a study in contrasts – where Gregor apparently carries quite a few romantic notions about life and particularly love, Artur’s the wild one (if not an actual sociopath) who we can well imagine to get into the kind of trouble he won’t be able to slip out of easily in the future.

Right now, he’s just doing stuff like lying rather a lot – and implicitly betraying Gregor’s truancy habits to school authorities early on in the movie, though it’s never going to outright tell us thus – and encouraging threesomes with his girlfriend Pia (Jessica Schwarz) and Gregor.

Gregor’s drawn to Artur’s incipient dangerous life, but becomes distracted when he meets Billie (Sabine Timoteo), a young, single mother, with an evasive air of mystery and the kind of background rich kid Gregor clearly can’t quite comprehend. While Gregor is instantly smitten, Billie is acting hot and cold, perhaps using Gregor for things he’s not worldly enough to understand, perhaps genuinely feeling drawn to his still schoolboyish kind of innocence and having to step back for reasons of her own.

At the borders of the plot, there are elements of the strange: Gregor’s belief that there’s some fated other for everyone seemingly being true, ghosts that have appeared to Billie as well as to Artur at the moments of someone’s death.

Whenever I write about German films, I tend to lament Germany’s deplorable lack of proper genre filmmaking. That’s certainly not director Dominik Graf’s fault, for Graf has made a career out of making genre films wherever he can get away with it, be it in the often much too worthy format of German TV crime movie series like “Tatort” and “Polizeiruf 110”, or in TV movies like this.

Proper genre movies, but not exactly straightforward ones, mind you, for one of the director’s main strengths is a willingness to be strange (or even outright Weird), hopefully causing a maximum of confusion in your typical German viewer of Saturday evening crime.

It has been ages since I’ve consciously watched anything directed by Graf, so I’m not even sure I wasn’t terribly confused or even annoyed by him the last time I encountered them myself.

The film at hand has elements of a crime drama, but these are mostly kept at the borders of what’s going on, suggested to be the parts of Artur’s life Gregor has just learned to ignore or choses not to see, as he choses to ignore or not see rather a lot of things around him.

I rather prefer to see the film as a ghost story, one told sideways and at an angle of the way ghost stories are usually told, but one carrying quite an emotional impact quite beyond the realm of jump scares, an impact that’s entwined with a sense of melancholy and sadness, a feeling of characters drifting in directions quite beyond their grasp, control, or perhaps even understanding.

Which does seem appropriate for something based on a Henry James tale of all things - though I doubt James would have been terribly happy with the nudity and the sometimes realistically coarse language in the film. Nor seems Graf’s masterful treatment of the confusion of being young very Jamesian to me – I am pretty sure Henry James was born middle-aged.

Die Freunde’s impact is carried by two things that stand very much in contrast – highly naturalistic acting by a great cast (young Schweighöfer was quite the thing, but Timoteo, Stetter and Schwarz are on the same level) and an incredibly thick mood of unreality. Graf shoots in the kind of grainy digital video that makes quite a few art-minded films of this era look ugly and cheap as hell, but hits exactly the point where this look turns the world of his film strange and off-kilter even when nothing strange or off-kilter is actually happening on screen. There’s a washed-out quality to the film’s reality that suggests a drift towards something inexplicable, and to my eyes, it’s pure magic, particularly combined with an electronic score by Sven Rossenbach and Florian van Volxem that is at once utterly of its time and perfectly outside of any time.

How Graf managed to get this approved by the never exactly weirdness-affine people in charge of German Publicly Owned TV, I can’t imagine. I’m just glad that he did.

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Twilight aka Szürkület (1990): I found György Fehér’s adaptation of a much-adapted Dürrenmatt novel to be a rather frustrating experience. There are moments here, many moments even, where its Hungarian slow cinema style, the long shots of foggy, murky landscape accompanied by an ominous score create an incredible mood of dread, a feeling of wrongness highly appropriate to its plot about child murder and a retired policeman obsessing over the case.

But whenever characters start to speak, that very sinister spell was broken and I felt thrown into what I could only read as a parody of the same Hungarian slow cinema style, dialogue scenes that go on and on and on (and on and on) because characters pause for endless seconds after every second or third word in a sentence, as if the actors had painful trouble remembering every single word in every damn line they say. Call me a barbarian, but that ain’t art.

Seedpeople (1992): Probably not art either is this Full Moon Production film directed by the typically entertaining Peter Manoogian. Instead, it’s a seed-based version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, but with more gloopy rubber monsters. It’s rather good fun in its very undemanding low budget movie manner, and while the acting is nothing to write home about, and the script doesn’t really add much (and subtracts a lot of subtext) from its, ahem, inspiration, you can’t argue with gloopy rubber monsters, or at least I’m not going to.

Mostly because they use mind control, and/or turn you into a plant person.

Get Away (2024): Speaking of things that are undemanding but good fun, this horror comedy by Stefan Haars about a British family coming to a remote Swedish (shot in Finland) island to witness a curious play and stumble into a plot of folk horror and perversity isn’t terribly deep either. You’ll either notice its big plot twist early on, or get distracted by those wacky, creepy Swedes (portrayed by Finns), and you’ll enjoy the very, very bloody climax, or you won’t.

If this sounds as if I’m going for the classic “you’ll like this sort of thing if you like this sort of thing” move here, indeed I am, because there’s little else to say about the movie apart from that. Well, it’s always great to see Nick Frost.

Three Films Make A Post: Where there is no more death we shall meet again.

Laurin (1989): This is that rare example of an interesting, moody German horror movie. Of course, director Robert Sigl shot in Hungary with predominantly Hungarian actors and crew, so few Germans were actually involved in the production.

This is an example of Gothically inflected, psychological horror concerning the business of a girl starting to grow up, a serial killer, and possibly ghosts, slow-moving yet emotionally and metaphorically intense. Sigl is rather good at imbuing small gestures with a depth of complicated meanings, which traditionally tends to be the sort of thing I like. This being a serious German movie, certain weaknesses show whenever there’s a need for traditional suspense (which isn’t something we do in Germany), but the mood of childhood nightmare is so thick, I won’t blame Sigl for not understanding how to stage a chase scene effectively.

Black Cab (2024): On the plot level, Bruce Goodison’s Black Cab isn’t a terribly original mix of urban legends and contemporary horror tropes, but as a mood piece, it has considerable strengths.

There’s a dreamlike unreality to the various night drives under duress here that make the involvement  of the outright supernatural utterly plausible via the mood provided. Another strong element is a pleasantly deranged performance by Nick Frost as a very sinister taxi driver that greatly strengthens the impact of some well-chosen moments of the kind of dread women suffer from terrible men on a daily basis.

If this sort of thing works for you, you might be as willing to forgive the film the weaknesses of its plotting as much as I did.

Suzhou River (2000): Finishing today’s trilogy of vibes (see how hip I am, fellow kids?), Lou Ye’s play on (and with) elements of noir and Vertigo is all ambiguous doublings of characters, moments and movement, hand-held camera that signals subjectivity instead of authenticity, mermaids and the curious beauty of an industrially wasted river.

Lou’s play with the meta-level of his narrative mostly manages to avoid getting annoying (there’s typically little worse than a filmmaker getting precious about this sort of thing to me) by the amount of ambiguity it shows: this isn’t meta to show how many movies the director has seen, nor to make a precise point, but because it is a movie about ghosts and phantoms, on the screen and off, and the ghost of old movies are ghosts as real as any other.

Red Desert (1964)

Original title: Il deserto rosso

Having spent some time in an psychiatric clinic, Giuliana (Monica Vitti), the wife of a higher-up at a local plant, now walks through life and the industrial wastelands of rural Italy between fugues and moments of intense activity, confused, alienated and sad. She drifts into something of an affair with businessman Corrado (the most clean-cut I’ve ever seen Richard Harris), who isn’t quite as fine with the world as it is as everyone else around them, and feels drawn as much to Giuliana’s pain and alienation as he is to her body – or he might just be very good at pretending thus.

This might sound as if Michelangelo Antonioni’s arthouse classic Red Desert has something like a traditionally dramatic plot, but there’s very little interest in that sort of thing on display here – as in most of Antonioni’s films I’ve seen. The bits and pieces of plot are really only there to have things for Vitti to react – or not react depending on her mood – to or pull away from in anguish. Vitti performs the kind of inner turmoil that can’t really be expressed in its inescapable, near-spiritual totality, a suffering for and against the world in ways I found touching and sometimes deeply disturbing – this feels much more like real “mental illness” than most movie versions of it do.

Aesthetically, Vitti’s work is couched in the most striking visual depictions of an industrial waste you’ll ever get to see, pictured in ways that always emphasise Giuliana’s alienation, but also never shy away from the beauty and fascination of our destruction of the natural world, while the soundtrack prefers abstract drones to a traditional score. There’s an ambiguity to how the film views Giuliana, and it is never quite clear how much it shares her alienation and anguish at the modern world; most probably because living in a man-made world instead of forever standing outside of it, in pain, also suggests certain beauties to the filmmaker and the audience Giuliana can’t grasp, as much as the rest of the world cannot, will-not come to share her perspective fully.

Trenque Lauquen (2022)

Apparently, it helps for a piece of arthouse slow cinema to come from Argentina if it wants my buy-in. Who knew?

Anyhow, if you can make time and mind space for 250 minutes or so of various characters (particularly those played by Laura Paredes and Ezequiel Pierri) in various timelines very slowly being drawn into various kinds of (non-violent) obsession with various mysteries and secrets – including love letters hidden in old books, the disappearance of a woman, an uncategorized specimen of flower, and a monster/child/who knows you’ll never get to see – you might just become as riveted as I found myself.

The slowness, here, turns out to be patience, a willingness to let things develop in their own shape and tempo. Which doesn’t at all mean that director Laura Citarella eschews increasing the tempo when it fits her, probably mysterious, plans. As well, there is a willingness to keep some of the film’s mysteries unsolved, or rather, to admit the ambiguity of leaving space for an audience’s interpretations.

On the way to that not solving of mysteries, the film moves through phases and stages – practically lineated in chapters in a gesture that seems rather more inviting than slow cinema often is – where the focus shifts from different protagonists, to different obsessions, and different kinds of beauty, finding much in small actorly gestures, nature, and the town of Trenque Lauquen and its surroundings, testing and exploring different kinds of connections between people.

There is also a strain of weirdness running through the film I found particularly enticing, perhaps more Magical Realism than the versions of the fantastic I’m most fond of. Some reviewers have found a comparison to Lynch here, but Trenque Lauquen lacks an interest in, or perhaps does not believe in, the deep and uncomfortable darkness that always rears its head with Lynch. Rather, this film’s weirdness feels kinder and more compassionate, with little risk for the characters to fall foul of an uncaring universe or moving into the wrong metaphysical hut for some decades. It’s not such a cosy world, though, for there are still human passions, foibles and dramas.

Not being Lynchian, mind you, is not a weakness. Citarella’s much too interesting a director and writer to need to take on other people’s world views, and has one rather singularly her own.

A Page of Madness (1926)

Original title: 狂った一頁, Kurutta Ichipeiji

The Internet – well, and people who have read the script as well – tells me that A Page of Madness is about about a man (Masuo Inoe) taking on a janitorial position at an asylum to free his wife (Yoshie Nakagawa), who is imprisoned there.

One can understand about as much about Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness. But seeing how the film lacks intertitles, a third of its original runtime, as well as the narration that most probably accompanied it in Japan on its release, this is where any kind of unambiguous understanding ends when watching it, at least for me.

Instead, the viewer is drawn into a series of scenes that are influenced by the angles and shadows of German expressionism, and often wildly experimental. There are quick and violent edits, fades and superimpositions you wouldn’t expect in any movie made in the mid-20s, a bit like Eisenstein turning his montage technique inwards (or into the cosmic), or like Maya Deren in an aggressive mood. Some of this, I’d most probably be better able to understand on an intellectual level if I had a better grasp of traditional Japanese theatre forms, but feeling instead of thinking one’s way through a film like this might be the better approach in any case.

For most of the film’s wild and improbable (in the best way) technical experiments are put in service of visually reproducing altered states of mind, putting into moving pictures how it must feel to see reality like the “mad” do. The only way to really achieve that is by giving up much of already established filmic naturalistic language and aiming for something harsher, wilder and stranger.

Because mental illnesses are how they are, the film’s handful of moments of beauty are rare, short, and quickly dissolve into panic, anger and dread. A sense of doom lingers, shadows threaten and the only reasonable way to live may be to wear the mask of madness. So it is little wonder this is often seen as some kind of proto arthouse horror film. After all, A Page of Madness’ images linger and disturb, even nearly a hundred years after it was made.

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Trap (2024): Not surprising anyone who has ever heard anything I said about his films, I did have a very typical M. Night Shyamalan experience with this one, in so much as I found myself in turns annoyed, exasperated and bored by his usual approach of setting up something that could go somewhere interesting but only ever follows through to the lamest possible direction.

To the usual Shyamalan problems (I don’t feel the need to list them yet again), this one adds a dollop of nepotism when our director/writer/producer casts his daughter Saleka as a basically angelic popstar, the facts she’s not great at the whole popstar bit as well as an aggressively terrible actress notwithstanding. Josh Hartnett for his part apparently believes he’s in a comedy, and so mugs and grimaces his way through his cartoon serial killer shtick without any fear of embarrassment.

Well, at least he seems to enjoy his time with the film.

#AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead (2024): I found the first thirty minutes of Marcus Dunstan’s slasher comedy/sledgehammer satire on influencers hard going – it’s not easy spending time with characters this broadly drawn to be ridiculously horrible, nor did the first kills really catch my interest. However, once the cast is whittled down a bit and things get into a groove, Dunstan lets some of his instincts for suspense come to the fore, as well as some additional character traits in the gaggle of idiots to be destroyed.

Plus, some of the cheap nastiness actually becomes somewhat funny.

Luminous Woman aka Hikaru Onna (1987): As a lover of the weird and the woolly, I’ve often been rather disappointed with my regular inability to get much out of this sort of thing when approached from an arthouse angle. Case in point is this Shinji Somai joint full of nonsense like hairy holy innocents from Hokkaido, or underground wrestling matches that come with their own opera singers that should be just the kind of things that delight me. Yet I never found myself able to connect with any of it.

That doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate Somai’s artful direction, the inventiveness of his framing of scenes, his – famous - long shots, or the way he folds time and space when he feels the need to in a way only cinema can do. In practice, however, I don’t connect to any of this, neither intellectually nor emotionally nor aesthetically, more’s the pity.

The Delinquents (2023)

Original title: Los delincuentes

Aging bank employee Morán (Daniel Elías) steals a very particular amount of money from his bank. It’s more or less exactly double the sum he would earn by working for them to retirement age. His idea is this: hide the money, get arrested, and spend three and a half years in prison instead of twenty as a bank employee. The money he gives to his colleague Román (Esteban Bigliardi) who only learns of the plan after the money is already stolen, for safe-keeping until Morán gets out. Afterwards, Román will get half of the money and be free from doing a crap job for the rest of his life as well.

If he doesn’t take the money, Morán will name him as an accomplice, so Román doesn’t feel he has much of a choice in the matter, though his conscience doesn’t always let him rest easily.

The rest of the film concerns Morán’s adventures on the run and in prison, Román’s suffering under the bank’s intensely passive aggressive reaction to the theft, and various matters of freedom, love and sudden influxes of quiet beauty.

Slow Cinema is an interesting thing to me: about half of the films from the not-genre I know, I find insufferably pompous exactly because they’re so fixated on not being pompous but merely ponderous. The other half, I tend to be rather in love with, though these films often aren’t obviously different from the ones I can’t stand at all. It is, alas, a matter of mood, vibes, feeling, or however one might want to call it, something that’s even less quantifiable than most things concerning art (popular or un).

For its first third, I wasn’t really sure if I was on board with The Delinquents’ apparent project of turning heist movie tropes quotidian and drawing them out endlessly. Yet slowly (sorry) but surely, the film did work its particular kind of magic by digressing into directions that have little to do with deconstructing or slowing down heist movie tropes, or making them more “realistic” by making them less dramatic.

Instead, director Rodrigo Moreno starts from the idea of the heist movie as a dream of freedom – freedom  from the shackles of the capitalist project, from the emptiness of the daily drudge – and follows that idea to the many places it leads: love, nature, poetry and sudden bursts – perhaps too dramatic a term for a film that ever hardly is that – of an intense visual beauty achieved through patience and care, a deep interest in the small gestures that make up daily lives as much as in the way small changes of light, a poem read through years and years or hair turning grey and thin can be beautiful.

I’m not sure there’s actually that much intellectual substance to the film’s philosophy, or even depth to its characters, but the longer the film goes on, the less these concrete things turn out to be the point here. Rather, it is moods, feelings and hopes this seems to be about in the end, and that moment when a series of shots in a film overwhelms you not because of any technical accomplishment (though there is a lot of technical accomplishment here if you are into that sort of thing) but because the ineffable way it touches you.

The Delinquents is often very funny as well, in a weird and sideways manner that’ll not be for everyone as much as everything else about this won’t be.

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Copycat (1995): There are two reasons why Jon Amiel’s serial killer thriller is anything more than a slick adaptation of an overconstructed script. And since these reasons are called Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter, and both are in their fullest screen presence modes, this silly concoction about a serial killer who is basically a serial killer cover band turns into a tour de force commanded by two actresses who drag every bit of possible substance out of very little. This sort of thing can absolutely elevate mediocrity into a greatly entertaining movie, as the film thoroughly proves.

Malasaña 32 (2020): Some of the set pieces in Alberto Pintó’s movie about a Spanish family in the 70s moving from the country into what turns out to be a haunted apartment are very well done and effective. However, this is the type of horror movie that can only ever treat and see its supernatural threat as a reason for set pieces and plot twists, and never manages to cohere the political troubles of the time it suggests, the family’s experience moving from the country to the city in hopes of a better life, and the backstory of the supernatural threat into any kind of thematically coherent argument.

The horror pieces themselves tend to the grab-bag approach where thematic coherence or coherence of mood never appear to be of interest to the filmmakers, either. All the easier to borrow heavily from all kinds of sources, be it Poltergeist – a much superior film – or creepypasta.

Embrace of the Serpent aka El abrazo de la serpiente (2023): There’s a certain kinship between Ciro Guerra’s film and Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Cobra Verde and Fitzcarraldo in the way naturalism and sudden outbreaks of the surreal intertwine, as well as in its location.

However, this is a film made by someone from a very different time and place, so there are as many differences in approaches and world view as there are similarities – Guerra certainly isn’t a Herzog cover band. The film’s treatment of colonialism, Western scientific and Amazonian traditional culture comes from a very different direction, but Guerra generally doesn’t simplify and keeps certain differences unresolved, philosophical questions answered from two opposing directions at once.

As a film this is an act of deep worldbuilding, making ways of looking at and being in the world understandable by slowly drawing a viewer into them, full immersion in a style only a handful of directors use these days (Robert Eggers comes to mind).

Litan (1982)

Nora (Marie-José Nat) awakens from a nightmare that may very well be a vision of the future in which her boyfriend, two-fisted – and very appropriately named - geologist Jock (director/co-writer/auteur Jean-Pierre Mocky), appears to die – among other, less straightforward things. This sends her racing for Jock through the streets of the curious little town of Litan, where they are temporarily living so he can do some rather explosive geological work.

Today is a particularly strange day in the already strange little town, for it is the festival of Litan’s Day, when its occupants roam the – often fog-shrouded – streets in masks, a (masked) brass band plays wherever and whenever, and everyone acts extra weird. I’d call it the Lesser Festival of Masks.

Apart from the already rather strange festival, there’s something stranger still coming, and soon, peculiar behaviour will turn obsessive or violent, the dead seemingly taking possession of the bodies of most of the living in town.

Sometimes, Jean-Pierre Mocky’s piece of fantastic (in the French sense of the “Fantastique”, so heighten your brows with me) cinema Litan can become a little too self-consciously weird for being surrealist’s sake for my tastes, channelling the misguided arthouse energy that brought us things like Fellini’s beloved parades.

Fortunately, that’s only happening in a couple of scenes, and for much of its running time, this is a wonderful exercise in dream moods and dream logic, taking place in a location where reality just doesn’t seem frayed at the edges but already half dissolved at the beginning of the film. Which would explain Nora’s actually prophetic dream rather well, if you want to apply some kind of story logic to a film that thrives as much on that of dream and metaphor as this one does.

Mocky creates the peculiar world of the film in often striking images that turn a very real location – most of the film was shot in an actual small town in the Auvergne that must be strikingly beautiful in its way – into a disorienting labyrinth where metaphors and symbols crash into elements of pulpy genre cinema in a way I have only ever encountered in French cinema. There is certainly a kinship to Jean Rollin here, while parts of the film play out as an outsider’s pick of elements of horror cinema from Romero’s Crazies – whose knitting lady would have felt right at home in Litan – to folk horror like The Wickerman, and the mad science and masks of Eyes without a Face. It’s just all filtered through a very individual, singular eye, as it should be.

Because this is a French movie, it is also rather discursive, so Mocky is certainly never hiding his ambition of speaking about capital letter concepts in capital letters. Love and Death, are the director’s main interests here, specifically, as well as the rather more complicated than we typically assume borders between Life and Death. The results of this discourse are rather ambiguous, but then, that is rather the point of film like Litan (possibly of life).

The Sweet East (2023)

High school senior Lillian (Talia Ryder) semi-accidentally goes on the run when the opportunity arises to while she’s on a class trip to Washington DC. From there, she goes on a long strange trip across the Eastern seaboard of the US, during which she falls in with leftist college activist, becomes  the live-in Lolita of pseudo-intellectual neo Nazi (Simon Rex) who likes to go off about Poe but really doesn’t seem to have made it to Nabokov, turns curiously (or not so curiously, really) great actress in a low budget movie for a bit, survives a massacre that’s somewhat her fault, and falls in with a member of an Islamic cult living in the woods. Among other things.

The first ten minutes or so of veteran indie cinematographer Sean Price Williams’s first feature as a director go for maximum lo-fi indie grain eyestrain, threatening the sort of misunderstood naturalism I still loathe known as mumblecore. But as soon as Lillian starts on her improbable trip across the Eastern seaboard of the United States by going through the modern version of a rabbit hole, things turn more interesting – and calmer – to look at.

They also turn increasingly surreal, Lillian drifting through an America that has gone off-kilter and ever so slightly grotesque. Like the proper protagonist of any good picaresque, Lillian herself is a bit of a trickster, able to project exactly the qualities the people – mostly men - she falls in with want to see in her, and thus uses this ability as a survival tool. Or, one can’t help but think, as a way to keep the world off her back, so she can drift, and look and just be in the world. Lillian always seems to sit right on the border between user and used, naïve and manipulating here, and the film never makes the mistake to replace this enigmatic quality – perfectly projected via Ryder’s exceptional performance – with something as boring as psychology or trauma porn.

While there’s violence and horror here as well – we are talking about contemporary America after all – The Sweet East never loses its dream-like quality, never playing as a coming-of-age movie in the traditional style, but rather one that portrays the strangeness of a self not fully formed colliding with the strangeness of the world. This quality of dream, of a fairy tale without a moral, is probably what draws me particularly to the movie. Even though I wouldn’t exactly call this a work of fantastic cinema, its feel is much closer to the realm of, for example, Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural than US independent cinema of this style typically ventures these days.

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Fallen Leaves aka Kuolleet lehdet (2023): I’m not quite as enthused about this Aki Kaurismäki film as most professional critics seem to be, and would prefer his previous two movies to this romance with difficulties, but then, I always found that Kaurismäki’s directing style, his use of Brechtian/Mamet-type acting, his love for stiffly posing characters in the frame, works better in his more comedic films. Here, where humour is still there and accounted for but really not at the centre of attention, the conscious distancing and stiffness gets a bit in the way for me, overemphasising concepts in favour of characters in what is for all sense and purpose actually a character piece.

This doesn’t mean I don’t see this as a worthwhile or artfully made film. It’s just not one I’m burning to revisit soon.

Return to Seoul aka Retour à Séoul (2022): Staying with arthouse favourites that didn’t quite connect with me, I found Davy Chou’s years-spanning tale of a French woman (Park Ji-min) with Korean birthparents repeatedly returning to Korea often visually stunning, but also rather frustrating in its unwillingness to connect some dots about its main character Freddie for the audience. Where mainstream films tend to overexposit and feel the need to explain every damn thing in them, Chou goes the other way, never expositing or explaining, even when a bit of a hint or two might provide a deeper understanding of Freddie. As it stands, her behaviour often feels random and a bit disconnected from what we know about her, her trauma an abstract thing rather than one to empathize with.

And yes, yes, I get it, this does of course mirror Freddie’s lack of deeper connection to the people and the world around her, as caused by her issues, but that doesn’t mean it is a satisfying way to go for a movie; it’s more an abstractly interesting one, and I’m not terribly interested in the abstract in my film watching experience. I can feel disconnected very well on my own, thank you very much.

Mad Fate aka 命案 (2023): On the other hand, I did connect with this complicated film about the horrors of destiny, the weight of grief, and the nastiness of coincidence/the gods, rather a lot more than with the first two in this entry. It’s not as if director Cheang Pou-Soi is out to make anything easy for his audience. His characters – including deeply disturbing performances by Gordon Lam Ka-Tung and Yeung Lok-Man – are certainly not what you’d normally call “relatable”, while the plot is as finicky as you can expect from a film where the destructive force of destiny hangs over the characters like a badly-humoured cat. The whole affair has a somewhat curious disposition as well,where it finds a degree of hope in a manner bound to make you uncomfortable.

Yet there’s a drive to push the audience into the film’s world Return to Seoul only has visually, Fallen Leaves not at all, and a willingness to let the audience into the head of the characters as well as its ideas the other two films of this entry lack, and that really makes this something special.