Three Films Make A Post: There's Only You And Your Dreams

Dad Savage (1998): The main selling point of Betsan Morris Evans’s thriller about greed and betrayal set in the British countryside is Patrick Stewart in one of his infrequent – and as usual in these cases clearly cherished - eccentric villain roles, though the rest of the cast with actors like Helen McCrory, Marc Warren and Kevin McKidd isn’t half bad either. The film’s trouble lies with a script that assumes you can make a simple story more dramatic by telling it in the most complicated, flash-back heavy manner available, where more time spent on actually fleshing out the characters would have done the film much more good. I also found myself not terribly fond of the film’s chamber piece aspirations, where everything that isn’t a flashback consists of the characters trapped with each other to enable loads of overtly dramatic ACTING of the very shouty variety.

Dangerous Lies (2020): Whereas this dreadful Netflix production by Michael Scott should be so lucky to actually have aspirations on things like theatricality. It’s a psychological thriller whose characters have all the depth of those of a daytime soap, played by the sort of young and pretty things not experienced enough to provide depth when the script doesn’t, shot in the bland style of a bad 90s TV movie and showing all the verve of a sleeping pill. It’s the kind of by the numbers filmmaking that really makes a boy think fondly of a less than successful film like Dad Savage because that one’s actually trying to do something interesting, whereas Dangerous Lies is just as generic and boring as its title.

La terre et le sang aka Earth and Blood (2020): Of course – and I know I am repeating myself here – originality isn’t everything. Case in point today is Julien Leclercq’s fine French Netflix production that goes through a lot of the typical motions of movies about middle-aged men violently protecting their daughters. But Leclercq knows where to add specificity to his clichés, understands about the importance of the telling detail to sparse characterisations, and has absolute control about the pacing of his film. The cast led by Sami Bouajila is pretty great too, applying care and intelligence where others would go through the motions.


The film’s also admirably brutal and ruthless, not in a gratuitous way, but one simply unwilling to be nice for nicety’s sake. This would make a rather instructive double bill with Netflix’s Braven, a pretty similar film that does everything wrong this one does right.