Whistle (2025)

New kid at school Chrys (Dafne Keen) finds an ancient Mesoamerican whistle in her school locker. Soon, someone makes the mistake of blowing it, cursing all the teens present, who are now being haunted and killed by their future deaths in various more or less imaginative ways. Hooray for them, I suppose.

Despite a theoretically decent enough cast of young actors and in Corin Hardy a director who knows his way around around a mid-budget horror set piece (his The Nun being one of the few Conjuringverse movies I genuinely appreciate), this tale of teens cursed by a Mayan whistle (the Internet talks about an Aztec death whistle, but the film quite explicitly says Mayan – it’s nonsense in both regards anyhow) is as dire as everyone says it is.

Owen Egerton’s script is a total mess, lacking consistency and even the kind of out-there logic you can easily get away with in supernatural horror, and instead features wonky characterisation and character motivation, as well as a completely messy time line. And not in the classic Italian way of weirdness I delight in, but in the “we don’t actually give a crap, it’s just a horror movie anyhow” kind of way I particularly do not. Nothing here makes sense – hell, even the inscription on the whistle is in our Latin alphabet (and wouldn’t be something you could translate via an Internet translator, come to that), and what’s worse, nothing in the film carries any weight of mood or thematic connection.

What’s left are bits and pieces cobbled together from various teen horrors, and signifiers of It Follows, Final Destination and Smile that not only make the dangerous mistake of reminding me of much better movies but also make it clear that nobody involved in the production actually understood what they were trying to imitate.

But to finish on the only positive note I can come up with about this mess: I did genuinely appreciate how simply normal the film treats the fact its heroic lead romance is a Lesbian one.

Hallow Road (2025)

On a dark night, Maddie (Rosamund Pike) and Frank (Matthew Rhys) get a call from their daughter Alice (Megan McDonnell), with whom they had a giant row that evening. Apparently, Alice stormed off and stole Frank’s car when the parental units got rather angry at her for certain life decisions that don’t bode terribly well for the future they imagined for her.

Anger notwithstanding, Alice is now calling them for help. She has had an accident, struck a girl with her car on a lonely forest road, and doesn’t know what to do. Because the circumstances look dubious, and will become increasingly so the more information Alice shares, Maddie and Frank are driving to help Alice. Maddie’s experience as a emergency rescuer comes in helpful for talking Alice through first aid steps on the girl she injured, at least.

However while the parents are driving on, developments take a rather dark turn or two.

Speaking of the drive, there’s something strange going on there as well, for Hallow Road, where Alice had her accident, seems curiously difficult to reach, as if there were forces at work that have their own ideas about what to do about Alice for the trouble she has gotten herself into, forces rather less willing to tolerate wrongdoing than parents may be.

Babak Anvari’s Hallow Road is a project that could very well have ended up as merely a gimmick movie of a kind that might have been better realized as an audio play. However, Anvari directs the hell out of a story that consists of two people in a car having a phone call for most of its running time. There’s an admirable sense of focus to Anvari’s work here, as well as clear trust in his main actors to convey desperation, anger, as well as slowly encroaching dread. Which, as actors of a certain calibre are wont to do in cases like this, they repay with the kind of great work that eschews getting too showy while also hitting the proper dramatic notes, suggesting things that don’t need to be told directly.

William Gillies’s script works like clockwork but never feels like one, and handles characterisation as well as it does escalation, while confronting its increasingly fraying characters with a situation where one wrong decision cascades until events become catastrophic. I also loved how the film handles the supernatural, mixing very traditional folkloric tropes in a way that makes them fit perfectly with its psychological thriller base.

To my eyes, Hallow Road is a prime example of how to make creative use of constraints, and how to make a movie out of very basic elements that’s anything but basic.

Flora and Son (2023)

Flora (Eve Hewson), a mostly single Mom in Dublin – the father Kev (Paul Reid) is around but is clearly useless in most regards – can’t really connect with her teenage son Max (Orén Kinlan). She’s not quite grown-up as fully as you’d expect of a proper movie mom, after all, and is rather more abrasive than Hollywood rules allow for being a good mother.

On a wine-driven lark, Flora signs up for online guitar lessons from Los Angeles never-quite-made-it musician Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Not unexpectedly, they do fall in long-distance love, but, this being a John Carney movie, the romantic aspect isn’t everything, so Flora discovers certain aspects about herself through the power of music and their connection that will in turn help her connect with Max.

So yes, this is pretty much a typical John Carney film in its use of romance movie tropes it doesn’t quite subvert but also clearly isn’t feeling slavishly beholden to, where the lovers not getting together in a romantic embrace isn’t actually a sad ending, and where re-connecting a family isn’t part of some kind of conservative impulse to put things back in order, but an example of human connection.

Human connection that in Carney’s films is typically enabled and enhanced through the power of music, or really, the power of songs – in a way where genre and approach matter less than the nearly spiritual way making music together as an act of creativity can connect people in unexpected ways.

This nearly never glides off into the realms of kitsch because Carney also knows that songs do not magically solve every problem, that problems may indeed not be solvable, and isn’t afraid to leave room for characters to grow or screw up after the movie is finished. His sometimes a little abrasive but never cruel sense of humour certainly helps keep things honest as well.

Which makes Flora and Son, like all of Carney’s musically minded movies, the kind of film to watch when you want to feel all little better about humanity without feeling like you’re being lied to - a perfect thing, really.

Three Films Make A Post: Turn the darkness into light

The Secret of Kells (2009): I dare say there’s not exactly a load of animation out there that is highly influenced by the art of mediaeval illuminated manuscripts. It doesn’t fit too many narratives, I assume. Yet where would this be more appropriate than in a tale about a mediaeval illuminated manuscript?

Directors Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey made some interesting choices in other regards, as well, often slipping into the – to the modern eye strange – mindsets of their protagonists, while appearing to make a film that’s philosophically at once pagan, Christian and modern humanist. Which most of the time makes for a narrative full of surprising details, even when it hits a lot of the tired old Hero’s Journey beats. It’s also so damn beautiful I probably wouldn’t even criticize it (much), if it were only the Hero’s Journey stuff.

The Flowers of Evil aka Aku no hana (2019): This adaptation of a much loved manga and anime feels nothing at all like what you’d expect from a Noboru Iguchi film. If that’s a good thing or a bad one depends on one’s tolerance for melodramatic, pseudo-intellectual teenage bullshit with a wee bit of sexual deviance included taking the place of absurdist gore as an expression of all possible human feelings.

Mine isn’t terribly high, so I very quickly lost patience with these particular characters, their small town malaise and their inability to read Baudelaire without drenching their books in dramatic rainfalls; your disgust with misuse of books may vary.

Nightmare aka Nattmara (1965): Apparently, not only Jimmy Sangster over in the UK found himself thinking about what to do with the Hitchcock model of what we’d now call the domestic thriller. Arne Mattsson over in Sweden certainly thought along the same lines as Sangster with this tale of gaslighting. The resulting film is at times beautiful and moody, painfully obvious, crude and elegant, with a curious idea of how to time plot revelations running into moments of deep intensity.

Thus, the whole thing feels rather disjointed, though it is never without something interesting happening on screen.

Three Films Make A Post: What would you ask your older self?

Haunted Ulster Live (2024): For much of its running time, this is  painfully unfunny Ghostwatch but as a comedy business – very much something nobody asked for, but if they did ask for it, probably imagined done much better than this thing is. The non-funny business always gets in the way of the elements of the film that are actually interesting: the emulation of 90s Northern Irish television, some nearly clever bits and pieces of characterization to the TV personalities the film will always drop for the next tedious joke, and some genuinely cool ideas about the how and why of the haunting.

Alas, when that last part came onto the screen in full force, at least this viewer’s patience had worn much too thin for it to have much of an effect.

Things Will Be Different (2024): Michael Felker’s SF (with a smidgen of horror) time-shenanigans movie was produced by Benson and Moorhead, and it very much feels like the kind of project that much beloved (certainly by me) duo of filmmakers will get up to on their own. To my eyes, it also demonstrates how genuinely great Benson & Moorhead are at their high concept SF/horror with genuine humanity on a shoe-string budget art – by not being terribly effective at all, particularly in comparison.

The pacing here is just off, with all revelations about the weirdness around the protagonists coming at least one or two scenes later than they should. Worse still, I found myself not at all interested in the sibling family drama between the main characters, and never found much of a thematic or connection of mood between the weird fiction part and the characters.

My Old Ass (2024): As a very good-looking feel bad feel good movie, Megan Park’s My Old Ass is rather successful. The acting, especially by Maisy Stella and the typically wonderful Aubrey Plaza, is fine as well.

My core problem with the film is this: while it talks a lot of about the acceptance of pain (or at least of the possibility of pain), bitter-sweet coming of age crap as seen in a thousand US indie movies, and so on, it never actually faces the horrible reality of pain, loss and suffering head-on, the moments when this sort of thing isn’t polite, or hopeful, or the thing that’ll teach you some valuable lesson about life, but a profoundly destructive force that leaves only trauma in the ruins of its wake.

Depending on the mood one is when watching this, that’s either a perfectly alright decision for a movie to make – they don’t all have to dig deep – or it is one that can piss a viewer off considerably.

In the Land of Saints and Sinners (2023)

The Republic of Ireland, 1973. Finbar Murphy (Liam Neeson) has killed for money from his boss Robert McQue (Colm Meaney) and/or a cause for decades now, but is really getting tired of the killing and what it does to him and the world. An encounter with a particularly dignified victim closes the deal for him, and he decides to retire. McQue isn’t going to make trouble for him, and they’ve both kept their dirty work as far away from their homes in County Donegal as possible, so there’s little danger for anyone in the retirement.

Why, Finbar is even buddies with the local Garda man, O’Shea (Ciarán Hinds). Of course, men like Finbar never can truly get away from their pasts, and when he realizes the visiting uncle of a neighbour who is also clearly an IRA member is abusing a little girl he’s friendly with, he decides to straight up murder the guy.

The killing itself doesn’t go quite as slick as Finbar hoped – youngsters carrying knives now is a new one to him –, but that’s not going to be his main problem. Rather, his victim wasn’t just some IRA guy with particularly bad manners on a visit, but actually part of a cell hiding out after a bombing that went a bit too well. Worse still, leader of the cell is Doireann (Kerry Condon), who just happens to be the sister of Finbar’s victim. Doireann, capable of switching from friendly to disturbingly violent at the drop of a hat, is not a woman who takes kindly to the disappearance of her brother.

There are of course quite a few clichés about 70s Ireland in Robert Lorenz’s In the Land and rather a lot of the standard tropes of the Neesonsploitation genre as well. However, Lorenz and the script by Mark Michael McNally and Terry Loane handle most of these clichés – let’s just ignore the subplot around a junior killer played by Jack Gleeson in that regard - with some wit and a degree of delicacy, taking a bit more care with the characters than about half of your typical Neeson outings from the last few decades have done – and of the next decade will do.

While he’s still better at the violence than a man of his age would be, the film goes out of its way to keep him in the realm of the human, an opening Neeson of course uses to do some actual acting. Neither his character nor his development are particularly deep, but they are complicated enough to be engaging. Specifically the contrast between the actual kindness and consideration Finbar shows other human beings and the trained efficiency with which he commits violence when on the job works very well indeed.

In this approach to violence, Finbar stands in marked contrast to Doireann, who does have sudden outbreaks of humanity – this is not a film about supervillains - but also tends to be more brutal than she needs to be, and very much makes the impression of enjoying what Finbar has come to loathe (and probably always treated more as a duty than a pleasure). Condon is really rather wonderful in the role, selling the transition between whatever the Irish female version of a Good Old Boy is to someone who’d cut your throat without a second thought and like it, while also keeping Doireann human and likeable enough to make me a little uncomfortable for wanting to like her.

In short: Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan (2020)

Julien Temple’s documentary about the late, great Shane MacGowan uses a kind of collage method to not speak about the man and his work but let him speak for himself. So the film uses archival footage and often appropriately bizarre animation to illustrate the life and times of MacGowan as he tells them through various interviews from different stages of his life, some of which conducted by and with friends with an physically barely there man. The only outside perspective given is from some interviews with members of his family, editorializing doesn’t really happen. Given MacGowan’s tendency to extreme drunken debauchery, I wouldn’t exactly believe anything he’s saying, which doesn’t mean the film isn’t a true portrayal of his life and mind – it’s simply not one I’d believe as a portrayal of all the facts of his life and mind. But the facts aren’t really the point when you’re trying the portrait the core of a human being.

Given the nature of the man and his music, the film is a mix of nostalgia, aggression and sudden outbursts of poetry. It’s also clearly not on board with romanticizing hard living as a necessity for art – there’s an unflinching aspect to its look at MacGowan’s increasing physical and mental decline that leaves no room for that. Pleasantly, this unflinching view is paired with a complete lack of hypocritical moral superiority – talent wasting away and life fading is not treated with judgment here, but sadness for what’s gone and love for what’s still there. Which does turn this into a bit of a heartbreaker for those of us to whom MacGowan’s music means a lot, but that’s only right and proper.

Marlowe (2023)

1939. Bay City/Los Angeles. Morally upright private eye Philip Marlowe (Liam Neeson) is feeling his age quite a bit, but he’s still working a job that involves getting shot at, conked on the head, used by the police and clients to do their dirty work, and so on.

This week – one must not assume but knows this sort of thing happens to Marlowe regularly – ravishing Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger) hires Marlowe to find her lover Nico Peterson (François Arnaud) who has apparently disappeared without even a goodbye, which simply isn’t a thing that happens to the lady, or so she explains. Marlowe soon enough finds out that Nico is supposed to be dead, his head smashed by a car at the back of a club; eventually his client discloses that she knows about this, but has seen Nico after his supposed death, looking rather chipper for a zombie.

That is of course not the final omission or outright lie Marlowe is going to hear from his client. Cavendish does at least tend to soften her lies and obfuscations by quite a bit of spirited flirting. Other members of the lying persuasion Marlowe encounters in the following days do tend to prefer violence to sweettalk. And, this being Los Angeles in the late 30s, there are a lot of shady people trying to lie to a private eye who is soon up to his eyebrows in liars, killers, pimps and drug pushers – among other charming people. Every single one of them is played by someone like Jessica Lange, Danny Huston or Patrick Muldoon.

Neil Jordan’s Marlowe is based on John Banville, not Raymond Chandler, but the film is very much clued into Chandler’s idea of what the private detective of the hard-boiled model is supposed to be and do, so expect this version of Marlowe to be a knight in somewhat aged armour, manoeuvring the corrupt world of Hollywood and surroundings while doing his utmost not to be corrupt himself and leave a positive footprint, for someone at least.

Jordan as a director is at his most playful here. His approach to the film’s stylized but often incredibly fun dialogue is to emphasize the artificiality of what characters say and how they speak, which fits nicely into a film that does a rather nice job at pretending Spain is Los Angeles. While this certainly isn’t anything to make the friends of naturalism happy, I do find an ironic joy in a film all about characters to whom pretence and lying has become second nature – again, this is set in Hollywood – pretending to take place where it certainly isn’t with a wink and a smile.

It’s the nature of this particular beast that Jordan pays homage to classic noir and hard-boiled material rather a lot, with many a shot that stands in direct dialogue – let’s say, instead of borrowed - with comparable shots in the classics, but also by drenching this material not in black and white, but rather the colours of 90s neo noir. This does put further emphasis on the artificiality of the whole affair, but it’s a kind of artificiality I found engaging throughout – joyful even.

Evil Dead Rise (2023)

Sisters Beth (Lily Sullivan) and Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) haven’t always seen eye to eye, historically, but when Beth has a problem, as she has at the beginning of the movie, she still comes back to Ellie – and Ellie’s kids Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), Danny (Morgan Davies) and Kassie (Nell Fisher). Right now, Ellie’s family has problems of their own, though: the father of the kids has left them, and the high rise they live in is going to be demolished in a month, with no new place to live on the horizon.

So the family reunion isn’t without its troubles. Troubles which will be rudely interrupted when an earthquake open ups a hidden bunker under the building and Danny grabs the grimoire stashed there in the hopes of selling it off to get everyone out of trouble. Soon deadites and fountains of blood will redecorate the building’s interior.

The new Evil Dead film is not at all the kind of film I’d have expected out of Lee Cronin. Where the director’s short films and his The Hole in the Ground are rather slow, cerebral and thoughtful, Evil Dead Rise is fast, bloody, and often wonderfully fucked up perfectly in keeping with the tradition of the franchise. Cronin turns out to be really good at this sort of thing, as well, timing shocks, freak-outs and nasty suspense masterfully, while keeping the characters interesting enough for him to be able to slow down strategically whenever necessary or useful to the film’s mood.

There are, of course, a lot of nods to the other films of the franchise here (there’s a particularly wonderful/creepy variant of the old “DEAD BY DAWN!”, turned into an actual chant here), but Cronin – who also scripted – also adds some flourishes of his own that manage to keep completely in the style of the series but also feel new and individual enough to move it forwards, in a much more organic way than the new Hellraiser tried and failed to do it. The final creature – to spoil that one would be a crime – is a great example for this. It’s certainly in the mind space Sam Raimi works in when doing horror, but it’s also something I really haven’t seen before, or indeed imagined to see in the fifth movie in a franchise that also already spawned a TV show.

For a movie that’s aiming for the mainstream, this can get surprisingly nasty – not just in the blood showers but also in its willingness to kill characters who would be taboo in most mass market fare, in its general sense of gruesomeness and in its sheer macabre visual imagination.

Between the crazy effects, the blood, and the horrific action, Cronin has also managed to include elements that resonate on a different level. Apart from being a movie about possession, blood and unpleasant transformations, this is also very much a film playing on a very basic human fear. To my eyes, it is not the “evil mother” thing certain people get so cranky about (because all mothers in real life are awesome I assume against better knowledge?) but rather the fear of your loved ones turning against you or changing beyond recognition, turning into monsters literal and metaphorical. There’s a certain perverse glee in the way Evil Dead Rise plays with this fear, first setting up family relations that are close but not too idyllic, and then destroying them in ways none of the characters deserve.

If you start thinking about it, Evil Dead Rise is really very dark indeed – it just puts this darkness into such a sweet mix of macabre and perversely fun carnage, not everyone watching will even notice that darkness.

Three Films Make A Post: A Rian Johnson Whodunit.

RRR (2022): It’s a little wonder the kind of mainstream critics who’d usually spit on an Indian mainstream movies the same way as they do on a Marvel flick seem to have seen the light for S.S. Rajamouli’s latest. It’s probably the cartoonish (yet certainly not un-earned) anti-colonialism, whose treatment of Big, Serious Themes is just as enthusiastically maximalist as everything else in the movie, be it manly friendship or turning historical figures into the mythical equivalent of superheroes. The musical numbers (apart from the flag-waving post-movie sequence that really takes things too far in the nationalist direction for my tastes) are awesome (in all meanings of the word), as are the fights scenes, the melodrama, the CGI (realism can shut it),  and the oversized personalities. If this doesn’t grab you already simply by the virtue of being EVERYTHING at its loudest, but also most charming, then just look at how Rajamouli paces this thing, as if a three hour runtime weren’t a marathon but a damn sprint he – clearly as heroically made as his characters – can keep up for so long without even the slightest of efforts.

Glass Onion (2022): Full disclosure: I don’t actually like Knives Out, despite my huge admiration for everything else Rian Johnson has made. I found it unpleasantly smug in the way certain parts of the “progressive” side of US politics can look from over here (where their reactionary counterparts simply tend to look like fascist assholes), and wasn’t impressed by it never giving a character a second dimension if one was available. This one here, with the same basic politics, does everything right, grounding snarky politics in actual characterisation and much more complex relationships, which does tend to make one’s politics much more convincing. All the while, the film keeps the ease with which Johnson has always juggled plot, humour and a sharp visual eye. The cast is doing fantastic work as well. Hell, even Daniel Craig has toned down his “Southern” accent from rage-inducingly obnoxious to terrible (which is of course the traditional note the detective in a Christie-style traditional murder mystery has to hit).

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022): This tragical comedy about the end of friendship, boredom, depression, places and people that drag everyone in and around them down, as well as the one woman who gets the hell away by Martin McDonagh is the wonder everyone says it is. Funny and sad at the same moment, this shows what are foibles in most of us turn big and toxic in its characters, self-destructive and violent in ways that are grotesque when you think about them but also feel completely natural and logical.

In McDonagh’s usual style, there’s much space left for the actors –particularly of course Kerry Condon, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson – where lesser films aiming where McDonagh does might bury them under mawkish or too knowing dialogue.

Three Films Make A Post: Party Like It’s 2022

Mandrake (2022): Sometimes, I really don’t know. Objectively, Lynne Davison’s clever mix of traditional British social drama and neo folk horror is a fine, perhaps even great film. The acting, particularly by Deirdre Mullins and Derbhie Crotty, is great and absolutely on point, Davison’s visual language is creepy without only ever going for the obvious effect, and the script clearly knows what it wants to be about as well as how to express it. In practice, I didn’t connect with it at all. Despite my love for clever variations on folk horror and good filmmaking this might as well have been Generic Blumhouse Horror Number 9855, for all I felt and thought. Which says very little about the film, obviously.

Beast (2022): To be fair to myself, for most of the time, I had the same reaction to Baltasar Kormákur’s animal attack movie in which Idris Elba needs to protect his family from lions. But here, it’s the proper reaction. As you might expect, the film milks the whole “a man needs to protect his little girls” so incessantly, you can’t help but wait for the other shoe to drop and the movie to deconstruct this notion. To nobody’s surprise, the other shoe never does drop, and it’s just a case of very low effort character writing.

On the plus side, Elba is good even if he has very little to do, the young actresses playing his daughters deserved better as well, and Sharlto Copley does – as usual – a great portrayal of Sharlto Copley playing a likeable ranger. Too bad the film has no ambitions beyond being as generic as possible, wasting the talents of everyone involved on the kind of movie that’s simply there.

Barbarian (2022): Because I didn’t want to go into spoiler heavy territory with this one – let’s just say there’s a really clever, effective and actually meaningful structural thing or three that happen – I can end the post on a positive note.

For Zach Cregger’s Barbarian truly is as good as everyone says – apart from one bit I found somewhat too smugly on the righteous side of our times which would involve heavy spoilers to get into – using parts of today’s social conversation in intelligent ways to surprise. It’s the case where a movie has something to say, knows how to say it, and also how to make a pretty fantastic horror movie out of it. Add some really great performances by Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgård and Justin Long, and you have something really rather special.

The Coming of the Black Dawn (1965) & The Testament of Caleb Meeke (1969)

In The Coming of the Black Dawn, a young man arrives at the castle of his uncle to bring him a rare tractate that the old man needs to help Cthulhu bring on the end of the world as we know it. At first, our protagonist is into the whole business of graverobbing and letting an ancient evil speak through the thusly acquired corpse, but a vision of the changes that will come to himself after the end of the world do suggest second thoughts may be rather appropriate.

The Testament of Caleb Meeke sees another young men travelling towards yet another uncle’s place. In this case, though, the uncle is dead and the protagonist is attempting to gather his inheritance. Alas, this uncle also dabbled in the occult, as all uncles are wont to do; his diary and grimoire suggest pacts with the Old Ones dwelling in the woods. Obviously, there’s nothing good awaiting our nephew.

From the 60s through the 80s, amateur filmmaker/indie auteur Roy Spence ignored pretty much everything an independent filmmaker in Ireland was supposed to do at the time and produced a singular body of short films. These films mainly belong to the fantastical genres or are documentaries about local craftspeople. In these endeavours, Spence was assisted by his twin brother Neal, now a well-regarded poet. Quite a few of these films are now, happily, available to the public via the Irish Film Institute.

The two shorts movies we are concerned with today obviously belong to the former group of films (unless Irish craftsmen are weirder than anyone could have expected), and seem to be among the first movies Spence made. As far as I could read up on him, Spence was a bit of an americanophile, with a deep and abiding love for the country’s pop culture, especially its B-movies – good, bad and in-between. This influence is rather obvious in these two films, particularly in Spence’s fearless use of cheap and cheerful homemade special effects of the kind Paul Blaisdell cooked up for Roger Corman in the 50s. Like with the best of Blaisdell, the cheapness doesn’t overshadow the conceptual Weirdness (the capitalization is truly earned) but actually helps enhance it; some things are best expressed in cardboard and papier-mâché, it seems.

Another influence on Spence’s style here is silent expressionist cinema – which makes a lot of practical sense with movies shot with one camera, limited technical possibilities and with dubbed sound. Spence’s visual quotations and stylistic parallels to the world of Nosferatu and Caligari create a decidedly non-naturalistic world of big, strange emotions, and shadowed landscapes. In their best moments – and each of these two examples has at least four or five of these in twenty minutes of runtime – the films take on a mood of true strangeness, of things – perhaps some naked dudes in ski masks which stand in as faces without features – lurking in a somewhat disturbing manner in an early winter Irish forest, of the world being out of whack. It’s the sort of strangeness that can only be achieved by talented amateurs who don’t have to take all rules of conventional filmmaking as a given but who do have the spirit, the heart and the intelligence to come up with their own private rules and understand how those are informed by the non-amateurs whose work they have been inspired by.

This sort of thing is of course also exactly what I love in my obscure, somewhat heroic, indie horror movies, so I find myself rather giddy about the prospect of seeing more of Spence’s work. These specific two movies do also recommend themselves to me, personally and specifically, because they are at least somewhat informed by classical Weird Fiction. The Coming does suggest Lovecraft and Derleth through more than just the C-word, whereas The Testament’s dwellers in a pool in the woods do have more than just a slight whiff of Machen about them.

Three Films Make A Post: Willie and Kris? You better duck!

Songwriter (1984): Given the very self-serious nature of much of the following body of work of Alan Rudolph, it’s easy to forget he was perfectly able to make this kind of loose music-based comedy – with genuinely effective moments of drama – with Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson playing fictionalized version of themselves who are sticking it to the music industry, while also making up for past mistakes and becoming better persons in the process. If you like Willie and Kris – and if you don’t, you might think about your movie watching choices – this is a pretty joyous affair, simply based on watching guys doing (and singing) what they do (and sing) best; and even one that’s not completely uncritical of the way soft machos like these two tend to treat women.

There’s also a pretty damn great outing by Lesley Ann Warren as possibly up and coming country star - who already has the mandatory alcohol problem – Gilda that’ll end in a very, very Nashville kind of way.

Madelines (2022): The final third of Jason Richard Miller’s indie time travel movie with a lot of murder (or is it suicide?), written by lead Brea Grant and Miller is a pretty great example of lo-tech weirdness, reminding me of nothing so much as weird fiction great Jeffrey Ford’s trips into science fiction – which is a rather big compliment. Alas, to get to the brilliant and effective part of the movie, you have to move through a script so full of holes, even I got annoyed by them. Essentially, to get where it wants to go, the film needs its characters to act and react like no human being ever actually would to basically everything that happens to them; it needs to pretend this married garage science couple knows nobody in the whole damn world but their financier; and so on and so forth.

I only made it through the early parts of the movie at all thanks to the typically charming performances by Grant, Perry Shen and Richard Riehle – which is a bit of a shame given how wonderful the final act is.

Perrier’s Bounty (2009): In Ian Fitzgibbon’s very dark Irish crime comedy, a series of unfortunate events (including a bit of self-defence killing) leads to an unlucky guy (Cillian Murphy), his neighbour, friend and crush (Jodie Whittaker), and the guy’s dead beat dad (Jim Broadbent) having to go on the run from a gangster (Brendan Gleeson), his cronies and various other ne'er-do-wells. This being an Irish comedy, there’s much violence, more drinking, a lot of existentialist philosophy (that’s much funnier than the French version of existentialism), and an ironic sense of the tragic. Most of it is very funny indeed, always interesting, and at times even quite moving. And it’s very difficult to find fault in a movie whose main villain finds his demise because he broke the rule of how to handle dogs as a movie character. Hint: you don’t shoot them, unless they are zombie dogs.

You Are Not My Mother (2021)

Teenager Char (Hazel Doupe) lives with her mother Angela (Carolyn Bracken), her grandmother Rita (Ingrid Craigie) and her uncle Aaron (Paul Reid) in a housing estate in Dublin. Quiet, intelligent, and sad, Char’s the favourite victim of her school’s bullies. At home, she has trouble coping with Angela’s clinical depression. She’s rather close to her grandma, though, and the general vibe of her family life is very strained but not fatally so.

Things take a strange turn when Angela disappears mysteriously, only to reappear just as mysteriously a short time later. Clearly, something must have happened to her, for after her return, she at first seems rather more lively and healthy than she had been for quite some time, so much so that Char is at first happy to see these changes in her mother. But something’s not quite right with her behaviour. Angela seems to be missing some of the cues of normal social behaviour, at the very least. Going by the looks Rita gives her daughter, the old lady suspects something rather terrible that hasn’t anything to do with mental illness; and given how Aaron assists her in things like hindering Angela from going away with Char for a weekend, he shares these suspicions. Obviously, things are only going to get worse from here on out.

Writer-director Kate Dolan’s You Are Not My Mother is a highly accomplished example of how to mix social realism with folk (or at least folklore based) horror. I don’t believe it is a spoiler to say that it is yet another variation on changeling folklore; it is also pretty much the best film I’ve seen using this particular part of Irish folklore. That’s not just because the film varies the tale’s typical structure by using a mother instead of a child as the spirited away and replaced part of a family, but because Dolan uses this change to explore usually unexplored and unspoken dynamics between children and parents, dynamics that are changed but not stripped of love and true human connection by mental illness.

Indeed, that last part is one of the film’s greatest strengths. It does use its supernatural threat to explore how depression can change familial relations and the toll mental illness takes on those of us suffering from it as well as the people who love us, but it never equates the two.

The film’s treatment of the bullying Char suffers is also rather excellent, constructed with an understanding of the differences between various types of bullying demonstrated through a very precise depictions of social subtleties. Dolan is so good at this stuff, she absolutely sells even the part of the story where one of her bullies becomes Char’s friend, something that could be either implausible or mawkish in hands less adept.

The film’s portrayal of poverty is equally excellent. It never shies away from showing poverty – the version of poverty where you’re probably not going to go hungry and homeless but that’s all – but it lacks the sense of touristic wallowing quite a few British films certain critics eat up tend to show, films in which poor people can only be portrayed as suffering 24/7, as if only that would be enough to convince an audience of the intrinsic worth of the poor as human beings. But I digress.

Apart from Dolan’s precise, tight and often cleverly moody direction, the film is further enhanced by some fantastic performances. Doupe’s unsentimental portrayal of all of Char’s hurts, awkwardnesses and pains as well as her strength and the short bursts of teenage joy she is allowed is particularly moving, whereas Bracken very effectively delineates the difference between the depressed mother at the film’s start and the un-human thing that is taking her place.

Which segues nicely into something I haven’t said about You Are Not My Mother until now: it is indeed also a highly effective horror movie, one of those examples of the genre that uses social realism and supernatural horror to open up different ways to talk about difficult things, yet that’s also highly effective as a piece of supernatural horror. Because these aren’t approaches to horror that stand in opposition but, handled well, only strengthen one another. Particularly the final act also simply has a couple of brilliantly effective set pieces.

Three Films Make A Post: Revenge is a Dirty Business

The Killer is Still Among Us (1986): Criminology PhD student (Mariangela D’Abbraccio) becomes convinced that the serial killer haunting her city now is the same one she has started to write her thesis on, who did his horrible work a decade or so ago. Because the rules of the giallo say so, she starts investigating herself and quickly gets in over her head.

Camillo Teti’s giallo is a pretty uneven effort. About half of it is either stylish, or genuinely clever, interestingly unpleasant or very tense; the other half still looks rather fine, but is the movie version of someone dragging their feet very slowly. It does certainly get up to a very clever (or infuriating, if you’re of that temperament when confronted with the highly eccentric) ending with a healthy dose of meta.

Clean (2020): Paul Solet’s (and Adrian Brody’s, seeing as he co-writes, produces, acts and writes the generic score) movie about a man of violence trying to mend his ways but getting dragged back into his old ways to protect some innocents has exactly one half-way original thought: treating our protagonist’s former violent ways as an addiction like his heroin one. Too bad that thought is also pretty damn stupid, psychologically dubious, and just not getting the movie anywhere more interesting. Otherwise, this is an okay entry into its sub-genre, with one or two pretty effective moments of violence, decent performances, and technically competent filmmaking.

The Eclipse (2009): I’m still not quite sure what to make of this Irish film directed and written by Conor McPherson. At times, it seems to prefigure the most arthouse affine arm of A24-style slow horror, but it also has some of the loudest jump scare ghosts ever annoying you with a VERY LOUD NOISE, and a script that never seems to want to decide on a tone. So the spookiness as metaphor stuff, scenes about grief and loneliness and scenes of a man slowly coming back to life via awkward romance are paired up with the sort of romantic farce you’d expect a local amateur theatre to come up with. All of it is staged in a stately and artful manner (if that fits any given scene or not), acted very well by Ciarán Hinds, Iben Hjejle and Aidan Quinn even in those moments when the material doesn’t deserve their efforts, and never really comes together for me.

In short: A Child’s Voice (1978)

The golden age of radio in the UK. The excellently named Ainsley Rupert Macreadie (T.P. McKenna) writes and narrates serialized ghost stories on a nightly radio program that closes out the daily programming schedule. Things turn rather spooky in real life when he starts to tell the story of a little boy and stage magician’s assistant who disappears under curious circumstances. After the first episode, a child calls Macreadie on the phone, asking him, in words very close to ones the little boy in Macreadie’s story uses to not continue with the tale. Macreadie does continue; things do not go well for him.

This short film from Ireland directed by Kieran Hickey is very much made in the spirit and style of the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas. Clearly, something was in the air on the isles at this time. This is a lovely little film that makes all the right decisions to create a thick, decidedly creepy atmosphere out of a lot of shadows in a couple of very small rooms, sound design that at times might as well have come from the Radiophonic Workshop, and an unhurried (which is code for “slow, but purposefully so”) pace that understands that it’s much easier to let the uncanny enter after you’ve prepared your audience properly for it. And, because this was clearly made with my tastes in mind, it really is the uncanny, so no complete explanations are ever forthcoming, and the whole truth about what is happening here is left as undisclosed as the end of the story Macreadie is beginning to tell will be.

McKenna’s lead performance is lovely, making the character neither too pompous nor too nice. In a very clever touch, the film adds Valentine Dyall’s well-oiled voice as a narrator, so the story about a man telling ghost stories on the radio is told to us by a man who did indeed tell ghost stories on the radio, an extra frisson in a wonderfully effective tale that uses the spookiness of certain kinds of technology, like the telephone and the radio in their early years, the liminality of the disembodied voice, to great effect.

Three Films Make A Post: He was a world-class criminal and a working-class hero.

The General (1998): This gangster movie by the great John Boorman about Irish burglar, robber (etc) and perhaps part-time national anti-hero Martin Cahill (portrayed by Brendan Gleeson with perfect nuance even when the character he portrays would deny possessing any of that) was all the rage with critics when it came out, and really doesn’t seem to be part of any conversation anymore. It’s definitely a John Boorman movie in its willingness to be peculiar: at times, it feels more like a very strange comedy than your typical biopic. It portrays its protagonist with as much sarcasm as it does reverence (though there’s some of that, also), understanding the very specific working class charm of the man as well as the fact that he also was a scumbag. Boorman is never willing to make any total statements about his subject, instead treating Cahill as the sort of complicated and contradictory person we all are, denying the audience the easy way of seeing him as a hero or as a villain, therefor denying the kind of easy judgement that sees everyone as either all-virtuous or all-bad that’s all the rage at this political moment in time.

Confessions of a Police Captain aka Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della repubblica (1971): If you go into this Damiano Damiani joint hoping for more typical hard-hitting Italian 70s cop movie fare, you’ll probably be a little disappointed, for as is so often the case with the director, he’s really only interested in providing as much of the exploitative stuff as he needs to let his social criticism go down easier with an audience. That approach is not always to my taste because it does tend to suggest a pretty patronising view on Damiani’s audience, but in this film, the director avoids most of the spirited monologing he loves so well and instead makes his points via the conflict between a bitter police captain (Martin Balsam) and an idealistic young D.A. (Franco Nero, cleverly and effectively cast against type), who want the same things but completely disagree on how to achieve them, arguing against political and societal corruption by showing what it does to individuals and their view of the world.

It’s a very effective film at this, and even better for the fact that this is one of the Damiani films where the director seems to have put as much heart and energy into the more generic crime elements as he has into the political side of the film, letting one enhance the other quite wonderfully.

Jaca Pocong (2018): A nurse (Acha Septriasa) is tasked to travel to a lonely country home to change an IV and make an injection, but quickly finds herself roped into a wake. Of course, there’s spooky stuff happening. And some of said spooky stuff in Hadrah Daeng Ratu’s Indonesian horror film is rather effective; the spookery is also rather generic in its nature, with only the not quite as worn out last act twist providing a hint of half-originality to the proceedings. It’s not a bad film before that, mind you, just one that seems so satisfied with standards shocks and suspense moments, it never gets too exciting.

On the other hand, it is crafted carefully enough that it also never becomes boring, so there’s that.

Three Films Make A Post: Hard work never killed anyone. Until now.

Boys from County Hell (2020): This Irish horror comedy by Chris Baugh has quite a bit to recommend it: the – really very Irish, going by other Irish comedies I’ve seen – black humour often hits very well indeed, not necessarily being kind to its characters but also not using them as punching bags. I’m also very happy with the surprisingly clever (and creepy) twists it makes to some of the mechanics of vampirism. The cold open is a scene of two elderly people’s blood coming to the vampire instead of the undead coming to suck for a reason.

I – and I know quite a few people disagree with me there – am not always as happy with the way the film’s comedy and its more naturalistic emotional side interact; in fact, the film seems to use its humour to distract from its darker, personal elements, like an awkward guy afraid of his own emotions.

The Wanting Mare (2020): Sometimes, I use these three movies/one braincell posts to mark a film I’m not sure I’ve quite come to terms with as interesting, wonderfully made, or important. Case in point is this multi-generational weird science fiction film by Nicholas Ashe Bateman that tells a story of yearning and hope carried by a dream over three generations, casting it into dream-like yet precise imagery that belies its low budget. I’m not sure I’ve quite been able to penetrate its metaphorical level, so I can only say it’s a fascinating and beautiful film most certainly worth returning to, made by a filmmaker clearly worth watching.

The Bloodstained Butterfly aka Una farfalla con le ali insanguinate (1971): This sort of giallo by the always interesting Duccio Tessari is a very peculiar film. On a plot level, this is more of a police procedural with a sharp, socially critical edge (as nearly always in this kind of film, towards the rich and people in authority positions, and the failures of the older generation bringing the younger to ruin) that focusses on all of those things giallos usually don’t focus on: a systematic police investigation and courtroom shenanigans, with only little time spent on the things you’d expect going in.

However, stylistically, this is absolutely a giallo, using all the visual and acoustic tics and tricks of the genre, but applying them to a narrative space they are not usually applied to, turning the dry and the sober strange through it.

Vivarium (2019)

Gemma (Imogen Poots) and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) are on the young couple’s lookout for a first house. Their search leads them to an encounter with a rather peculiar estate agent (Jonathan Aris) who is really, really keen on showing them one of his houses.

The development where it is situated looks like a nightmare of bland pastels, breathing a kind of ordered artificiality that does suggest the whole thing is the product of minds who don’t quite understand concepts like houses or home. While they are exploring the house on offer, which turns out to breathe just the same kind of nightmarishly blandness as its surroundings, the estate agent disappears. Worse still, Gemma and Tom can’t find a way out of the development of perfectly identical buildings under a perfectly unchanging sky, neither on foot nor by car. In the end, they always end up at “their” house again. They are trapped.

Somebody is dropping off perfectly bland groceries tasting like a perfectly bland simulacrum of the real thing when they aren’t looking, so they do not risk dying, at least. After some time, said somebody is dropping off a baby too, with a note explaining that the couple will be freed if they take care of it.

At first, the baby seems normal enough, but it grows much faster than a normal human being would, and the boy (Senan Jennings, later Eanna Hardwicke) it becomes is even less so, copying and imitating its “parents” in ways that seem built to break them.

While I’m sure its style and tone will be annoying to quite a few viewers, to my eyes, Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium is an absolute masterpiece. There aren’t terribly many movies aiming for something parallel to the tone of modern non-cosmicist weird fiction, or Robert Aickman, but this one’s not just aiming, it is hitting perfectly what it is trying to achieve.

There’s a fantastically nightmarish quality to the whole film, a design sense that perfectly suggests the setting to be a copy of something human as constructed by something deeply non-human, emphasising the passive-aggressive power of blandness and the horrors of a place that is absolutely ordered to someone else’s rules. The place Gemma and Tom find themselves in is hell, even if it isn’t the hell of Christianity, and their captors are not demons. In fact, the film isn’t calling these captors evil exactly. Instead, in one of the most interesting aspects of the film, it makes them so ambiguous it is never clear if they are malevolent, indifferent, or simply don’t understand these or any other human concepts at all. It simply makes clear there’s little difference between malevolence and indifference if the entity that is either malevolent or indifferent has nearly absolute power over you.

It’s no wonder that the characters break in these kind of surroundings even before they are ordered to take care of their very own changeling, and the way they are breaking is very well done indeed, Finnegan portraying how a very non-realistic pressure drives Gemma and Tom apart in effectively realist ways, thereby finding a way to ground a film based in something we can’t quite relate to through the humanity of his characters. Poots and Eisenberg are both very strong here, really helping to provide the film with an empathetic emotional resonance as well as the more abstract one.Their reaction to something they can’t comprehend is utterly comprehensible, and becomes increasingly heart-breaking the worse their mental states become. In fact, I have seldom seen a film where I wished some Hollywood ending for the characters; though the whole tone and style makes it clear they are doomed from the start.

And that’s before I’ve even mentioned their horrible child-thing, copying and repeating in what feels like a cruel parody of an actual child, screeching for food, and sucking all energy out of Gemma, while Tom’s simply starting to dig a hole instead of confronting what is going on. Which does obviously more than just hint toward a metaphorical angle of this being about the horrors of conformity, the fears of young parenthood, etc. Yet even though the film’s most certainly about these things, it never loses the feel of watching people confronted with something they can’t comprehend, and which can’t truly comprehend them either. That some of this also fits into some modern Fortean ideas about transdimensional entities is just added icing on the cake.

But really, what makes Vivarium so great is that it takes all of these ideas and influences and turns them into a, sometimes very darkly funny, nightmare, holding to its mood perfectly and without wavering.

Three Films Make A Post: Want to watch another?

Karen Doesn’t Dream (2018): At its core, this indie production by Zach Huckaby is pretty typical of that movie space, concerning itself with its protagonist Karen’s (Jessica Lynn Skinner) struggles with grief, mental illness, poverty and insomnia, which, apart from Thanksgiving dinners and “coming-of-age” in the 80s, are the main safe spaces of this kind of film.

Huckaby adds quite a few non-realist touches to the film, though, not necessarily just there to emphasise Karen’s deteriorating mental state, giving the film an obliquely dream-like quality that fits something whose main character watches video tapes of people sleeping to find sleep of her own.

Sadistic Intentions (2019): Staying with an indie movie, but moving on to indie horror, Eric Pennycoff’s film sees a woman named Chloe (Taylor Zaudtke) drawn into a game of sadism, murder, bad metal and a pretty fucked-up idea of romance. The film’s pleasantly slow beginning is – as is most of the film, really – carried by Zaudtke and Jeremy Gardner’s chemistry, as well as helped along by a tone that seems at once sardonic and empathetic towards the characters, providing the film an excellent basis for later developments when things become rather unpleasant for everyone involved.

It’s a lovely little film that finds the right point between being nasty and funny, and does a couple of actually unexpected and interesting things with/to its characters.

The Other Lamb (2019): Let’s end on a very impressive movie I have surprisingly little to say about, Malgorzata Szumowska’s film about a female cult and their male leader coming up on the late stage of utter destruction even the more stable cults eventually can’t help but reach. It’s incredibly acted (not just by lead Raffey Cassidy), visually strikingly and meaningfully composed, starting from a starkly naturalistic place but always reaching for the mythical, and about as powerful a film about young women conquering male-induced terrors as one could imagine. Despite being pretty heavy on the symbolism, it’s also a film not really made to be simply interpreted and cut open to examine its guts – it’s so well-constructed and nearly hypnotically dense and tense, you’ll come to the same conclusions by experiencing it, which rather speaks to the director’s artistry.


Prospective viewers shouldn’t go in expecting the horror film some of the marketing material promises; this is incredible arthouse fare that uses some elements horror movies might use, but is really not interested in the specific kicks we tend to look for in horror, even slow horror.