24FPS @ Raindance: Where's Rose?

Dir: John Mathis

After 8-year-old Rose (Skyler Elyse Philpot) goes missing, she is quickly found. Once she comes home though, it seems that only her brother Eric (Ty Simpkins) can see that she is not the same little girl who disappeared from her bed just hours before.

Where’s Rose? doesn’t suffer from a lack of ideas. Combining domestic horror with shades of possession movies and folk horror elements, it’s covering a lot of bases in an 83 minute running time. John Mathis’ screenplay clearly sets its cards on the table from the start: Eric is the golden boy; handsome, off to college on a full athletic scholarship, close to his family, but things start to run off the rails as he becomes convinced that his sister is no longer what she appears. However, we see cracks in this perfect facade even before Rose goes missing, notably from the self-confidence audiobook he has on his headphones, and the frosty atmosphere between him and the girl next door, Jessica (Anneliese Judge).

These broad hints, and the film’s rather unambiguous approach to Rose’s changed character, are a good indication of the issues with the film. Mathis tips his hand too much, letting us be ahead of the film at every turn. When one particular revelatory sequence comes, it feels almost purposeless, because the story elements have already been tied together with the one image that leads into it. This undermines a lot of the film’s impact, which is unfortunate because otherwise there is plenty here to admire.

The performances are strong all round, with former child actor Simpkins making a strong argument for himself as a leading man going forward. His compassionate big brother character credibly develops into something more complex and nuanced, always holding something back. Skyler Elyse Philpot has some cliché things to play as the film leans into the beats of the possessed child movie. That said, she grounds Rose as a sweet, fantasy-prone, little girl early on, and is heartbreaking when we find what lies behind that fantasy. Anneliese Judge has less to do, and her role being so small means that just about every moment she’s on screen has to clue us in to some backstory (through implication rather than exposition). She gives us huge amounts of resonant character detail with just body language and the occasional line. The fact she ends up letting us know rather too much is down to how her character is used, and a testament to rather than a problem with her performance.

On a surely limited budget, Mathis sometimes makes the semi-rural setting seem almost idyllic to grow up in. However, the woods around the houses also feel menacing and oppressive as they come inside via prints on many of the fabrics in Eric and Rose’s parents’ home. He also gets some excellent practical effects in the film’s last sequence.

It’s frustrating that Where’s Rose? doesn’t quite come together. The ingredients are all there, and the ending will probably stick with you. If only it weren’t one you got to quite a while before the film does.

★★★

Where's Rose? is available on Curzon Home Cinema until Midnight on November 4th

24FPS @ Raindance: Youth V Gov

Dir: Christi Cooper

Even with COP26 happening right now, it doesn’t seem that enough focus is being put on the man made climate change that is already befalling our planet, and which all indications say is about to get catastrophically worse. Christi Cooper’s documentary takes a look at group of 21 young people in the US who have elected to try and do something radical about it, by suing the US government to claim that their action in supporting the fossil fuel industry, while knowing the effects it is having on the climate, infringes their right to life, liberty and property.

The film’s greatest asset is these young people, aged between 11 and 22 at the outset of the case. All of them are informed, charismatic advocates for the case. We see this both in events surrounding the various court dates during the case, and in some frankly ridiculous footage from depositions, where opposing lawyers badger them with questions that should be reserved for climate experts. We also get to see some of the details of how climate change is affecting the plaintiffs right now, from extended wildfire seasons threatening farmland, to hurricanes and floods all but destroying homes. In their downtime, we see how these young people become close, their bond among themselves and with their lead counsel seeming to strengthen their resolve when the case gets challenging.

As a film, Youth V Gov is resolutely standard in form, cutting between observed footage of trial prep, talking heads stuff be it with the kids or with experts, and laying out the history of the US government's knowledge of, and action to exacerbate, climate change. It’s informative, but the history aspect is rather dry in its presentation. Spending time with the plaintiffs is often engaging, but that gets repetitive, as do the arguments the film is making, important as they are. Cooper hammers home the point over and over again, which has the peculiar effect of making more than a few sequences feel like a pre-credits summing up. This is perhaps the influence of the case on the film; as much as the lawyers want to make their case in court, Youth V Gov ends up serving as that case in miniature, and there are several closing arguments made.

Juliana Vs United States has the potential to be a massively important case as well as (as we see during the credits) an inspiring one, but Youth V Gov gives it rather standard issue treatment.

★★★

Youth V Gov is available on Curzon Home Cinema until midnight on November 1st

24FPS @ Raindance: Pause [2018]

Dir: Tonia Mishiali

Over the past few years, there has been a lot of coverage of coercive control relationships and marriages, with the behaviour finally being recognised as the form of abuse that it is. With Pause, her first feature, Tonia Mishali takes a stark look at Elpida (Stella Fyrogeni), a woman in her early 50s whose husband Costas (Andreas Vasileiou), while he goes out to work, controls just about every aspect of her life. 

Mishiali begins by laying out the mundane reality of Elpida’s life. She sometimes looks after her friend’s baby granddaughter, but otherwise passes the days alone in her flat, cleaning and cooking. Repeated shots of her and her husband at the table, only ever speaking for functional reasons, and of them each watching their own TVs (Elpida’s an old CRT that she’s forced to use headphones to watch) hammer home the lack of any affection in the home. We also see that the purse strings are entirely held by Costas, who doles out small amounts day by for groceries. When Elpida asks for money for a haircut, he refuses (“Your hair is fine as it is”).

Elpida’s few escapes from this reality are closed down as the film goes on; Costas taking more and more from her, and Elpida escapes into brief fantasies. In an interesting choice from Mishiali, these moments of fantasy are never cued for us, and as we see more of them even the exits from the fantasy sequences aren’t clear, so while it’s obvious when a handsome young neighbour turns and kisses Elpida in the hallway that it’s not real, a later encounter with a man painting the apartment building is more ambiguous.

The depiction of coercive control feels very real, disturbingly so, and Stella Fyrogeni (also seen in the festival in a supporting role in Patchwork) is outstanding as she plays both Elpida’s near total detachment and her fleeting moments of hope—real or fantasised. While the screenplay has a few clunky moments throughout (the painter’s “Bye bye, Hope” to Elpida is painfully on the nose), there is one moment towards the end of the film that feels very out of place and wildly out of character for Elpida. It’s as if Mishiali decided that she needed one real shock sequence in the film, which is otherwise concerned with the way that implied threat can control someone’s life. It doesn’t work in the moment, but worse than that, for me it unravels some of the good work from before, because that’s the moment it’s building to.

Much of Pause is a hauntingly close up and credible portrait of an abusive relationship, it may stumble badly at its last hurdle, but Stella Fyrogeni’s performance is worth the running time by itself.
★★★

Pause screens at 6:20 on October 31st at the Curzon Hoxton, and online at Curzon Home Cinema from November 1st-3rd

24FPS @ Raindance: Shadow

Dir: Bruno Gascon

In March 1998, 11-year-old Rui Pedro Teixeira Mendonça disappeared from close to his home in Lousada, Portugal. Later that year, his picture was identified when an international child porn ring known as the Wonderland Club was shut down by Police in an operation that spanned 13 countries. He has never been found. 

Shadow changes a few names, but otherwise sticks close to the facts of the case, following Ana Moreira as Isabel, after her 11-year-old son Pedro goes missing and Police botch the initial investigation the film tracks both the devastating psychological effect on Isabel and her efforts to keep the case alive and find her son.

Shadow is largely a performance piece. The cast that surround her, including Miguel Borges as her husband and Tomás Alves as the man she believes holds the key to what happened to Pedro, are effective, but this is  Ana Moreira’s show. There is little in the way of grandstanding in her performance, instead we see the impact of Pedro’s absence reflected in her body. The film unfolds in chapters: 1998, 2004, 2011 and 2013. Across the first three we watch as Isabel slowly shrinks before our eyes; an already slender woman becoming anorexic and sunken as if the stress of Pedro’s absence and simply of not knowing is eating her from the inside. The dialogue can be a little blunt (at least based on the subtitles), but Moreira’s physical performance always cuts to the core of the emotion of her scenes.

Much of the film looks like a typical Netflix true-crime story: it communicates the story well enough, but Gascon doesn’t find many images that stand alone. The exception, and the film’s most interesting purely visual thread, is in the use of yellow. The portrait used on Pedro’s missing poster has him in a yellow short, and for almost the entire film, Isabel is either wearing or carrying something yellow. Most of the time it is her shirt, but when she travels to meet another mother of a missing child, it is her suitcase. When Gascon, at Isabel’s low point, strips yellow out of the frame it feels like a final signal that Isabel has, at least in the moment, truly lost hope. Interestingly, this isn’t noted in the dialogue, so it’s only late in the film that it feels entirely intentional on Isabel’s part, but the emotional impact of the choice is there throughout.

The problem with the film is that nothing that surrounds Isabel is particularly well developed. To a degree that’s because she tunnel visions just about everything else in her life away, but there’s a lack of much sense of the impact of that on her husband and especially on her daughter. The final chapter focuses on a court case that, important as it is to Isabel, never gives us a feel for the stakes of its outcome, nor the specific charges it is over and which is much more formulaic than the rest of the film. It’s a weak note to end the film on. 

Of course, the problem that Gascon has is that there really isn’t an ending here. Nobody knows what happened to the real Rui Pedro, he was declared dead in 2019, but that’s an assumption, and the film never quite finds a way to deal with that beyond just stopping and dedicating itself to him and his family. The ending here ought to be lingering and haunting, instead, it just feels rather hollow. This is a tragic case, and Ana Moreira’s performance impressively articulates the impact of it on Pedro’s mother, but the rest of the film doesn’t land with quite the same impact.

★★★

Shadow screens at the Raindance Film Festival on October 30th at Curzon Hoxton and online on October 31st. Tickets are available here.

24FPS @ LFF: All About My Sisters

Dir: Wang Qiong

Starting in 2015, 22-year-old Wang Qiong picked up her camera and began filming her family, focusing on her younger sister Jin. The story she tells across this nearly three hour canvas is about a family that, with two daughters and despite China’s one child policy desperate for a son, first tried to abort and then gave away Jin to one of her uncles, who raised her as his own. Just over 20 years later, Jin is a young mother herself and has an understandably difficult relationship with her parents (who she calls Auntie and Uncle). Qiong’s camera documents their relationship, as well as digging into a family history of abortion and abandonment.

All About My Sisters is, from the start and frequently throughout, an uncomfortable watch. It begins with Jin asking her sister what the point of telling her story is, but as that story unfolds, whether Jin knows it or not, it becomes clear that the point is not only that it is fascinating a devastatingly emotional from a singular point of view, but that Qiong uses it to unfold a critique of how the one child policy drove many people to act. Perhaps the toughest scene to watch is an interview with Jin and Qiong’s uncle, who was one of the local administrators of the policy, and recalls leaving two babies that he and his wife attempted to abort at 8 months out to die. His regret and remorse are clear, as is the implication that this was a routine part of life at the time, but it remains an horrific moment.

The film hammers home the results of the policy not just in moments like Qiong and her other sister Li’s memory of walking over a bridge to school and seeing the bodies of babies, all female, that had been abandoned to die but in a larger, and still prevalent, preference for male children, both at pregnancy and throughout their lives. What emerges is a picture of a society—or at least a section of society—that views women’s lives as almost purely transactional. There are discussions of how much the groom’s family should pay when Jin gets married, of how much families should gift when a woman gives birth to a male child rather than a female, and more besides. 

Watching Jin’s personal story is no easier. It seems clear that her abandonment has affected her both as a person generally and as a parent specifically (some of the scenes of her scolding her two-year-old son are very difficult to watch). Unsparing as Qiong’s camera is of her sister, it’s also sympathetic. She is consistently the family member noting, especially in a late conversation with their 13-year-old brother Sifan, that the situation isn’t Jin’s fault. Many of the questions she asks their brother seem a bit challenging for someone of his age to process, especially when she asks if he thinks Jin was abandoned so that he could be born; that’s a lot to put on him, but it’s a question that hangs heavy on the film and over that relationship, which despite that seems, for much of the film, the closest Jin has with any of her biological family.

For all the moments that Jin is unsympathetic, the film strives to understand the impact of how she grew up on her. She talks about the time she did spend living with her parents and her sisters as feeling “like I was a cleaner in your home”, and the way she is treated by her parents now seems defined more by financial support (an investment in a shop, which then ties her to them) than by anything emotional. Judgments and words are harsh, though to be fair this is not just towards her, at one point her father tells Sifan “you shouldn’t have been born” after he gets in trouble at school. Again though, everything that Jin’s parents are really invested in about her seems driven by money, little emotion comes through, even on her wedding day. The ending is tinged with both sadness at the fact Jin doesn’t seem to be able to find a way forward with her parents and at least a little hope at where it finds her going, and it would be nice to have an update on how she and her family are doing now.

All of Wang Qiong’s points are worthy and often devastatingly made, but it’s fair to say that all of them are made many, many times over and that by the third hour of the film it’s hard to see that she’s adding much new to the argument she’s making. This is an insightful film, and a promising debut for the young director / producer / cinematographer / editor. Next time, it might benefit her to take on fewer jobs herself, as another voice might have focused the film down a bit more, making its points land all the harder by concentrating them. There is much here that could be tightened, from reducing some of the repetitious nature of the sequences to simply trimming back some incidental shots that don’t add a lot to the narrative or the argument. I can see that there is a point to making this an exhausting watch, but after a while, it does dull the emotional punch. 

★★★

24FPS @ LFF: Martin and the Magical Forest

Dir: Petr Oukropec

10-year-old Martin (Sebastian Pöthe) is a town kid who is packed off to a forest-based summer camp that he’s less than excited to be going to. Uninterested in joining in with the team games, and constantly complaining, he soon alienates most of the other kids. However, the sprites that live in the forest need some of the items he’s brought with him to cast a spell that might save them from a drilling crew looking for minerals. Martin’s price is their help so his team can win the camp’s series of challenges.

I sometimes worry that we’re not doing enough to grow the next generation of cinephiles, raising them on a limited diet when there is a world of kid’s cinema out there, and the LFF’s family strand is always a good way to throw the net a little wider. This Czech film is squarely pitched at an audience of its main character’s age, but it doesn’t talk down to them in terms of the environmental issues, nor by assuming that it needs fart jokes to keep a young crowd engaged. 

The magical world of the forest is something the film highlights from the very start. We see it in the beauty of the setting, but more to the point in the creatures that appear from the very first time Martin steps foot in the forest. Initially the sprites like him about as much as he does them; pine cones throw themselves onto his head and vines trip him up, but we also see that they have a side that can come to people’s aid, flying Martin back to the campsite when he’s tried to leave or helping him win the various challenges.

 

The methods used to realise the creatures are a little tough to discern. There may be animatronics in use because the sprites are very present within the frame and have a slight staccato effect to their movement, but if they are CGI then it is exemplary work. The creatures are expressive and fun to look at, with several developing personalities. One moment, when a stick Martin has been trying to get an arrow back from gets run over and ‘bleeds’ sap is surprisingly affecting as an image, even though we’ve never seen that creature before. It’s an effective way to teach kids a healthy respect for nature, but it’s never cloying or overly preachy.

Most of the kids other than Martin and Foxie (a winning Josefína Krycnerová), a fairy-tale loving 8-year-old who believes in the sprites but has never seen one, aren’t especially well-defined. The adults fall into two categories: the counselors, only one of whom, who measures chemicals in the local water and talks about being ready for a catastrophic event, is particularly notable and the drillers, personified by a couple in their 30s. On the one hand, it’s refreshing that the drillers aren’t simply shown as monsters who can’t wait to destroy the forest (remember Ferngully’s smoke-belching bulldozers), but on the other hand, they don’t otherwise have a great deal of personality.

The stakes and morals are pretty simple, as is the solution of the ending, but Martin and the Magical Forest should be a fun time for its intended audience, and it’s hard to argue with any of what it's trying to teach them about respect for nature and finding common ground with other kids. For adults, there’s some lovely imagery and the chance to watch something a little different from the usual kids movie fare. It’s slight, but a charming and fun time.

★★★

24FPS @ LFF 2021: Inexorable

Dir: Fabrice Du Welz

Adoration, Fabrice Du Welz’ last film, which played at LFF in 2019, was basically Junior Badlands, with two twelve-year-olds on the run from a mental hospital. It’s still only had a digital release in the UK, and remains something of an underseen gem. If that film had a single obvious influence, then Inexorable is much more of a patchwork, drawing plot points and images from a lot of entries in the yuppies in peril subgenre, among others.

Marcel (Benoît Poelvoorde), his wife Jeanne (Mélanie Doutey), and their young daughter Lucie (Janaina Halloy) have just moved back into the massive estate owned by Jeanne’s family. When a young woman named Gloria (Alba Gaïa Bellugi) brings their daughter’s new dog back after he has run off, and offers to show Lucie how to train him, the family soon offers her a job as a nanny/maid. However, it quickly becomes clear that Gloria is not just a fan of Marcel’s successful novel, Inexorable, but that she may have a fixation on it and him, which begins to manifest in manipulative ways.

Like many of the films it draws on, much of Inexorable unfolds like a home invasion thriller in slow motion. Gloria’s assault on the family is not one of sudden violence, but of nurtured obsession and festering resentment. It’s a mix that Alba Gaïa Bellugi plays effectively. The first moment there is a flicker of a crack in her mask is especially good; it’s a tiny bit of nervousness that passes across her face when she’s asked about a bit of her background, visible enough for it to register for us, but fleeting enough that we buy Marcel and Jeanne failing to recognise it. The performance, driven by the necessity of the screenplay, gets broader throughout, but Bellugi comes up to meet the tone rather than overplaying.

Poelvoorde, Doutey and Halloy are all good too, and a believably imperfect family unit. Poelvoorde’s blocked author (an early drone shot has shades of The Shining as it tracks the car on the way to the dusty stately home they are moving into) is obviously at first intrigued by and perhaps too easy-going with the attractive young woman who is now in his home, but from his lies to cover an indiscretion to his hiding of parts of his life, it becomes clear that he’s largely driven by self-preservation. Doutey has perhaps the least rounded character here, too often she’s written a little overly spiky, and early on there’s a naïveté in the way she takes Gloria in (and especially her reaction to Gloria’s first real manipulation) that never seems especially credible from the rest of her performance, but these too are largely script issues.

Du Welz doesn’t just wear his influences out in the open, from Chabrol to Barbet Schroder and from Hitchcock to (if I didn’t misread a certain point) Park Chan-wook, he displays them proudly. Sometimes, as in a stylish shot of Marcel throwing Gloria out of his (stationary) car, one side bathed in blood-red light, the other in vivid blue, in what one could take for a fleeting giallo homage, it works in his favour. When his plot points bear if not direct then certainly considerable comparison to the likes of La Ceremonie and the criminally underrated The Page Turner, those influences hang heavy on the film. That said, Du Welz and the cast successfully draw out the tension. The single location where the bulk of the film takes place may be expansive, but the lighting and the blocking, particularly as Gloria begins to draw Marcel in, help to shrink that space and eventually make the dynamic between the three adult characters fairly claustrophobic.

Inexorable isn’t a bad film. The issue is more that it’s never as good as the sum of its influences promises. The performances are capable, it’s got some thrills and some tension, but you’ll always know where it's going, and you’ll know because you’ve seen its moves done better before. An engaging homage, then, but not one that can sit alongside the best of its predecessors.

★★★

2021 Catch Up: Mortal Kombat and Wrong Turn

Mortal Kombat [2021]

Dir: Simon McQuoid

When I was a kid, there was a series of TV adverts for a wood varnish called Ronseal. They were very simple, saying that the product “Does what it says on the tin”. Mortal Kombat is cinematic Ronseal. I don’t mean that as a bad thing.

The last Mortal Kombat game I played was probably the third; the series’ last 16 Bit venture, and I saw Paul WS Anderson’s 1995 film once, and have never felt the need to revisit it, so I am not at all versed in the lore, but the story here is perfectly accessible to newcomers. MMA fighter Cole Young (Lewis Tan) is at the tail end of his career, but after a fight he’s told by Jax (Mehcad Brooks) that  his dragon shaped birthmark means he has been chosen as one of the champions of Earth for the upcoming Mortal Kombat championship. However, Shang Tsung (Chin Han) has dispatched his fighters—including Sub Zero (Joe Taslim)—to kill as many of Earth’s champions as possible, to win the tournament before it can start.

It is an odd choice, with a game as packed with characters to choose from as this one (the latest edition has 32, discounting some characters from other franchises) to create an entirely new character to act as the audience surrogate. That said, Lewis Tan, like the rest of the actors here, does what he can with fairly basic material. Where character should be, Cole has a wife and daughter (Laura Brent and Matilda Kimber) to protect. This does provide a link to Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada), whose family Sub Zero murders in the prologue, but there’s not much more there than a couple of walking plot devices. The rest of the writing is largely functional, though Kano’s constant f bomb heavy quips, and casual misogyny towards Sonya (Jessica McNamee) get to be wearing pretty quickly. That said, this is Mortal Kombat. I suspect there is a deeper and richer backstory that fans might want to see, but as a casual viewer, I’m not really looking for great emotional depth here… I just want to see some good, bloody, fights.

On an action level, Mortal Kombat delivers. The fight the fans want to see is between Sub Zero and Scorpion, and we get one of those at either end of the film. Joe Taslim, though almost always masked, makes for a pretty menacing villain—it helps that the costume design is more intricate and less primary coloured than in the previous films—and his throwdowns with Sanada are fast, furious, and brutal. There is a little overcutting but the sequences aren’t just a blur of fists and feet. Director Simon McQuoid pulls back fairly frequently to allow us to see sequences of martial arts and emphasises the right moments, particularly the solidly impressive effects used to realise Sub Zero’s powers (a dagger frozen out of his opponent’s blood is the film’s single coolest image)  If anything, the film has bigger editing problems in its dramatic scenes, which indicate large chunks having been cut out, than during its fights. Each fighter has their own style, with Ludi Lin and Max Huang as Liu Kang and Kung Lao much more graceful than the pure brute force of Kano (Josh Lawson) and Jax. Sonya Blade is a little underused, and it’s strange to have her not be one of the chosen fighters in the beginning. The subplot of the fighters having to discover their special abilities isn’t a bad idea, but it’s underexplored and few of those abilities have any connection to even the loose sense we have of who they are. On the other hand, the effects do generally look cool, and they aren’t overused to the point that they become what the fights revolve around.

Mortal Kombat is no masterpiece; the action has its moments, but it doesn’t get close to some of the best work being done in the genre right now, whether that’s the John Wick’s of the world, the films Taslim was making back in Indonesia or even some of Scott Adkins’ DTV work and the threadbare story and characters don’t give us a lot to invest in. What it is, though, is fun. It ticks the boxes it needs to tick, it’s solidly entertaining and at 109 minutes including credits it doesn’t outstay its welcome. In this case, I’m perfectly happy with a bit of Ronseal filmmaking.

★★★

Wrong Turn [2021] 

Dir: Mike P. Nelson

There is an inherent challenge with remakes. Stick closely to the original film and that’s all people will see and comment on; either it’s too close and you might as well not have bothered, or every little change will be nitpicked and compared to the previous film. On the other hand, if you depart wildly from what has gone before then all you’re perceived to be doing is cashing in on a title, without delivering on the promises inherent in it. Wrong Turn, whatever its other qualities, does genuinely do its best to square this vicious little circle.

It no doubt helps that I have no investment in Wrong Turn. I saw the 2003 film when it came out on DVD and, while I liked it well enough, probably haven’t watched it more than once more in the following 16 plus years. I’ve also never seen any of the sequels, so I can’t claim any affection for it as a franchise. That said, the first 40 minutes or so of this version (written by original screenwriter Alan McElroy) feel pretty familiar. A group of six friends (on a hiking trip this time, rather than being waylaid by a car accident) find themselves lost in the Virginia woods and having to survive when they are threatened by a family of sorts living in the forest. The details have changed somewhat—particularly with the addition of a framing story about Scott (Matthew Modine), the father of our lead, Jen (Charlotte Vega), looking for his daughter six weeks after she has dropped off the map—but the basic shape of the film is similar enough that it makes some sense as a remake. The second hour, however, is very different and seems to have divided fans of the original film.  

In its second half the film takes a sharp diversion from the backwoods slasher it’s been hinting it would be, turning more to folk and survival horror, though with a generous helping of gore. Bill Sage plays a patriarch who still leads a family of sorts that one could call inbred, but both the society and the individuals within it are very different from those in the original. I can see how this bait and switch could be seen as a negative for fans of the franchise, but credit to McElroy and director Mike P. Nelson for trying something very different from the original, if not so much in its own right.

The character writing isn’t the strong suit here. Bill Sage’s performance; more restrained than you might expect, and more effective for it, is the standout. He also gets the best material McElroy has to offer. Jen is a fairly bland lead/final girl, there’s a potentially interesting turn involving her boyfriend Darius (Adain Bradley), but it happens out of the blue, with some development this element might have been much more effective. The friend group is filled out with the asshole (Dylan McTee as Adam), the brain (Emma Dumont as Milla) and a gay couple (Vardaan Arora and Adrian Favela as Gary and Luis). These performances, and Matthew Modine’s, are fine and a more diverse cast where that diversity is treated largely as a given rather than a plot point is welcome, but that’s not to say that any of the characters has much of a personality. Like the small plot turn with Darius, Jen’s switch to badass for the film’s final act isn’t very well developed, and there’s no reason that two or three minutes couldn’t be spent to build up her sudden Lara Croft level prowess with a bow and arrow.

Behind the camera, Mike P Nelson delivers what's needed. An early sequence with a tree trunk rolling down a hill is well-executed, and the violence is made to feel brutal without always dwelling on detail that might betray what was likely not the biggest of budgets. The aftermath, however, particularly a couple of wince-inducing caved-in heads, is appropriately nasty. Like the screenplay, the direction doesn’t do anything wildly original, but it at least subverts a few expectations an audience might have of this film, and supplies the ingredients demanded of it in a way that is somewhat filling, if not especially nutritious.

Overall, Wrong Turn 2021 is probably the beneficiary of my floor level expectations. It’s at least trying to do something new; sure, it’s just remixing a bunch of elements we’ve seen before, but it has chosen elements we wouldn’t expect from this series. In a lot of ways, it does exactly what it sets out to do; injecting new impetus into a franchise by bringing some different ideas and elements to it. With deeper characterisation and a bit more motivation for the way certain things proceed I might have gone for a higher grade, but this is a perfectly entertaining way for a horror fan to pass some time, no more, but certainly no less.

★★★

24FPS @ BFI Flare 2021: Boy Meets Boy

Dir: Daniel Sanchez Lopez

On Harry’s (Matthew James Morrison) last day in Berlin, he meets Johannes (Alexis Koutsoulis) and they end up spending the day together, walking around the city, talking and connecting.

There are many great brief encounter movies—the Before series, Weekend, Brief Encounter itself—and Boy Meets Boy isn’t afraid of wearing the influence of all of them on its sleeve, but it cleaves closest to Before Sunrise and Sunset. There is a real sense of time being limited, and we know that at a certain point Harry has to move on, physically at least, to go home on an evening flight. As with those films, the time Harry and Johannes have together is largely filled with moments that might otherwise be mundane, but become meaningful both because of who they are with and the truncated timeline.

The most important thing with a film like this is to find two actors who have chemistry. From the first moment we see them together, dancing in a club and making out soon after, that’s not a problem, but it also carries over into the conversational scenes. There is an ease between Morrison and Koutsoulis that gives the film a loose, relaxed, flow. This certainly helps the chemistry in the sex scene (another where director Daniel Sanchez Lopez makes his influences, in this case Don’t Look Now and Out of Sight, obvious), but it’s felt just as much in the long series of conversations as the two wander around Berlin. The two talk about general life stuff, but things are most interesting when they get a bit deeper, where in a lighthearted way (Johannes’ assertion that “Everyone’s a cheese”) or in deeper conversations about sex and relationships, and what each is really looking for.

It’s easy to be swept along with this film, almost as if you’re tagging along with Harry and Johannes, the issue with it as a brief encounter film is that the stakes never feel especially high. For all the chemistry, the film seems to acknowledge immediately, and never change its mind about, what this is. The sense of longing that we are primed to feel both from the characters and in ourselves for them to be together, or the sadness that they can’t be, just never comes through. In some ways, perhaps this is more of an honest approach to the Tinder/Grindr age of relationships, but as drama it ends up feeling a little flat and meaning that, for all its fun and promising qualities, Boy Meets Boy doesn’t linger that long in the memory.

★★★

24FPS@LFF2020: Nomadland

Dir: Chloé Zhao

Having made her name with two films with entirely non-professional casts, and next heading over to Marvel for The Eternals, writer-director Chloé Zhao doesn't depart much from the loose narrative and semi-documentary style of her earlier films for her first piece with well-known actors (Frances McDormand and David Strathairn) in the leads.

Fern (McDormand) is in her early 60s and recently widowed. The town where she and her husband lived and worked for years has essentially dropped off the map, killed when its largest employer - a quarry - closed. Now Fern lives in her van, moving from place to place and temp job to temp job, running across people living much the same nomadic life as she goes.

Much of Nomadland is positively funereal, in mourning for an America dying thanks to end-stage capitalism and showing the exploitative grind of the march from one unstable job to the next, just to earn enough to meet basic needs (and sometimes not even that). Odd, then, that it should begin with a largely uncritical sequence of Fern working at an Amazon warehouse, praising the wages in the dialogue and not even hinting at the hideous working practices that have been credibly reported on. Other jobs are shown as the hard graft they are. The one Zhao gets the most out of visually is when Fern is helping pick beets. We see the machines churning, the physical labour, Fern dwarfed by a huge pile of the vegetables and her showering off a layer of dirt afterwards. It probably the most effective passage of the film in depicting the way industry churns through these workers, but it's also a point that has already been made more than a few times before this point. Sometimes, work is leavened by the company of Fern's fellow travelers, notably Dave (Strathairn). In another movie, he might be a love interest, but here the lines are clear, Fern hasn't taken off her wedding ring and isn't looking for anyone to take the place of her husband. 

The selection of non-professional actors playing the other denizens of the road, some rotating in and out as Fern re-encounters them, others appearing just for their one moment, are easily the most interesting aspect of Nomadland. While it has to be stressed that Frances McDormand is fantastic as Fern, giving a naturalistic performance that is totally unselfconscious, it can't be denied that when she's placed next to the obviously real stories and experiences of the non-actors in the cast (for instance, one heartbreakingly relating how he's managed to get up each day for the five years following his son's suicide) it's obvious that what McDormand is doing is acting. She's impeccable, but she simply can't fake (nor, likely, could anyone) the lived-in reality of what comes from her co-stars. This is most prevalent as an issue in the sequence that finds Fern rolling up at Dave's family's house for Thanksgiving. It's a rare moment in the film that feels plot-driven and where the dialogue seems more out of a conventional movie. It's not a bad sequence, and it's notable that Fern seems as uncomfortable in it as it feels in the film, but it still sticks out like a sore thumb.

If nothing else (and it's plenty else) Nomadland is beautiful. Cinematographer Joshua James Richards, who also photographed Zhao's first two films, makes the landscape one of the film's most compelling characters. His images capture the desperate cold of the winter months when we first find Fern sleeping in her van, the almost alien landscape of the desert where Fern wanders off rather than stay for the tour Dave is giving and the lonely, frozen in time, interiors of the abandoned town of Empire, among others, with an eye that not only creates gorgeous images but asks us to think about how Fern and others are situated in them.

I wonder whether Zhao's film would be more effective and more affecting if it were pure documentary. The moments that tug hardest and most organically at the heartstrings are often silent images and montages that communicate the film's message about these people either as cogs in the workflow machine or as outliers who have chosen to step away from it. The point is well taken, but it's also made early and not really elaborated on thereafter. The rest of the great moments are those completely real and unguarded conversations that come straight out of real life, and while there's nothing especially wrong with Fern's story within the film, I'm not sure it adds much to the effectiveness of either of those great things.

★★★

24FPS @ LFF 2020: Herself

Dir: Phyllida Lloyd 

I’d argue that you’d be hard pushed to find a more unlikely subject for a crowd-pleaser than Margaret Thatcher, but since Phyllida Lloyd apparently pulled that trick off with her last film, The Iron Lady, why not one with this subject matter? 

Herself centers on Sandra (the film’s co-writer Clare Dunne) who, in her 30s, finds herself with two young daughters (Molly McCann and Ruby Rose O’Hara), living in a hotel, having left her abusive partner Gary (Ian Lloyd Anderson). Seeking a more permanent fix, she decides that she wants to build a home, getting the space and a loan of the money from one of her employers, Peggy (Harriet Walter). 

For much of its running time, Herself is exactly the film you’d expect it to be given its director’s pedigree (she also directed the first of the Mamma Mia films). Given the storyline it is surprisingly breezy, never quite glossing over the challenges in Sandra’s life, but also generally making sure that easy fixes fall into place as the plot demands. For instance when the council, despite Sandra’s suggestion that they would profit from helping her build the house, won’t even discuss it, an offer of land and a £35,000 loan over “however long we decide” comes within five minutes and two scenes. 

What Dunne and Malcolm Campbell’s screenplay does capture in its lighter than expected tone is Sandra’s effort to always keep a bright outlook for her girls. We’re not seeing the action through their perspective, but wherever they are on screen the characters around them and the film itself seem to make an effort to make the world seem friendlier than Sandra knows it can be. 

As an actor as well as a writer, Clare Dunne impresses, so much so that she makes some of Lloyd’s directorial choices feel clunky. Over and over, when Sandra has a moment of reflection about Gary, Lloyd will cut to a bit of the awful abusive scene we see in the film’s first few minutes. We simply don’t need these cuts, we know exactly where Sandra’s mind is because the story is all there, written all over Sandra’s face. Outside these moments, Dunne gives Sandra a very real and warm relationship with her kids and is convincing as she is both wary of and aware that she might still be somewhat sucked in by Gray, if she were to allow herself to be. 

The acting is good all round, with Harriet Walter increasingly feisty as Peggy and Molly McCann and Ruby Rose O’Hara giving very natural performances as Sandra’s daughters. Compared to these key roles, Gary is rather underwritten, but Ian Lloyd Anderson does what he can with a fairly transparent role. 

As Sandra draws a ragtag band of largely volunteer builders together, things progress more or less as you’d expect. Badly chosen music soundtracks building montages and a couple of accidents, arguments, and one more dramatic, but no less predictable, turn of events raise their heads. It’s all well played and the tone is well-balanced between drama and lighter moments, but I found it all just washing over me. The film’s last ten minutes or so change that, delivering an emotional gut-punch I didn’t expect and finding a final scene that is not only moving but manages to wrap the film’s themes and its message up in a bow without seeming trite or treacly. 

Herself isn’t perfect, but it suggests a successful future for Clare Dunne as both an actor and a writer and it will probably be one of the year’s less likely crowd-pleasers. 

★★★

24FPS @ Glasgow Film Festival 2020: Blood Machines and Spookies

Blood Machines

Dir: Seth Ickerman

Synthwave hasn’t found a mainstream moment since the Drive soundtrack, but it has carved out quite a niche as an underground scene. Soaked in the influence of the 80s, and particularly of John Carpenter both as a musician and as a filmmaker. The music readily conjures sci-fi imagery even on a first listen and Carpenter Brut and their regular directorial collaborator Seth Ickerman trade heavily on all of those influences in this 50 minute hybrid of mid-length film and music video, which trades on the same imagery they have been employing in their previous videos.

The story, such as it is, finds two men (Anders Heinrichsen and Christian Erickson) in charge of a spaceship, they have just shot down an enemy ship and taken an enemy soldier (Elisa Laskowski) prisoner. Unbeknownst to them, the ship was alive. The ship’s essence becomes a beautiful woman and a galactic chase ensues.

The dialogue isn’t great and the acting (all in English) is a bit ropey, but Ickerman’s imagery - if overly heavy on gratuitous nudity - is striking, folding Carpenter Brut’s recurring motifs in fairly naturally and employing some excellent CGI for what can’t have been a large budget. Ultimately though, the score is the star. If you like synthwave and in particular Carpenter Brut’s brand of the genre, this will work for you, though you do have to wait a little longer than is ideal for the first time the music kicks into high gear.

At 50 minutes, this is overextended, and it’s hard not to wish the writing and acting had been more of a focus, because there’s the kernel of a decent short film here, even apart from the score. As an extended music video though, there’s plenty for fans to enjoy both visually and aurally. The third star below is strictly for those fans.

★★★

Spookies

Dir: Eugenie Joseph, Thomas Doran, Brendan Faulkner

There are auteurs in the horror and exploitation genres, but you do have to remember that the exploitation part of that equation sometimes applies off screen as much as it does on, and bottom line often takes precedence over a director’s vision. Spookies is definitely one of those cases. It began life as Twisted Souls, about a group of teenagers (played by unknowns, but for Charlotte Alexandra—here Charlotte Seeley—known to arthouse fans for Walerian Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales and Catherine Breillat’s controversial debut, A Real Young Girl) who are trapped in a house by a Warlock who wants to use them to raise his bride from the dead. Bolted on to this were new scenes with an entirely different cast and extra creature effects.

Spookies entirely bears out its messy origins. It’s hard to imagine that Twisted Souls would have been any good in itself. What remains of co directors Brendan Faulkner and Thomas Doran’s work is basically a boring version of the original Evil Dead. Their characters establish little presence, indeed they’re barely even stereotypes, and the acting is middling at best. The story doesn’t hang together in these sections, particularly frustrating is the fact that, for me at least, it never became clear why these kids needed to become victims in order for the Warlock to get his wife back (she’s walking around long before the bulk of the deaths occur). In story and character terms, the extra scenes directed by Eugenie Joseph add little besides running time, always feeling untethered from the rest of the film and making the storytelling even more confusing.

What Spookies does have going for it, in both of its constituent parts, is some enjoyable practical creature effects. Effects team members like Gabe Bartalos and John Dods went on to more notable work, Bartalos recently branching out as a director. The work here displays budgetary limitations, but the design is always excellent, even when it’s clear that articulation was limited (see the Grim Reaper puppet and the spider monster, among others). The effects can’t paper over all the cracks in the film, but they do make it lively enough to be fun if you’ve got a soft spot for slightly ropey 80s horror.

Spookies is what it is: a movie that appears to have been held together with sticky tape and good will. There’s a sense that the cast are having fun and the effects crew in particular are trying hard, the film doesn’t add up to very much, but at 85 minutes it’s worth catching just for the kind of practical effects we seldom see these days.

★★½

24FPs @ LFF 2019: Lunana, A Yak In The Classroom / Babyteeth

Lunana - A Yak in the Classroom

Dir: Pawo Choying Dorji

Sometimes, all it takes for a film to feel a little different is a change of context. There are more than a few movies about teachers in an unfamiliar environment, from comedic takes like Kindergarten Cop to more dramatic pieces like Dangerous Minds. In most of them, the teacher will find their class or environment something they don’t initially warm to, but eventually will be turned around, learning something about themselves. Lunana, a Yak in the Classroom doesn’t do these broad strokes any differently, but the setting and cultural specificity of it make it feel a bit different.

Ugyen Dorji (Sherab Dorji) is in his last of five years of service as a teacher, following his training, and he’s fallen out of love with it. He’s lazy, marking time before he can leave Bhutan for Australia. Ugyen’s boss, sick of his attitude, dispatches him to Lunana and the most remote school in the world, eight days hike across the Himalayas from the nearest town. When he arrives, Ugyen immediately wants to leave, but the villagers and the kids he’s teaching win him round.

There isn’t much unexpected here. Ugyen is slowly inspired by the kids, notably adorable class captain Pem Zam (all the kids use their own names) and sets about doing up the school, for instance having the villagers helping him mix charcoal paint to make a blackboard. A city resident and a modern person, he also has his head turned by traditional culture, notably the songs sung by yak herder Saldon (Kelden Lhamo Gurung). This is where the film marks itself out from the many others like it. Music is a major throughline, Ugyen wants to be a singer when he gets to Australia, and we see him spending much of his time trying to learn a traditional song he hears Saldon singing. The music is soothing, and unlike much we regularly her in the UK.

As well as a beautiful soundtrack, the film makes use of its stunning location to mark itself out. Shot on solar powered cameras 5000 metres up in the Himalayas, Lunana looks like few other films, taking place among the clouds not because it is set in some fantastical realm, but simply because that is where its characters live. The vistas are unbelievable and almost worth the price of admission on their own.

While it never goes anywhere unexpected, Lunana is executed with great charm. The dynamic between Ugyen, the villagers and the kids feels natural and has a warmth that permeates the whole film, in contrast to the mountain weather. This is especially the case in the friendships that develop between Ugyen and his escorts and the potential budding romance between Ugyen and  Saldon.

A sweet natured film about the importance of community and tradition, as well as that of following your calling, whatever that may mean, Lunana is perhaps a bit different to the rest of LFF’s Family programme, in that it doesn’t seem as much aimed at children as suitable for them, just as much as it will be for their parents. It should charm the whole family.

★★★

Babyteeth

Dir: Shannon Murphy

The teen cancer romance has, weirdly, become prevalent enough to be a subgenre all of its own. Generally speaking, I can’t stand them. Most feel like tragedy porn, content to let their characters be defined solely through illness and essentially acting as a big stick, designed to poke you until you cry. The genre’s miserable low is without doubt the vomitously saccharine The Fault in Our Stars. I’m not sure it had a high point until now.

Babyteeth begins with 16 year old Milla (Eliza Scanlen) meeting and falling for Moses (Toby Wallace), he’s older, tattooed, jobless, a small time drug addict and dealer. Milla’s parents, Anna and Henry (Essie Davis and Ben Mendelsohn), understandably, do not approve. It’s only later that we learn that Milla’s cancer has returned. In the throes of first love with Moses, she wants to spend as much time with him as possible, to the point that he ends up living with Milla and her parents as she gets sicker.

There are many things that set Babyteeth apart from the herd of teen cancer movies, most notably the fact that it is not defined by Milla’s illness. This is largely a comedy drama about a dysfunctional family and cancer is only a part of that dysfunction. It’s also only a part of the film. It lurks in the background of the first half, becoming more present over time, much like the progress of the disease. For much of the first hour, writer Rita Kalnejais and director Shannon Murphy push comedy to the fore, with Essie Davis especially priceless as Milla’s anxiety riddled mother, who spends much of her time in a Zoloft induced haze, drugs prescribed by her psychiatrist husband. The scene in which Milla first brings Moses home and there is an excruciatingly awkward family dinner is particularly priceless. What many films about tragic things forget is that, even in the midst of it, not every moment is tragic. By remembering this, the sometimes irreverent humour of Babyteeth conveys more emotional honesty than any of the manipulative set pieces in a more typical teen cancer pic.

Milla’s first romance is obviously unsuitable, but we understand it from all sides, whether it’s Milla's romantic sense of being with the bad boy who’ll annoy her parents or the rather deeper thought that it’s Moses’ fearlessness that first draws her in, perhaps a quality she wants more in herself as her cancer gets worse. Eliza Scanlen is excellent in the part. For a long time we can see her playing Milla as a kid who simply wants to ignore her illness; she hasn’t got any hair, so she’ll wear fun wigs, and she’ll go out and she’ll fall in love with this guy, like a normal kid. We also see and feel the moments that bring that crashing down to Earth, but Scanlen never overplays them. For Moses’ part, there’s a recognition that he too, more experienced if not that much wiser at 23, realises that this crush Milla has on him isn’t entirely healthy, and that he at once has some feeling for her that goes beyond sympathy and yet he’s not immune to exploiting her feelings. Moses, in particular, is a more complex character than we usually see in these films and his shifts in motivation and feeling are given great weight in a deceptively light performance from Toby Wallace.

Initially, Ben Mendelsohn and Essie Davis have broader roles, essentially doing something close to comic relief duty (their first scene, an appointment for sex in Henry’s office, is a good example of this tone), but this recedes as the film goes on and their performances become heartbreaking. Mendelsohn, one of the best actors in movies right now, is especially brilliant when his daughter asks him to smile for a picture; “gimme a second” he says, and the weight of everything in the film is felt in those three words.

Director Shannon Murphy, making her feature debut after several shorts and plenty of TV work, balances the film’s tone beautifully and draws terrific work from her cast, allowing supporting players like Emily Barclay, as Anna and Henry’s heavily pregnant neighbour, to steal a few scenes, but never the focus. I’m not a fan, though, of her aggressive chaptering. The many, many title cards add little and sometimes give the film a bitty feel that undermines an otherwise strong emotional throughline. The nadir of this technique comes when a title card introduces the song a sequence is set to, making that sequence resemble a music video even more, slightly deflating its impact for that.

On the whole though, Babyteeth is a refreshing addition to a genre that has so far given us little to enjoy. The balance of humour and heart is more honest here than in any of its peers, and Eliza Scanlen and Toby Wallace both impress, marking themselves out as names to watch for the future.

★★★★

24FPS @ LFF 2019: Saint Maud

Dir: Rose Glass

Maud (Morfydd Clark) is a recent and zealous convert to Christianity. As a private nurse to Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), who is dying of cancer. Maud does her job trying to look after her patient’s ailing body, but also concerns herself with Amanda’s soul, but her devotion to her religion becomes more extreme and more disturbing with time.

Ever since I was able to really consider the various claims, I’ve found religion less than credible, but I remain fascinated by it and by films about it. The roots of belief, how people engage with it, how it can change them, the actions it can drive people to - for good or ill - are all intriguing and much-explored subjects in cinema. 

We never get to see where Rose’s faith begins, but we meet her as a relatively new convert, which goes some way to explaining how devout she is, seemingly having thrown herself fully into this new faith. Rose Glass seems to set up Maud’s faith as a defence mechanism; a way of her feeling that, in a world where she seems to have few other engagements, she can feel someone always has her back. This is particularly underlined by Maud’s prayers, which are conversational more than they are devotional, and seem to speak of a desperate need for meaning and connection.

This need to make connections, if not for herself then for God, is further underlined in Maud’s relationship with Amanda. She only mentions her religion after Amanda comments on her crucifix necklace, but thereafter is trying, gently but firmly, to win her soul. Boundaries begin to be crossed though, and we see a moralistic side to Maud’s Christianity in her conversation with Carol (Lily Frazer), an escort Amanda hires on a regular basis. 

None of these are bad ideas, but they are all very familiar. The drawing of an increasingly bold connecting line between devout religion and mental illness is a crutch that many films have relied on in the past, as are the handful of moments that equate religious and sexual ecstasy. While Maud is more sympathetically and fully presented than many of those characters, these are still old devices and Rose Glass’ screenplay fails to reinvent them, particularly in the film’s second half. The film’s imagery is impressively mounted, but it’s also rather predictable. Again, this is something especially felt in the film’s back half, as it moves away from the two hander about Maud slowly trying to live up to Amanda’s inscription in a book of William Blake’s paintings she gives her nurse as a gift, calling her her “saviour”. 

The second half trades in more extreme imagery as it depicts the difference between Maud’s image of herself and the world and the reality around her and in almost every instance we can predict what we’re going to see long before Glass shows it to us. This makes the last forty minutes or so much less intriguing than you’d hope. The commentary on religion is obvious and done to death and the progress of the story is a trudge towards a heavily signposted ending. Sometimes, knowing where a film is leading can give it a doomy feel of inevitability (even predestination, given the themes here), but that never clicked for me here, perhaps because the film doesn’t use that ending to say anything it hasn’t been shouting for an hour already.

The one thing that unambiguously works about Saint Maud is the acting. Jennifer Ehle is excellent as a woman constrained before her time by terminal illness, but still as vivacious as ever, bursting with the desire to eke whatever enjoyment she can out of her final weeks and months. As is so often the case in her work, Ehle is a bit underused, but again she makes an impression bigger than her role, which is helpful in keeping Amanda present in our minds in the second half of the film. There are also effective performances by Lily Frazer as Carol and Lily Knight as Joy, who knows Maud from a previous job and seemingly as a very different woman.

The film, though, belongs to Morfydd Clark, whose exceptional performance as Maud lifts the entire enterprise. While the machinations of the character and the story are fairly rote, Clark invests them with such detail and truth that not only can we not help but empathise with Maud, she becomes more interesting as a character because we invest and believe in her psychology thanks to Clark’s work. Along with Glass, she evokes an emptiness that allows us to understand why Maud turned to this extreme piety. There are some extreme moments in her performance; the contorted face and body of the moments that her religious experience seems to turn at first sexual, then for a split second painful or disturbing, but it’s the quieter moments that resonate. This is the aspect of the second half that does work, her silence when Joy turns up at her flat, her serenity in the film’s final scene. It’s great and complex work, it added a star to my grade by itself and serves notice that Clark is a real talent to watch.

I wish Saint Maud were better. The acting deserves a screenplay that does some more inventive things and digs deeper into its themes. Rose Glass serves up some memorable images and conjures a weirdly non-specific but still palpable sense of place, making me wonder what she might do in the future with someone else’s writing. On the whole though, this has to go down as something of a disappointment; a film that can’t as a whole match its best elements.

★★★

24FPS @ LFF 2019: Selected Shorts

It’s a shame we don’t see more short films in general release, but at LFF the various shorts programmes are often a good way to spot new talent both in front of and behind the camera. Here are some appropriately brief thoughts on some shorts I’ve seen recently. These films were viewed on the online press library.

Be Still My Beating Heart

Jericho (Sarah Andrews, Aaron Hopwood), screening in the Family shorts programme on October 5th, is one of the briefest shorts in the festival. Though barely 90 seconds long, it’s still an impressive piece of work. Fluent and high quality CG animation tells the story of a lonely robot trying to build himself a friend. It’s gently funny and rather touching. I do wish it were longer though, as there is potential to mine some more humour out of the situation. Sweet then, but perhaps too limited by its running time. 

★★★

Be Still My Beating Heart (Ruth Paxton) screens in the Cult shorts programme on October 6th and 8th (both sold out). This story of a medical examiner looking after her younger sister who has an unspecified illness benefits greatly from having the always excellent Maxine Peake in the leading role. Peake and Elysia Welch bring dimension to a sisterly relationship that feels sour on both sides, even if it’s loving deep down. Director Ruth Paxton’s imagery veers between the mundane and the primal, and points to interesting things for her future. Unfortunately, the film ends up as less than the sum of its parts. The various ideas don’t knit together in the 25 minute running time and this ends up feeling less like a trailer for a future feature film version of itself (a common issue with shorts) than an impressive showreel for its director. 

★★½

Let's Roll

The Lamb (Nina Volic) screens in the Dare shorts programme on October 10th and 12th. Most boys, when they’re around 12 or 13, start wanting to impress the girls around them. That’s where The Lamb begins, with a boy meeting two girls from his class to show them something. In an incredibly dark turn, ‘something’ turns out to be a black man, tied up and gagged, on his sofa. The way the kids interact with the man is initially not violent, but the immediate and casual dehumanization of this ‘other’ is horrifying, as they treat him as a prop, posing for selfies with him in the background. A deeply disturbing, if extreme, look at how social media has made some of us treat the world as a background image to our lives, The Lamb promises great things from Nina Volic. 

★★★★

Let’s Roll (Chris Thomas) screens in the Thrill shorts programme  on October 5th and 10th. A surprisingly gentle film for its strand, Let’s Roll is a coming of age film set around the Cooper’s Hill cheese roll. Antonia’s brother was a champion, but now he’s away in the Army and her mother is against Toni taking his place. The progression of the film is fairly familiar, as Toni has a friend (who may be nursing a crush) help her train for the cheese roll in secret. The best thing about the film is how much it packs in to 23 minutes, writer Allan Macleod puts a lot of depth into the background in Toni’s relationship with her Mum, both of their implied concern about their brother and son and Toni’s troubled reaction to this stress (we first meet her running from a shop after stealing a magazine). This is also very well played by Amy Bowden as Toni and Zara Ramm as her Mum. There is a lot to build on for a feature version, which I’d happily watch, but the short feels complete in its own right. The only disappointment is the last sequence, which is too obviously documentary footage that Bowden doesn't appear to be in. 

★★★★

24FPS @ LFF 2019. Day 5

Deerskin

Dir: Quentin Dupieux

It has been a while since the UK has heard from Quentin Dupieux, the musician turned determinedly weird horror filmmaker who debuted with Rubber, a film about a killer tyre. This is far from his first film since, but it’s the first to make an international splash for a while.

Deerskin sees Jean Dujardin (still best known to international audiences for The Artist) as Georges, who appears to have left everything behind to buy a 100% deerskin jacket. Soon, he hears the jacket tell him it should be the only jacket in the world. One night he tells Denise, a barmaid (Adele Haenel, also at LFF in Portrait of a Lady on Fire), that he’s a filmmaker and she responds that she, in her spare time, is an editor. Together they begin making a film. You know, that old story. 

Deerskin couldn’t be accused of being a deep film. Dupieux largely deals in strangeness for its own sake. If there’s any larger point that he’s making then it’s probably in the fact that Denise finds such interest and potential in Georges’ poorly framed and self-obsessed (or jacket obsessed) footage; perhaps a sideswipe at fans and critics who’ll reach for meaning in anything. Which likely means that, at this point, the joke is very much on me.

The film works because, from both behind and in front of the camera, everyone plays it straight, which has the effect of accentuating the absurdity and making it funnier. This is true from one of the very first images, which finds Georges trying to flush his suit jacket down a service station toilet, right through to the final scene. Dupieux doesn’t do anything flashy with the direction, again trying to ground his silliness in something that, if it doesn’t feel entirely like the real world, we can accept on its own terms. The visuals can feel a little flat—deadpan, perhaps—but this may also be something of a reflection of Georges’ own unpracticed filmmaking (and again, the joke’s on me).  

Jean Dujardin is brilliantly matter of fact as Georges. As he slips further from reality he creates a voice for the jacket. At some points Dupieux lets us see Georges speaking for it, but increasingly as the film goes on he allows us to see how tenuous Georges’ grip on what’s real has become by framing his face out when ‘the jacket’ is speaking. To talk about exactly how things go down would be a shame, as it would spoil some of the film’s funniest sequences, but suffice to say that Deerskin develops increasing shades of American Psycho, including its main character’s obsession with how he looks to the outside world) as it goes on. Adele Haenel’s role might look thankless at first glance; a facilitator more than a character. That may have been true at script level, but Haenel is a huge talent. She has what seems like a simple gift, but one which is incredibly rare; the ability to always seem real on screen. In this way, she provides the film a grounding influence of sorts, but the character is also credibly sucked into Georges’ world, culminating in a brilliant final image. I would absolutely watch a film that picked up from that moment.

Deerskin is, ultimately, a bit inconsequential. It is huge fun in the moment, but I’m not sure that much besides that will linger. However, that’s more than many films ever achieve and for 77 minutes it is highly entertaining and engagingly weird company. 

★★★½

Rialto

Dir: Peter Mackie Burns

With his 2017 debut, Daphne, Peter Mackie Burns established himself as a British director to watch. Powered by a searingly honest performance from Emily Beecham, that was an engaging drama that felt honest about the experience of being thirtysomething and single in London. Mackie Burns’ follow up in some way stakes out similar territory, focusing on one character and their struggles with relationships, sex and identity.

Colm (Tom Vaughn-Lawlor) is middle aged, working a job he doesn’t seem particularly interested in and equally disconnected at home from his wife (Monica Dolan) and their teenage kids. He begins a series of encounter with a much younger man (Tom Glynn-Carney) as his life outside this relationship begins to cave in around him.

What Rialto has in common with Daphne is the centrality and quality of its leading performance. Tom Vaughn-Lawlor’s performance is heartrending to watch, as Colm tries to find a space in which he can be fully himself and deals with the guilt of that not being at home with his wife and children. He is devastating in a couple of scenes in particular; one coming home after a long night getting drunk, only to faced with explaining himself to his wife and, later, finally spitting out his true feelings, directly in the face of his 18-year-old son. A less familiar face, but also very good, Tom Glynn-Carney brings more complexity than you might imagine to what might be a cliche role as a male prostitute. He’s especially humanised in a late scene ar his home, which is a touching contrast to the more menacing way he’s seen early in the film. I just wish I’d found the film around these performances quite as effective.

Written by Mark O’Halloran, the screenplay struggles to shed its stage origins. The dialogue, more so than in Daphne, feels constructed rather than something we’re just hearing the characters say for the first time. Aside from the two leads, the characters are lightly sketched, with Colm’s kids notably underwritten. The images are also a mixed bag. Though Adam Scarth’s (Daphne, Apostasy) cinematography often captures a certain stark beauty (the late scene of Colm walking to the sea late at night) the direction feels a bit flat. The dialogue and performances are the main storytelling engines here. There aren’t many shots that are memorable in and of themselves, and nothing that has stuck with me the way an early shot in Daphne, of Beecham descending an escalator, has. 

On the whole, Rialto is worth seeing for its two central performances, but the film surrounding them never quite lives up to them and this has to, for me, go down as something of a disappointment from Peter Mackie Burns, given the expectations set by his last film.

★★★