horror
Nick Hasted
Time-travel is a trap in debutante Michael Felker’s tender sf two-hander, whose title’s grim irony becomes gradually apparent.There’s golden American promise in the sun and shadow of the diner where Joseph (Adam David Thompson) meets sister Sidney (Riley Dandy, pictured below), cinematographer Carissa Dorson capturing Seventies New Hollywood’s elegiac glow. Joseph has just robbed a bank in the present day, and effects an unlikely getaway through a nearby farmhouse’s previously rumbled time-portal, letting the pair hide in the past till the heat dies down.What seems a sure-fire bolthole in Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
If you like a body-horror movie to retain a semblance of logic in its plot line, then The Substance – grotesque, gory and finally insubstantial – may not be for you.French director Coralie Fargeat’s second feature (her first was Revenge in 2017, a rape-revenge thriller) is a stylised commentary on the female body, Hollywood, sexism and ageism. It’s over-long and repetitive but still packs a gloriously hyper-real punch, shot by Benjamin Kracun, full of vivid colour, wide-angled lenses and movie references such as Carrie, Alien, The Elephant Man, Frankenstein, Barbie, with a Psycho shower-head Read more ...
James Saynor
Sometimes love never dies and the dead never rot. A lot of water has flowed down the River Styx since Tim Burton’s first Beetlejuice film in 1988, but the bones of the original have held up surprisingly well, the madcap morbid spoof outliving many of its peers from the “high concept” era.And this absurdly delayed sequel from Burton shows how well the director’s funny bones still click together, as do those of the actors Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder, back in harness here – their careers, like Burton’s, revivified in recent years after mid-career dips.Lydia Deetz, Ryder’s ghost-addled Read more ...
Justine Elias
Blame the high cost of city housing, or killer smog. What else can explain a bright young couple’s move from 1970s Leeds to Starve Acre, an isolated, near-derelict farm in rural Yorkshire that has to be the spookiest back-to-the-land setting since The Wicker Man.The husband, brainy Richard (Matt Smith), teaches archaeology at a nearby university; the wife, shy, ethereal Juliette (Morfydd Clark, pictured below), manages the farm. Ttheir son, little asthmatic Owen (Arthur Shaw), is just plain weird, claiming that a spirit, "Jack Grey", whistles to him at night. Richard, a man of science, Read more ...
Justine Elias
Strange noises fill the crisp nighttime air in a small Alpine village: Avian shrieks and some wild beast a-rustling in the hedgerows – or are those the screams of a desperate woman?Into the strange, scary, funny world of Cuckoo comes a British-American family that has upped sticks and packed the entire household – dad, stepmom, and little daughter – to rural Bavaria, where the father will be renovating the local spa-resort.Dragged along is the dad’s elder daughter from a previous marriage. That’s Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), a gangly punk rocker, yearning for her California home and her old Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
A group of young people rent a cabin in the woods. A masked killer lingers nearby. Surely you know how the rest unfolds. The slasher and its well-worn tropes have been parodied, satirised and subverted for as long as it has existed. In fact, we seem to prefer watching these deconstructions compared to the actual, pulpy thing. Scream is after all the most successful horror franchise in history. But In a Violent Nature is arguably the most intriguing experiment in the genre so far. Here, the schlocky slasher is told from the perspective of a silent killer named Johnny who stalks a group of Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
Apparently when actress Maika Monroe first saw Nicolas Cage in his full Longlegs get-up, her heart-rate skyrocketed to 170 bpm (her resting heart rate is 76). Or at least so a promotional video tells us. Whether true or not, it’s an example of the savvy marketing campaign, courtesy of distributor NEON, that has drummed up a genuine sense of anticipation for Oz Perkins's latest film. A handful of glowing early reviews and whispers from early screenings confirmed that Longlegs was the summer’s must-see horror film. I can confirm that a movie inspiring such overblown rhetoric does, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The question Korean director Jason Yu is asking in this eerie little spine-tingler (his debut feature) is “how well do you know your partner?” He may also be inquiring whether or not you believe in life after death, while planting nagging seeds of doubt about the competence of the medical profession.A ride both disturbing and sometimes darkly comic, intensified by an edgy and neurotic soundtrack, Sleep has chosen for its claustrophobic battleground the apartment of married couple Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun, from the Oscar-blitzing Parasite, who shockingly killed himself last year) and his wife Soo Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Mia Goth’s mighty Maxine finally makes it to Hollywood in Ti West’s brash conclusion to the trilogy he began with X (2022), which has become a visceral treatise on film’s 20th century allure, and the bloody downside of dreaming to escape.X riffed on Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Eaten Alive (1976) as elderly killers stalk a 1979 Texan barnyard porn shoot, and found a haunting frisson in Mia Goth’s duel portrayal of murderous, ancient Pearl and youthful Maxine. Pearl then recast The Wizard of Oz’s Kansas prologue in a grim 1918 equivalent to Dorothy’s rustic home, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Helpfully, this is a film that reviews itself. Like it says on the posters, “They were making a cursed movie. They were warned not to. They should have listened.”If ever a film was meant not to be, here it is. Apparently it was going to be called The Georgetown Project, and writer-director Joshua John Miller shot the bulk of it in South Carolina in 2019. Then it was shelved, not least because of Covid. It was belatedly resurrected and some extra scenes added, but the botched-together result is dead on arrival.Not the least perplexing thing about it is how Russell Crowe, who was once a copper- Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Benjamin Brewer’s post-apocalyptic, Nic Cage-starring creature feature finds a sombre interest in fatherhood and growing up in screenwriter Michael Nilon’s bleak scenario, after Paul (Cage) gathers up two abandoned babies with black smoke blooming, and a city falling into catastrophe.Fifteen years later, adopted siblings Joseph (It’s lead kid Jaeden Martell) and Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins) live in a farmhouse under Paul’s sternly loving tutelage, foraging by day, and cowering when night brings monsters scratching at their door, much like A Quiet Place or a vampire flick. Arcadian was filmed Read more ...
Harry Thorfinn-George
A number of films in recent years have added a distinctly local flavour to the folk-horror genre. Mark Jenkin was inspired by Cornish superstitions in the ghostly Enys Men and Kate Dolan’s underrated You Are Not My Mother was ripe with Irish pagan practices and folk tales. The Moor, the directorial debut of Yorkshire-native Chris Cronin, continues in this lineage of imagining local folklore through the eyes of genre cinema. Moorland is a distinctly British habitat and has been the swampy canvas we have projected fears onto for millenia. It’s the home of Grendel-like creatures, Read more ...