thrillers
Adam Sweeting
Showing over four consecutive nights, Night Caller is a stripped-down psychological thriller which steadily boils up to a conclusion which is both shocking and tragic.Robert Glenister turns in a meticulously controlled performance as Tony Conroy, a former schoolteacher now scraping a nocturnal living as a cab driver in Liverpool (you’d never guess the show was filmed in Dublin). A haunted and lonely character, broken by his failed marriage, he becomes fixated with the small-hours radio talk show hosted by Lawrence Brightway (Sean Pertwee, pictured below), whose relaxed, sandpapery voice makes Read more ...
Saskia Baron
While Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist doesn’t cast a spell as strongly as his Oscar-winning hit Drive My Car, it is a thought-provoking film well worth seeing for anyone with an interest in ecology or a penchant for subtle thrillers. Hitoshi Omika plays Tamuki, a widowed dad who spends his days looking after his young daughter and doing odd jobs in Mizubiki, a village high in the mountains but only a few hours away from Tokyo. Its rural isolation – deer wander in the woods nearby, drinking water comes from a well – means that life is pretty simple for the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This is a Nineties psycho thriller in Mad Men clothes, undermining its Sixties suburban gloss and Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain’s desperate housewives with genre clichés, yet sustained by the courage of debuting director Benoît Delhomme’s un-Hollywood conviction.Alice (Chastain) and Céline (Hathaway) are friends and neighbours, bonding over their eight-year-old sons Theo (Eamon Patrick O’Connell, pictured bottom with Hathaway) and Max (Baylen D. Bielitz). They team up, too, over Alice’s desire to return to work in journalism, inevitably dismissed by respective husbands Simon (Anders Read more ...
Mert Dilek
Stranger Things has shown us over four seasons that the alternate dimension known as the Upside Down can be the seat of many things: terror, mystery, camaraderie, compassion. As it turns out, it can spawn great theatre, too, for Stephen Daldry’s much-anticipated stage production of the prequel to the Netflix mega-hit has finally summoned its demonic energy to take the West End by storm.In this intensely cinematic and technically stunning show, a spirited ensemble breathes ambitious life into a villain origin story that feels at once epic and intimate – and with no shortage of wow factors. Read more ...
James Saynor
“Everything is legal if you have the money,” states the world-weary protagonist of this new film by the Mexican-American director Amat Escalante. And in the wilds of central Mexico, where the movie is set, the comment is unlikely to be questioned. Lost in the Night features characters lost at pretty much any time of the day in a slick, grim, ramifying desert mystery that never quite hits the escape velocity of thriller. At the start, the mother of young labourer Emiliano (Juan Daniel García Treviño) is disappeared by the cops for campaigning against a local mine, and the main Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Isabelle Huppert is French cinema’s icon of icy transgression, from Bertrand Blier’s outrageous Les Valseuses (1974) to Paul Verhhoeven’s Elle (2017), in which her character Michéle denies rape’s trauma, instead seeking out her rapist for sadomasochistic sex and mind-games. Huppert was Oscar-nominated for the latter, though she was ultimately too much for Hollywood.Union representative Maureen Kearney, Huppert’s real-life role in her latest film, Jean-Paul Salomé’s La Syndicaliste, was sexually assaulted, scarred and tied up in her home shortly before whistleblowing about secret French Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The Russo brothers, makers of Amazon Prime’s much-hyped, $300m new spy drama, decided to keep the concept simple – it’s Good versus Evil. In the Good corner we have Citadel, a super-secret global spy network which has the modest ambition of keeping everybody, everywhere in the world, safe.The black-hat guys with the mean expressions and sometimes beards are agents of Manticore, a malign SPECTRE-style operation funded by eight super-wealthy families who want to control everything, everywhere in the world. Manticore – is it really named after Emerson Lake & Palmer’s 1970s record label? – Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Tarik Saleh was born between two worlds, with a Swedish mum and Egyptian dad. His Egyptian side has inspired his two highest-profile releases.Seedy, sweeping noir epic The Nile Hilton Incident (2017) followed Cairo cop Noredin (Fares Fares) as his investigation of a murder unpicks his faith in his department’s violent corruption, and the Arab Spring briefly brings that world crashing down. Now Cairo Conspiracy, a Cannes prize-winner for Best Screenplay and big hit in France, sees innocent Adam (Tawfeek Barhom) leave his fishing village to study at Cairo’s iconic Islamic university Al-Azhar. Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Last year’s Brad Pitt vehicle Bullet Train was an affable action comedy except in those parts – including the dreadful coda – when it was an insufferably smirky one. Freighted with more thrills, intelligence, gravitas, and social commentary, 1975’s The Bullet Train, released in a 2K restoration on a Eureka Classics Blu-ray, is the better movie.Director and co-writer Jun'ya Satô’s main character is HIkari 109, a button-nosed 0-series (first-generation) Shinkansen express travelling the 1100 km between Tokyo and Hakata, a trip that then took seven hours. Seeking a $5 million pay-off, criminals Read more ...
Gary Naylor
“Darkly comic thrillers” (as they like to say) set in Ireland tracking how families, or quasi-families, fall apart under pressure are very much in vogue just now. Whether The Banshees of Inisherin will garner the Oscars haul it hardly deserves remains to be seen, but set 60 years later in a different Civil War, I suspect Under The Black Rock will not be troubling theatre’s award ceremonies next year. During the euphemistically named The Troubles, a Belfast mother loses her son, having seen him follow in his father’s footsteps into the Provisional IRA. Her daughter, wanting to prove Read more ...
David Nice
The farce in question is fast and furious, but not often hilariously funny; that’s because it’s the invention of a scary Irish dad who forces his sons to act it out with him every day in their seedy Walworth Road flat. Go with conventional expectations and you’ll be wrong-footed, or downright disappointed; Enda Walsh pushes boundaries, pulls the dirty rug from under our feet. Vividly acted, directed and designed, this revival of his 2006 two-acter suggests it’s a masterpiece.It helps not to know what lies in store, which heightens the thriller aspect of the play; I was a nervy virgin Read more ...
Nick Hasted
In Park Chan-wook’s strange Cannes prize-winning thriller, a husband is discovered mangled beneath a mountain, and pretty widow Seo-rae (Tang Wei) isn’t noticeably upset.Brilliant young detective Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) becomes obsessed as their breaths synchronise in the interrogation room, a piquant tremor after the erotic floods and earthquakes of Park’s The Handmaiden (2016) and Stoker (2013). Back home, Hae-jun cooks sensuous food for his quick-witted, beautiful wife, domestic and sex life decent enough. Yet even as the murder case closes, he spies on the widow, voyeurism Read more ...