horror
Nick Hasted
It doesn’t really end till the last dollar’s earned. But David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy, and Jamie Lee Curtis’s signature role, draw to an eventually satisfying close here.Four years after Michael Myers’ bloody Halloween return, Laurie Strode (Curtis) is healed enough to be bashing out a trite survivors’ memoir, and bonding with granddaughter Allyson (Andi Mabichak, filmed with Green’s customary lustrous devotion to youthful female beauty). A spectacular pre-credits sequence meanwhile introduces Corey (Rohan Campbell, pictured below with Mabichak), whose typically catastrophic spell Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Crimes of the Future is a nostalgic return to classic Cronenberg, a comforting catalogue of body horror and fleshy biosynthesis, paranoid plots and shadowy cabals. Sharing a title with his 1970 debut, the director is still fascinated by our physical adaptation to future shocks.In his vague, allegorical sci-fi future, humanity’s “insurrectional” evolution has largely eradicated pain and produced surplus organs of uncertain consequence. Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and ex-trauma surgeon Caprice (Léa Seydoux, pictured below, right with Mortensen) are performance artists on a posh, illicit Read more ...
David Kettle
In many ways, The Stones is what the Fringe is all about: a new theatre company (London-based Signal House); a single actor; a small black-box space; just a chair, a bit of smoke and some almost imperceptible lighting changes for a staging. And with those modest ingredients, it generates a work that’s really quite unnerving in its quiet power, and magpie-like in its references.Out of the blue, Nick receives a text from an old schoolfriend – well, someone he used to taunt with sinister messages in the hope of attention. As a result, he dumps his boyfriend, quits his job, and – almost as if it Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Lee Haven Jones’ Welsh-language folk-horror debut dissects a family’s treachery to the land in eventually apocalyptic fashion. It starts in silent, jagged style, the characters seeming as artificial as their minimalist house, abstract paintings and intensely designed rooms, set down like a lunar outpost in rugged Welsh farmland.Cadi (Annes Elwy) is up from the village to help Glenda (Nia Roberts) prepare a dinner party during which MP husband Gwyn (Julian Lewis Jones) means to seal a deal between the mining company which has enriched them and the neighbouring farm. As the canapes are Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This maggoty English pastoral blurs into folk- and body-horror, as Alex Garland dissects a relationship’s mournful aftermath, and sends toxic masculinity into toxic shock.Harper (Jessie Buckley) rents a grand Cotswold cottage in the grounds of bumbling, benign aristo Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear, pictured bottom with Buckley), seeking to put her marriage’s brutal end behind her. It still haunts her in broken flashback: facing James (Pappa Essiedu, picture below with Buckley) in a sunset-red flat as their marriage viciously unravels. Essiedu’s soulfully demonic James is unable to understand why Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Playwrights return to classical myths for two main reasons – to shine a light on how we live today and because they're bloody good yarns.Marina Carr's re-telling of Clytemnestra's story is boldly innovative in its conception and execution, but it never loses sight of its source material's power – and we wonder how, if "Enough is Enough" didn't work thousands of years ago, how is it going to work now?King Agamemnon needs to do something as his men are mustered for war and the blood is up, but the winds will not come to fill their sails for the passage to Troy. Worse still, a potential Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Ti West’s slyly self-referential horror film about a Texan porn shoot subverts expectations. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre/Debbie Does Dallas genre mash-up promised by the premise, pumping out head-spinning sex and gore, is in fact a muted exercise in craft, with memorable ideas on desire.From the moment blonde Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) steps out of the Bayou Burlesque club beneath a mural of an alligator snapping at a bikini bottom, and the camera pans to the industrial estates and belching refineries behind this particular American dream, West wittily depicts sex as small-town escape and Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
One feels, or perhaps hopes, that if she could have avoided it, first-time feature director Ruth Paxton might not have started A Banquet as she ultimately did: with Holly Hughes (Sienna Guillory) arduously scrubbing the frame of her husband’s hospital-style bed, as he coughs, gasps, and weeps for an end to whatever ghastly affliction he has been dealt. Not to be deterred from her usual course of existence, Holly pops across the kitchen to make herself a smoothie. Out comes the chopping board, in flies the fruit, and the blender goes whirr. Guillory’s face, angular and incisive Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The prolific actor Romola Garai first demonstrated her ability as a filmmaker with Scrubber, a gripping 20-minute feminist drama about a young middle-class mum and homemaker (Amanda Hale) who escapes her deadly routine through bouts of anonymous countryside sex; thematically, it anticipated the current critical favorite The Lost Daughter by nine years.Amulet, Garai's first feature as writer-director, builds substantially on that promise. A neo-Gothic horror film, it tells the story of an educated European refugee Tomaz (Alec Secăreanu), who’s surviving in London by taking dangerous Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A small film that packs a significant wallop, The Humans snuck into view at the very end of 2021 to cast a despairing shadow that extends well beyond the Thanksgiving day during which it takes place. Adapted from the much-traveled Tony-winning play of the same name, writer-director Stephen Karam's screen iteration of his own one-act seems even bleaker in this iteration than it did in my twofold experience of it on stage (including at the Hampstead, with its original New York cast, in autumn 2018). .Those who think American drama too often offers its characters the easy way out won't find that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Netflix is sometimes criticised for bringing too much of everything to its online feast, but the way it’s opening up previously under-exposed territories is becoming seriously impressive. Suddenly, South Korea is beginning to look like a powerhouse in the making, with consecutive big ratings hits with Squid Game and now Hellbound.Directed by Yeon Sang-ho (Train to Busan), Hellbound is derived from the “webtoon” series he created with cartoonist Choi Gyuseok. It depicts a nightmarish society where “sinners” are picked out seemingly at random by a mysterious “angel” and informed that they will Read more ...
Jon Turney
Our everyday lives, if we’re fortunate, may be placid, even contented. A rewarding job, for some; good eats; warm home; happy family; entertainment on tap. Yet, even for the privileged, awareness of impending change – probably disaster – intrudes.Our entertainment is saturated with foreboding. In the Anthropocene, the hard-to-define era when the human collective has planet-wide effects that will endure for aeons, any new fictional world bears traces of the ways our real world is being made, or unmade.Mark Bould’s book explores how these reveal what he calls the Anthropocene unconscious, which Read more ...