horror
Graham Fuller
The bleak power of the Australian horror movie Relic, Natalie Erika James’s feature debut, derives from its masterful use of a simple metaphor. The creepy house wherein Kay (Emily Mortimer) and her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) first seek and are then stalked by Kay’s enraged elderly mother Edna (Robyn Nevin) is an externalization of Edna’s waning cognitive skills. Many haunted houses in movies can be considered the manifestations of damaged psyches; few have literalized so terrifyingly the division between mental acuity and the void many people fall into before they die.Having learned Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Shirley is one of those films that the mood you’re in when you watch it will dictate whether you think it’s a great psychological horror movie or overheated and pretentious. Go to the cinema wanting to be plunged into a fever dream of gothic Americana, replete with glaucous close ups of Elisabeth Moss as a writer wreaking revenge on her unfaithful husband, and you’ll be more than satisfied. But if you’re hoping for a linear narrative that adheres to the actual biography of Shirley Jackson, the artful elliptical editing which blurs elements from her fiction with cherry-picked aspects of Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
There's something deeply uncanny about Adrian Shergold's Cordelia. When the film's poster was released on social media, many mistook it for a kinky period drama with the power dynamics reversed. It definitely isn't a costume drama, but there's some kink. It's unlikely the filmmakers intend this as a stunt, but it serves well enough to forewarn audiences that not all is as it seems with this film. Cordelia is a strange psychological chamber piece that's reminiscent of Adrian Lyne's masterful, and genuinely terrifying Jacob's Ladder, with elements of Roman Polanski's Repulsion. Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Shot across a period of five years, David Lynch’s creepy debut feature Eraserhead (1977) follows the story of Henry Spencer, played by Jack Nance, an employee at a print factory in a quiet, unnamed town. Henry arrives home one evening to a missed telephone call from a woman named Mary (Charlotte Stewart), inviting him to dinner at her parents’ house. Once he arrives, Mary’s mother breaks the news that her daughter has given birth to a baby, and Henry is the father.“They’re still not sure it is a baby!” If the premise sounds innocuous enough, Mary’s tortured reply sets the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It only takes a few seconds of Saint Maud – dripping blood, a dead body contorted on a gurney, a young woman’s deranged face staring at an insect on the ceiling, an industrial clamour more likely to score the gates of hell than the pearly ones – to make us realise that the film’s title is a tad ironic. That irony will become even sharper, and mordantly witty, when we find that for the eponymous hospital nurse turned private carer (references no doubt fudged for the private sector), sainthood would be most welcome. “What’s the plan?” she asks of God, with whom she Read more ...
theartsdesk
There are films to meet every taste in theartsdesk's guide to the best movies currently on release. In our considered opinion, any of the titles below is well worth your attention.Enola Holmes ★★★★ Millie Bobby Brown gives the patriarchy what-for in a new Sherlock-related franchiseEternal Beauty ★★★★ Craig Roberts's fantasy conjurs surreal images and magnetic performancesI'm Thinking of Ending Things ★★★★ Charlie Kaufman's eerie road trip through love and lossLes Misérables ★★★★★ An immersive, morally complex thriller set in the troubled suburbs of present day ParisMax Richter's Sleep ★★★★ Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
What do you do when your phone rings, but you know the person ringing isn’t alive? In many ways, the cleverly named Reality, and Other Stories is a collection of ghost tales. But they are updated for the present day. John Lanchester meets his reader at the point at which the spectral intersects with the digital, all the while dissecting the seemingly simple notion of reality and its contents. The fusion makes for a compelling series of tales.Lanchester’s protagonists are often erudite, logical and attractive. They went to Oxbridge; they are professors, QCs, solicitors; one is an “actress Read more ...
Nick Hasted
I’m Thinking of Ending Things ends in a giddying gusher of weirdness, the steady drip of earlier oddness finally bursting its narrative banks, till a horror scene becomes a Gene Kelly ballet, and an Oklahoma! tune is sung in bitter valediction by a male lead now resembling elderly Charles Foster Kane. It’s a Charlie Kaufman overdose, trashing convention to alienating effect. And yet this also stays his simplest chamber piece, about a young couple driving to meet the boyfriend’s parents in the country one snowy night.Later, you forget the first sight of Lucy (Jessie Buckley) as she lets a Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
It hasn’t been an easy ride for Josh Boone’s New Mutants. Delayed production, reshoots, the acquisition of 20th Century Fox by Disney, Covid-19, and accusations of whitewashing, have all contributed to it being dubbed a ‘cursed’ film. Now, with little fanfare, this YA horror has finally limped onto cinema screens three years after production wrapped.Updated from the original 1980s setting, the film opens in the mid-90s in the spooky surroundings of Essex House, an asylum for unruly teenage mutants (far removed from the hallowed halls of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters). This Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
The debate about whether violent films cause violent acts has been around for decades. From Mary Whitehouse’s puritanical crusade against films such as The Exorcist, to recent movies like Joker, pundits, columnists and even psychiatrists have wrangled over whether what we watch adversely influences our behaviour. And it’s often the horror genre that takes the brunt of the debate. Now actor-turned-director/screenwriter, Jay Baruchel wades in with his highly stylised slasher that seeks to unpick this complex problem. You might not expect the man who voiced Hiccup in the How Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
The timing couldn’t be more perfect for a series like Lovecraft Country (Sky Atlantic) in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. Here we have a spectacular show in which fantasy, horror and America’s racist legacy collide with remarkable results.Adapted from the 2016 novel by Matt Ruff, it depicts the journey of a black family in Jim Crow-era America. Across 10 episodes, they must not only survive encounters with supernatural monsters straight from the work of the father of Cosmic Horror, HP Lovecraft, but also contend with real monsters, like racist cops in sundown towns, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Stylish, eerie and unexpectedly moving by the time of its apocalyptic finish, the strangely titled Good Manners makes for a genuine celluloid surprise. Written and directed by Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra, this genre-defying Brazilian film suggests a peculiar amalgam of Angela Carter and Jean Genet, with dollops here and there of The Exorcist and even a brief nod towards Alien.The pregnant Ana (a sad-eyed Marjorie Estiano) finds herself falling for her baby’s serene-seeming nanny, Clara (a transfixing Isabél Zuaa). That the newborn turns out to be a werewolf sends Read more ...