Returning after the ambitiously flawed drama The Tracey Fragments (2007), Canadian director Bruce McDonald offers a bizarrely original adaptation of Tony Burgess’s novel Pontypool Changes Everything. Taking place within a single location, a radio studio in small-town Ontario, the film centres around frustrated shock jockey Grant Mazzy, whose innovative views and delivery are wasted on routine news items such as school bus cancellations and missing cats. Joining him in the studio are producer Sydney, with whom he shares a tempestuous professional relationship, and his bright assistant Laurel. On a typically mundane morning, their ‘eye in the sky’ helicopter correspondent calls in with reports of disturbing behaviour downtown and unexplainable acts of violence. Switching between pre-recorded shows and live broadcast, the three attempt to investigate the situation using what facilities they have, soon discovering their own broadcasts may be contributing to the mayhem.

Despite the limitations of the single location, Pontypool uses the confinement to the radio studio to great advantage, giving the film an insular and paranoid quality that only unravels in the film’s last quarter, as the infected residents inevitably break through the studio doors. The impossibly peculiar situation is well channeled through the three characters, occupying a position of power through the radio airwaves, and the relationships between them are interestingly played, particularly the contrasting ideologies and sexual tension between host and producer. Stephen McHattie gives a brilliant performance as Mazzy; with his gruff vocal delivery and withered yet enigmatic appearance he inhabits the role of an ageing radio host perfectly.

While the virus reveals itself to be unnecessarily complex and quite confusing, the concept of danger being spread through language is an interesting exploration point for a horror film. To elaborate would give too much away, though a hilariously notable set-piece shows two characters desperately speaking in pigeon French to avoid catching the virus. Scenes such as this confirm Pontypool as an imaginative addition to the zombie/virus horror canon.

James Merchant

Pontypool will preview at the AND Festival in Liverpool on September 25. It opens in the UK on October 16.

A giggling baby plays with his dad; a hair-tugging fight outside a suburban store; a bad bike spill; a grainy Saddam Hussein, noose around neck, drops to his death; a piano-playing cat; bodies in Iraq; clip follows clip, until we see a skinny blonde girl, nervous, uncomfortable, staring into the lens of an unseen cameraman, who is telling her to inform her mum on camera that she is a whore before the porn action starts. The website is ‘nastycumholes.com’, and a young student is wanking to it as his roommate bangs on the door to be let in. The first line of dialogue is ‘I smell come’.

Welcome to Antonio Campos’s feature debut Afterschool. We are in a preppy American boarding school in New York state when a class video project accidentally captures a tragedy; two popular seniors die, and we follow the reactions of the school, of its pupils, and particularly of the wanking student from the beginning, Robert (Ezra Miller), who shot the incident, an uncool and unliked tenth-grader who becomes a source of anxiety for the institution. He is tasked, by way of therapy, with making a memorial video to the two girls, and it quickly becomes clear that there is very much a right way and a wrong way to think about the girls, the school and the tragedy, and that Robert just isn’t in tune with everybody else. ‘I think I’m not a good person’, he says to his mum over the phone, and she promptly suggests medication.

If, as is usually the case, high school/college movies are intended as portraits of America in microcosm, then this is the most bilious, vicious picture of that nation I’ve encountered in years. The school establishment and student body are damned alike, a world of hypocrisy and empty platitudes, where bullying is studiously ignored, drugs are the currency of cool and problem kids with rich parents just can’t be problem kids. Evil here is not some malevolent force but an absence of feeling, a failure to focus; everybody is so preoccupied with appearances they just can’t acknowledge the reality of the situation. It says something about the tone of the film that eerie, blank Robert emerges as almost heroic in this context for producing a strangely clumsy, insensitive, but ultimately truthful memorial video, while the school’s official version proves to be an appallingly glib, black comic highlight.

Afterschool‘s low-key, observational surface conceals its tight structure, coming across as Kubrick via mumblecore. Campos constantly asks us to consider whose eyes we are looking through and whose version of events we should believe. It lingers where we would pull away, and stares where we would not think to look. The sound is muted and music-free. The dark nature of the story is emphasised by visually inventive, oddly framed photography throughout, imitating both the lopsided compositions of amateur cameramen and the disaffected gaze of a sociopath, building a woozy, unhealthy atmosphere, a world viewed through the wrong head. It’s creepy and smart, and it may just screw with your head for days - recommended.

Mark Stafford

Thirty years after his death (he was shot 19 times in a brutal police operation), the facts of Jacques Mesrine’s life and criminal career read like the results of some fevered pulp imagination. Surely he can’t be real? An international criminal Renaissance man, murderer, kidnapper, a master of disguise, a bank robber who’d hit another bank over the road if the mood took him, who gave an interview to Paris Match while on the run, escaped from his own sentencing by taking the judge hostage, broke out of prison after prison, and on one occasion even returned to one to free his fellow prisoners? Mesrine seems to have been born from the 60s-70s zeitgeist, some weird Clyde Barrow/James Bond/Andreas Baader hybrid thrown up by the public subconscious. But nope, he did exist, Jean-Franí§ois Richet and Vincent Cassel have made a 245-minute film about him based on his autobiography, and they have trouble fitting everything in.

Released in two parts, Mesrine is, for the most part, an exciting, if conventional biopic. Richet (who directed the efficient, but pointless Assault on Precinct 13 remake in 2005) has a ball with yer regulation gangster schtick. There are pulse-pounding prison breaks, tense shoot-outs, bank and casino robberies and car chases. There are piles of money and hot molls on tap (Elena Anaya, Cécile de France, Ludivine Sagnier). There are all kinds of exciting low-lifes played by great character actors (Gérard Depardieu, Roy Dupuis and a great turn from Mathieu Amalric). There’s a Schifrin-esque 70s score peppered with period pop as we hop from country to country over three decades. It’s a film of set-pieces and sequences, thrilling, and disturbing, and familiar. Everything you need is present and correct, it’s glossy, sexy, good-looking and halfway in love with its own roguish glamour. It’s hard to begrudge this, though, when the results are so much fun to watch.

To Richet’s credit, there is some grit in the oyster. Young Mesrine is seen in Algeria killing Arabs with a gun and full sanction given by the government he later postured against, and the first film especially depicts him as a nasty piece of work under all the surface charm, a racist wife-beater with a hair-trigger temper, ruthless and capable of vile acts of cruelty. He becomes transformed, after a fashion, by his own narcissism. An off-the-cuff ‘Vive le Québec libre!’ to some assembled journalists politicises him in the media and the public mind, and his criminal career is magically turned into a revolutionary one by the ferment of the times. Entranced by this romantic vision of himself, he starts to act up to this press-created identity, and in the second film becomes trapped by it. There is an intriguing ambiguity to this; we are never sure how much he buys his own outlaw clichés, and this is mostly Vincent Cassel’s work. This is probably the meatiest role he’s ever going to get, and he excels as a man playing the part of a superstar subversive who never quite convinces himself in the role. Full of bravado and populist rhetoric when cameras or an audience are watching, but an empty self-serving bastard inside, Cassel’s Mesrine is all strut and swagger, smiles that never reach the eyes and shifty glances to monitor reactions, utterly convincing as a man racing towards the grave because he has nothing to lose. It is his utter fearlessness, his permanent state of rebellion against everything and the ambivalence of his one-man attack on ‘the system’ that make him such a fascinating character. Cassel has described Mesrine as ‘a symbol of freedom and a terrible man’, which seems about right. I would have liked a little more of the terrible man, personally, but there’s enough here to chew on.

Mark Stafford

‘If you want to be the best, you’ve got to earn respect. And if you want respect, you don’t show respect to anyone else. And if you don’t show anyone no respect, they think you fucking invented it.’ So runs the reckless mantra of í–zgí¼r Yildirim’s gritty gangster drama, Chiko, set in the immigrant neighbourhood of Hamburg’s rough Dulsberg district, its compelling hero portrayed with bristling intensity by Denis Moschitto.

Chiko, whose real name is Isa (Turkish for Jesus), is a street-smart young guy on the drug dealer career ladder, running a small business with his quick-tempered friend, Tibet (Volkan í–zcan), with whom he shares a yearning for cash, hot wheels and chicks. More than anything though, Chiko wants to get to the top and enjoy the power that comes with it, and he sets out to prove himself to the local drug boss, Brownie, by agreeing to sell 10 kilos of grass in 10 days on the condition that the merchandise must be sold from an apartment, not on the streets.

Although the operation is soon running smoothly and profitably for all involved, the amount of dope and cash that is suddenly crossing the table seems too tempting for Tibet, who scents an opportunity to beef up his share behind Chiko’s back and use the extra money to support his seriously ill mother, a plan that goes horribly wrong. Not only does he put his long-lasting friendship with Chiko at risk, but he is cruelly punished by Brownie in a moment of savage violence. As the story drifts deeper into genre conventions, Chiko finds some love and stability with the prostitute Meryam (a decent acting debut for Turkish-German rapper Lady Bitch Ray), but ultimately breaks under the pressure of trying to balance his own ambitions with his loyalty to Tibet.

Produced by Fatih Akin (director of the stunning Head On and most recently The Edge of Heaven), Chiko is writer-director Yildirim’s first feature and much like his aspiring hero, he makes no pretence about his own dreams and utter conviction, describing Chiko as his Scarface in the film’s production notes. But ambition alone cannot generate excellence and although Chiko has good pacing and is engagingly witty (some of which is unfortunately lost in the rather careless subtitling), the film’s largely predictable plot is laced with clichés and a slick visual style that gradually defuses its fierce tension, leaving it to a strong cast to carry the film until its final act of desperation and ferocity. The vibrant hip hop soundtrack and well-tuned dialogue lend polish to the drab suburban location, but the mix of raving social commentary and dynamic storytelling is only half-convincing, and Yildirim’s film remains a straightforward rise-and-fall story about a small-time dealer with big dreams, whose reach turns out to exceed his grasp.

In spite of its flaws, Chiko is persuasive in the way it recreates the milieu in which the characters struggle to make it to something bigger and better than what is expected of them, but its uneven blend of social criticism, domestic drama and gangster tragedy illustrates just how difficult it is to capture that distinctive Scarface quality.

Pamela Jahn

Ursula Meier’s debut feature Home tells the story of an insular and unconventional family who live in a house by a disused motorway. Meier wanted to create ‘a road movie in reverse’ (the tagline of the film) by reflecting not the passenger’s gaze but the point of view of the people standing by the roadside.

When the motorway reopens, this kooky, sexually liberated, left-field family’s days of cavorting around semi-naked in front of each other are numbered. They have previously treated the road as an extension of their home, somewhere for the kids to play, for the teenage Judith to sunbathe, and for mum Marthe (Isabelle Huppert) to fit in a ride on her son’s scooter in between the chaos of domestic chores - all of which are undertaken with the style and poise that seem to come so effortlessly to the French (in cinema, at least).

Madness slowly takes hold as the noise and pollution of passing traffic inhibits the household’s daily routine. Dad Michel (Olivier Gourmet) is angry and territorial, while Julien daubs fresh white paint from the road across his face in a gesture of defiance. Marthe can’t hang out her washing anymore for the sound of truck drivers blasting their horns at a half-naked Judith, who persists in sunbathing in a bikini by the busy road. Practical middle child Marion, the scholar of the family, is worried about the effect of carbon monoxide on the family’s health, and defies her mother by refusing to wear a swimsuit that flatters her burgeoning figure.

The family decide to brick in the windows and sweat out the summer inside their house. Marthe, until now the devoted mother, puts her needs above the rest of the family by insisting they stay on no matter how bad it gets. Here is the only place she can be truly happy, even if the entire family suffers as a result. This seems contradictory: until this point, much has been made of her maternal bond with the children, especially with her young son Julien. But when the ultimate breakdown occurs and Michel threatens to leave with the children, Marthe is prepared to stay on alone in the dark, hot house; still more baffling is her lack of concern when Judith goes missing later in the film.

Meier intended to create ‘a sort of immobile expedition - an inner voyage, a mental journey’, yet Marthe’s breakdown amounts to nothing more than mindless pacing around a messy house full of dirty dinner plates. Marthe’s is a flattering, camera-friendly brand of madness, and luckily her ability to match this season’s floral prints with an edgy pair of heeled ankle boots seems to be entirely uncompromised by her mental demise. This type of superficiality permeates Home, rendering Marthe’s change in attitude to her family nothing more than an irksome plot contrivance, and Meier’s intentions are ultimately undermined by the precedence of aesthetic ideals over substance.

Jessica Dickenson

The legend of Orson Welles has no room for The Stranger. Masterpieces, studio-butchered (or simply flawed) classics, even bad films with elements of genius, but mediocrity never. As Welles’s co-star, Edward G Robinson, once put it, ‘Orson has genius but in this film it seems to have run out’. And yet other great auteurs were permitted hundreds of mediocre films; John Ford seems to have made at least one for every Stagecoach or The Searchers, and even Alfred Hitchcock was allowed his fair share.

The Stranger shows what Welles could have become had he been allowed to work as a jobbing director within the studio system. His output for the radio between 1938 and 1940 was certainly prodigious and not every programme sent Americans panicking into the streets as War of the Worlds did. Perhaps his film career could have been similar. The Stranger was even finished a day ahead of schedule and under budget and actually made money at the box office - not the stuff of Welles legend.

Perhaps it’s because Welles himself disliked the film, but for some reason The Stranger has become one of the filmmaker’s most forgotten and overlooked movies. It merits barely a page or two in most biographies and there are very few stories about its production. Welles apparently directed the film (following the script) by day and performed magic tricks at drunken parties in the evenings. The studio overruled an interesting casting option - Agnes Moorehead (the first wife in Citizen Kane) in the Edward G role - but other than trimming the opening section, interfered very little.

Thus the film is directed entirely by Welles, unlike The Magnificent Ambersons, which had an ending added by Robert Wise, and bears all the hallmarks of an Orson Welles film. His strong (heavy-handed) directorial style is much in evidence: his roving camera and striking angles, chiaroscuro lighting and his composition in depth (although without Gregg Toland’s wide angle lenses and dramatic depth of focus). The film’s strengths, as well as its flaws, are largely due to Welles.

The first reel is excellent - full of drama, tension and dramatic noir-ish shots as former Nazi Meinike is set free from prison in order to lead the war crimes investigators to a bigger fish - Franz Kindler. Edward G Robinson repeats his calm, all-knowing investigator from Double Indemnity. Kindler is played with hammy urbanity by Welles in what seems to be a dry run for his villain in The Third Man, Harry Lime. His speech on a ‘Carthaginian peace’ for Germany bears comparison with Lime’s story of the cuckoo clocks and the Borgias. Welles’s performance is often considered the film’s major flaw, although it is certainly not as jarring as the irritating Irish brogue he employs for The Lady from Shanghai, and seems to be indicative of his restless spirit and his constant striving to try something different, which led to his much lauded voodoo Macbeth as well as War of the Worlds. It is also indicative of his sheer love of acting.

The following reels are set in a sleepy Connecticut town complete with prep school and colonial style buildings (looking remarkably like the set from Gilmore Girls). The film itself takes on the pace of the place as we are treated to fishing trips, discussions on antiques and repairing the town clock, as well as the quirky locals who don’t much mind that the church clock hasn’t worked in decades and are annoyed by the noise when it is fixed. There is the town clerk and store-owner who inadvertently invents the self-service mini-mart so he can listen to the radio and play checkers instead of serving customers.

Disguised as a teacher and married to the daughter of a Supreme Court judge, Kindler hopes to hide out in the idyllic town until the Nazis rise again. But as the net slowly closes in around him the audience finds itself almost sympathising with the unrepentant Nazi (perhaps not to the disturbing extent Hitchcock achieves in Psycho) as he hurriedly redirects a children’s paper chase so they don’t find Meinike’s body. But of course Robinson, with his bulldog tenacity, eventually leads us to a finale that although not quite as baroque as the ‘crazy house’ in The Lady from Shanghai is certainly memorable.

The Stranger won’t trouble the greatest films of all time lists but it is not a bad movie. There are good moments in the overall mediocrity and it is probably better on the whole than The Lady from Shanghai, which alternates between the brilliant and the awful. It might even be the fifth best Orson Welles film…

Paul Huckerby

In a manner reminiscent of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Ole Bornedal’s riveting thriller Just Another Love Story (2007) opens with the death of its narrator, who detachedly comments on his dramatic demise as it occurs on-screen. Far from being a facile gimmick, this perfectly captures the tone of twisted irony and the central theme of deceit that run through this stylish, knowing take on film noir.

The film’s narrator is Jonas (Anders W Berthelsen), a crime scene photographer who lives in the suburbs of Copenhagen with his attractive wife and two kids. His life takes an unexpected turn when he accidentally crashes into a woman’s car, which causes her to fall into a coma. Overcome by guilt, Jonas visits Julia (Rebecka Hemse) in hospital but is mistaken by her family for her elusive boyfriend Sebastian (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), whom they have never seen as the couple met while travelling in Asia. When Julia awakes unexpectedly, amnesiac and nearly blind, she can only accept Jonas’s version of events, and he still cannot bring himself to reveal his identity and put an end to the deception. Incapable of giving up the excitement of this dangerous relationship with a ‘dark, mysterious woman’ (a film noir cliché he is entirely aware of), which provides an escape from a banal daily life that he finds increasingly narrow and stifling, he continues to lead a double life until the charade goes too far.

Bornedal first garnered acclaim in 1994 with his debut feature Nightwatch (Nattevagten), a stunning low-budget thriller that the Danish director remade himself in an English-language version starring Ewan McGregor and Nick Nolte in 1997. Bornedal followed up this early success with I am Dina (Jeg er Dina, 2002) and The Substitute (Vikaren, 2007). The latter is a sci-fi horror comedy similar to Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty (1998), centring on an alien who takes over the body of a farmer’s wife and impersonates the substitute teacher of a sixth grade class in order to learn about love, an unknown emotion in its extra-terrestrial world. Taking its protagonists and its premise remarkably seriously, Bornedal crafts a tale that is both wryly humorous and emotionally engaging. Preparing the ground for Just Another Love Story‘s neo-noir, The Substitute inventively plays with genre conventions and explores love, trust and relationships through the central conceit of mistaken identity.

With Just Another Love Story, Bornedal pushes his favoured motifs further, probing beneath the surface to illuminate the brutal banality of quotidian life, mixing chilling mystery, social realism and short bursts of almost surreal violence. The film’s emotional power comes from its double investigation of love and identity, falseness and authenticity. Jonas’s impersonation of Julia’s boyfriend leads to a false romance - and yet, as Jonas repeatedly wonders, are the emotions any less real because his name is fake? And what if the nice Jonas and the shadowy Sebastian were the two faces of the same lover, what if this was all about the unacceptable, irreconcilable duality of the loved one? Blurring the line between the real and the fake, the stranger and the lover, Just Another Love Story delivers a stark warning about fantasising one’s way out of boring, suburbanite, middle-class, middle-aged existence: Jonas, initially excited about living out the fantasy of escaping into someone else’s life, soon finds that the dream is in fact a nightmare and is ultimately brutally punished for wanting to be another.

Pamela Jahn

Read our interview with director Ole Bornedal in the summer 09 issue of Electric Sheep. Substitute is the theme of the issue, with articles on the fraught relationship between Takeshi Kitano and ‘Beat’ Takeshi, the various cinematic incarnations of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, interchanging identities in Joseph Losey’s films, the paradoxes of black and white twins in offbeat lost classic Suture, not to mention cross-dressing criminals, androids and body snatchers. Also in this issue: interview with Marc Caro, profile of whiz-kid animator David OReilly, comic strip review of Hardware and The Phantom Band’s favourite films.

TAKE 1: FRANCES MORGAN

In the brooding forests of the Pacific North West, a middle-class couple, played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, struggle to come to terms with the accidental death of their young son. It soon becomes clear, however, that grief is not the only opponent they face: malign, supernatural forces assail both protagonists, first implicitly, then with shockingly violent results, unleashing ancient evil, nature’s chaotic cruelty and primal female fury.

If the above précis sounds more like a by-numbers synopsis of a certain type of American supernatural horror movie than Lars von Trier‘s latest release, it is because Antichrist almost is one of those films, such is its adherence to middlebrow horror convention, and this is one of the most disorienting, frustrating things about the film. As Gainsbourg and Dafoe’s isolated cabin retreat becomes a hexed hell, one can almost tick off distinguishing features: the lost child as catalyst for terror; the family in conflict; the failure of institutions (in this case, cognitive therapy) to deal with evil; the reverberant folk memory of witch-hunting and devil worship; the uneasy truce between humans and nature; the vengeful or possessed woman who deploys torture, violence and voracious sexuality; even the obligatory hide-and-seek sequence of pursuit, capture, conquest and escape that concludes most horror films.

And yet, of course, although von Trier has used the genre to host the themes of suffering, manipulation and control that are echoed throughout the majority of his films, Antichrist is not a genre film. An efficient mainstream horror - and even the extreme body-horror films of Takeshi Miike, whose Audition (1999) springs to mind during Antichrist‘s latter segment - uses a particular pace to take us from unease to terror, from suggestion to gore, and, while not exactly hiding its political, sexual or religious intentions, will veil them enough with plot and action that they simmer more potently beneath the surface. This art-house take on horror does not work in that way, because its slower rhythm and self-aware script promotes an analytical response in the first instance - which is one way of saying that I spent much of Antichrist wondering why exactly von Trier had made the film; trying, in a sense, to justify to myself its disjointed structure, its choice of predictable esoteric material and, inevitably, the director’s seemingly infinite fascination (to the point of fetishism) with female suffering, which is combined here with clichés of female sexual power and its destructive intent. That this last might be a comment upon mainstream horror’s latent misogyny seems reasonable, for there certainly are distinct flashes of irony throughout. It is really only when the environment takes precedence and the setting emerges as a character in its own right that the questions stop, and Antichrist seems more than a sadistic exercise in style.

Von Trier’s citation of August Strindberg’s Inferno as an influence is perhaps not surprising. First published in 1897 and based on his journals, Inferno captures the author at a time of psychological crisis, which prompted a fascination with alchemy, dreams and the occult. It is a paranoid, claustrophobic read, imbued with a strange sexual tension, but it is also strikingly effective at summoning the sinister aspects of a place. A passage where Strindberg experiences a walk through a village as a visit to hell brings to mind von Trier’s impressive visions of the forest as charged with dark symbolism; a place visited in dreams and fantasy. The most effective of these scenes, in which Gainsbourg carries out a therapeutic visualisation exercise, has a kind of psychedelic resonance that is highly convincing, and more disquieting than much of what follows, perhaps because it hints at our fears and desires without seeking to scrawl their names in letters of blood.

TAKE 2: DAVID WARWICK

Controversial director Lars von Trier returns to the spotlight with Antichrist, a film sure to generate curiosity first, confusion second, and strong opinions third.

Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe play the only two characters – a couple mourning the accidental death of their son. Both are grief-stricken, but particularly Gainsbourg, who is quite overwhelmed by the loss. Fortunately (or not), Defoe is a trained therapist and prescribes for Gainsbourg a trip to their holiday cabin, where she is to face her fear of the woods. When they arrive, however, the atmosphere of the cabin is disturbing for both of them, and Gainsbourg’s condition proves more complex than Defoe had anticipated. Their convalescence quickly descends into madness and violence.

It isn’t clear, at first, exactly what Antichrist is. It’s not a horror film (because it’s not scary) and it’s not an art film (because it couldn’t be further from a work of art). It’s tempting to say that it’s just bad, just a hideous mess, and leave it there. But of course that wouldn’t do.

A lot has been made in the press about Antichrist‘s gruesomeness, and certainly, if it is anything, it is gruesome. The film’s unflinching close-ups of human mutilation are not only amongst some of the most extreme and unpleasant in the whole of cinema, but also some of the most pointless and gratuitous. The two naked, blood-splattered actors run around copulating and torturing each other, and it just doesn’t make any sense. It’s not a detached psychological deconstruction of power and sado-masochism, like Pasolini’s masterful Salí³, and it’s not a tense, titillating game of cat and mouse, like the hateful – but at least fathomable – Saw films.

Perhaps the talking fox has the key to Antichrist, when it pops up in the middle of the film and tells the audience that ‘chaos reigns’. Perhaps all the violent nonsense is profound because that is how life is. This would certainly seem to be the idea, especially given the film’s closing dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky (a dedication quite, quite deserving of the boos and belly laughs that it received at Cannes and elsewhere). Von Trier seems to want to follow Tarkovsky in dynamiting truth, and scrutinising the vague, misty appearance of reality, stripped of its bourgeois tint. Such pushing to the limits of consciousness and to the ineffable, however, tends to dramatically shrink the line between masterpiece and nonsensical garbage. Von Trier has walked this line before and, with The Idiots at least, made excellent work. With Antichrist, however, he has fallen into the stink. Beyond the simple fact that it doesn’t make any sense, every aspect of the film is also wildly overdone and off-key, from the leaden dialogue, to the gloopy, gimmick-ridden cinematography.

Watching Antichrist, one gets no sense of the artist grappling with his materials, trying to strike a balance between order and chaos. Instead, von Trier seems a confused and desperate director, whose latest film has completely evaded his control. Having made good work in the past, he may well make good work again in the future, and should he do so, Antichrist may come to be seen as an intriguing low in the director’s oeuvre. Considered on its own however, Antichrist is utter nonsense, an irredeemable mess, and one of the worst films I have ever had the displeasure to see.

Read our interview with Lars von Trier.

In the not-so-distant future, the Earth has been depleted of clean, natural resources. It is now powered by Helium-3, which Lunar Industries mines on the far side of the moon. Astronaut Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is the sole employee supervising the industrial mining station. Approaching the end of his three-year contract, he’s desperate to be reunited with his wife and young daughter back on Earth; a failure with one of the satellites means that he’s been unable to communicate directly with them, relying instead on recorded messages from his wife for some kind of human connection. Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey), an AI robot tasked with caring for Sam, is the only company he has in space. Sam’s health seems to be failing rapidly, and while out on a routine check in a lunar vehicle, he suffers an accident, only to wake up back in the station, unable to remember how he got there. Only he’s no longer alone - he finds a mirror image of himself ready to take over the running of the station.

The winner of the Michael Powell award for best new British feature film at this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival, Duncan Jones’s independent debut feature is a fascinating and visually stunning sci-fi film that explores the alienation and bitter loneliness of space, as well as the very essence of the human condition. Moon is Jones’s attempt to reverse the course of science fiction cinema, a genre that’s been altered beyond recognition in recent years. Clearly inspired by an earlier generation of films including Silent Running, Outland, and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jones is vastly more concerned with the genre’s human dimension, eschewing the kind of hyped-up special effects that in recent years have turned sci-fi films into a series of alien-launched missile attacks that inevitably blow up American targets like the White House.

Rockwell’s demanding performance is near perfect; playing two versions of the same character, he imbues both with contrasting traits and emotions. He plays the original Sam Bell as a man who seems to be in terminal decline, physically deteriorating as he gets nearer to his journey home, as if he’s reached his sell-by date, while his doppelgänger is healthy and fit, in the prime of his life. As they struggle to figure out what they’re both doing on the station, their consciousness is awakened; Jones’s characters confront the very nature of their own existence, and the disturbing truth behind the memories of their lives back on Earth.

Shot in high contrast, the gleaming white surfaces of the space station are almost luminescent; the lunar surfaces surrounding the station are cold, dark and chillingly ominous. Filmed in little more than a month, and refreshingly making use of models rather than relying solely on CGI, the picture beautifully captures Jones’s unique vision, both aesthetically and philosophically. Moon is an instant classic of the genre, as well as one of the most impressive and original films to emerge from the UK in years.

Sarah Cronin