Format: Cinema

Date: 19 June 2009

Venues: ICA Cinema (London)

Distributor: ICA Cinema

Director: Johnny Kervorkian

Writerz: Johnny Kervorkian, Neil Murphy

Cast: Harry Treadaway, Tom Felton, Greg Wise, Ros Leeming, Alex Jennings

UK 2008

96 mins

FrightFest remains the highlight of the horror calendar for many genre fans in the UK, offering the opportunity to not only see some of the hottest films in horror but also several chillers that are unlikely ever to legally see the light of day in this country. The Disappeared, a low-budget British supernatural horror with a largely unknown cast and rookie director, could well have fallen into the latter category, so it’s a delight to see the film receive an admittedly limited theatrical release almost a year after it debuted at the festival.

Director Johnny Kervorkian will not be a name overly familiar to cinema-goers, but The Disappeared, his first fully-fledged feature film, has every chance of putting his name on the map. It’s a ghost story at heart and, while not entirely original - The Sixth Sense is the most obvious comparison - Kervokian shows plenty of talent for building a creeping sense of terror and delivering genuinely heart-in-your-mouth shocks.

The film is set in the a grey, crumbling London council estate, where the teenage Matthew is racked by guilt following the disappearance of his younger brother Tom, who he was supposed to be babysitting but neglected to party with his friends instead. After a failed suicide attempt, Matthew’s already strained relationship with his father is put under even more pressure when he starts hearing his brother’s pained voice calling out to him. When his best friend’s young sister goes missing, Matthew is beset by horrifying visions and ghostly visitations leading him to both her whereabouts and the shocking revelation of her kidnapper’s true identity.

Harry Potter’s Tom Felton (Draco Malfoy) is probably the best-known name in the cast, but it’s Harry Treadaway who puts in the most impressive performance as the tortured, sullen and beleaguered Matthew. Starring in almost every scene, the captivating young actor shows he is more than up to the task of shouldering the responsibility of being a lead and is clearly someone to watch in the future - he’s soon to appear (albeit in a supporting role) in Oscar-winner Andrea Arnold’s sophomore feature Fish Tank, which was officially selected for competition at this year’s Cannes and will be playing at the forthcoming Edinburgh Film Festival.

Not all of the acting in The Disappeared is quite as good - in our experience London’s council estates are not quite so densely populated with such well-spoken, stage school kids - and the story occasionally slips into cliché, unwisely taking a step into the world of the satanic at the end. However, with Treadaway’s standout central performance coupled with Kervorkian’s directorial flair, The Disappeared offers a tense and absorbing experience that favours the kind of foreboding atmosphere of dread found in Hammer’s best supernatural thrillers of yore over the extreme violence and blood-splattering gore of more recent Brit genre fare.

Toby Weidmann

There will be a Q&A with the director and cast after screenings at the ICA Cinema on 17 and 22 June.

Read about other films in the New British Cinema season at the ICA Summer Scars and The Blue Tower.

Format: Cinema

Date: 26 June 2009 (Preview 23 June)

Venues: ICA Cinema (London)

Distributor: ICA Cinema

Director: Smita Bhide

Writer: Smita Bhide

Cast: Paul Chowdhry, Sonnell Dadral, Abhin Galeya, Indira Joshi, Nicholas Khan, Alice O’Connell

UK 2008

85 mins

Screening as part of the ICA’s New British Cinema strand this month is The Blue Tower, the blistering debut from Smita Bhide, which won the best UK feature award at last year’s Raindance Film Festival. Made for a scant budget and set in the director’s hometown of Southall, the film takes familiar themes such as twenty-something angst and traditionalist family oppression, weaving them in a romantic thriller framework that’s at once realistic and thoroughly gripping.

Abhin Galeya plays Mohan, an out-of-work twenty-seven-year-old stuck with a beautiful wife with whom he shares no chemistry, her oppressive family ever increasing the pressure on him to extend the family line and join their import/export business. As he sees it, his only real chance to escape is a job with his old friend Vivek, who at best has an unreliable reputation. Adding to his troubles is his bedridden Auntie Kamla (Indira Joshi), his only living relative, whom he relies on for money. Tyrannical and unappreciative, Auntie K appears to represent everything that is wrong with his life at present. Things change when he begins to fall for her pretty white nurse Judy (Alice O’Connell), a seemingly simple yet enigmatic girl who not only gives Mohan a temporary escape from his problematic life, but also suggests how he could permanently solve his dilemmas if he’s willing to go the required distance.

The Blue Tower is a remarkably assured film, especially given that this is Bhide’s first feature. The lead characters are all multi-layered, allowing the script to take many unpredictable turns while remaining believable and coherent. It’s also palpable that much thought has gone into even the minor characters, such as Mohan’s slacker friends who spend most of their time eating cheap food in a high street restaurant or hatching ridiculous money-making schemes, and there’s a convincing sense of menace in his wife’s intimidating family. There’s a great authenticity to be found in the film, which sets it apart from other British Asian hits such as East is East or The Guru, which arguably played upon racial stereotypes. The Blue Tower appears more like a solid Mike Leigh film given a new perspective by Bhide’s fresh female voice.

The relationship that builds between Mohan and Judy is engaging and heartfelt, making it difficult not to empathise with them despite the forbidden nature of their liaison, and while the lengths they go to in securing their future may appear extreme, in the context of the piece their actions are understandable. The natural yet beautiful cinematography and orchestral score further evoke the realities of Mohan’s experience dealing with his own culture and underline the difficult choices he has to make to change his situation.

With strong performances and a refreshingly smart and darkly funny script The Blue Tower is a little gem, and one hopes that the current interest in British Asian cinema in the wake of Slumdog Millionaire‘s success allows it to be discovered by eager audiences nationwide.

James Merchant

There will be a preview of The Blue Tower at the ICA (London) on June 23 followed by a Q&A with the director and cast. The film will then show at the ICA from June 26 to 30.

Read about other films in the New British Cinema season at the ICA Summer Scars and The Disappeared.

Format: Cinema

Date: 5 June 2009

Venues: Barbican, Cine Lumiere, Cineworld Haymarket, Curzon Soho (London) and key cities

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Fred Cavayé

Writer: Fred Cavayé

Original title: Pour elle

Cast: Diane Kruger, Vincent Lindon, Olivier Marchal

France 2008

96 mins

Everyone, at some point in their lives, has been a fool for love, doing the most reckless things for the person who has stolen their heart, but the protagonist of co-writer and director Fred Cavayé’s debut film takes this a step further than most. In a neat twist on the prison break genre, popularised by such cinematic greats as The Great Escape (1963), Cool Hand Luke (1967) and The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Cavayé’s film cunningly switches the action from inside the prison to the outside world, where loving husband Julien (Vincent Lindon) plots to break his beautiful wife, Lisa (Diane Kruger), out of jail and then abscond with their young son to a place far out of reach of the French authorities.

As exciting a premise as this is, the plot of Anything for Her does unfortunately rely too much on incredulous developments, not least because Julien is not a criminal mastermind, as an early botched encounter with the Parisian underworld illustrates, but a middle-aged everyman and humble teacher who is driven by a desire to help his loved one, who has wrongly been convicted of murder. Although he is faced by a few hurdles - a tense confrontation with a drug dealer is particularly well played out - Julien overcomes most of them far too easily, and while chance will always have some bearings in such an audacious scheme, he enjoys so many lucky coincidences he must be carrying round a sackful of shamrocks.

Equally, his moral transformation from loving husband and doting father into a stop-at-nothing Jack Carter hardman character is too simplistically portrayed. The film also misses a trick by quickly assuaging any anxiety over his wife’s guilt, undermining an ambiguity that would have added extra spice to their seemingly perfect relationship.

And yet the film has many redeeming features. It is particularly well cast: Lindon is excellent as the tortured Julien, juggling bringing up a child, relating to his suicidal wife, confronting his parents’ scepticism over Lisa’s crime and plotting their escape; Kruger’s descent into despair is both unnerving and captivating; and even young Lancelot Roch plays their distressed moppet with suitable conviction. The rest of the cast is filled out with some wonderful character actors, including Olivier Marchal (a former French copper and the mastermind behind 36 Quai des Orfí¨vres) as a former prison escapee who becomes Julien’s Yoda, and the granite-faced Hammou Graí¯a, who plays the tough investigating detective hot on their trail.

Reservations over some of the plot mechanics aside, the final third of the film is also genuinely thrilling. Its breathless pace and some bold editing touches indicate that Cavayé does have a talent for suspense and could be a director to watch in the future. While this French-language film’s influences are certainly more Hollywood than European, lacking the edginess and profundity associated with the latter and bamboozling style over content, it still delivers enough excitement and drama to satisfy fans of prison break films. Forget plausibility, just sit back and enjoy Anything for Her‘s escapist fantasy.

Toby Weidmann

Format: Cinema

Date: 29 May 2009

Distributor: Revolver Entertainment

Directors: Luis Piedrahita and Rodrigo Sopeí±a

Writers: Luis Piedrahita and Rodrigo Sopeí±a

Original title: La habitacií³n de Fermat

Cast: Lluí­s Homar, Alejo Sauras, Elena Ballesteros, Santi Millí¡n, Federico Luppi

Spain 2007

88 mins

There’s a sub-genre of murder stories called ‘the locked room mystery’, which consists of a dead body being found in a locked room with no obvious way for the killer to escape. This has been investigated by everyone from Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie’s various detectives and is the main premise behind the TV series Jonathan Creek. Fermat’s Room presents a novel variant on the genre: a murder is being committed in a locked room, which is shrinking to crush its four inhabitants (played by Lluí­s Homar, Alejo Sauras, Elena Ballesteros and Santi Millí¡n) to death, and the murderer may be inside.

This makes for a film that is both original and also over-familiar. The idea of characters being crushed to death in a shrinking room has been covered in all kinds of films from Goldfinger to Toys, Indiana Jones and Star Wars while rooms that exist purely as death traps have filled screens in recent years from the Cube trilogy to the endless Saw franchise. Even having a maths genius as the main protagonist occupies the middle ground between the TV series Numb3rs and the tedious Russell Crowe biopic A Beautiful Mind.

However, due to elegant cinematography, an intriguing premise and a good cast and script, Fermat’s Room rises above the ubiquity of its premise to make for an intriguing mystery that unsettles the viewer by combining claustrophobia and the modern fascination with games. There’s been a number of unspeakably awful movies based on computer games, but Fermat’s Room flirts with the medium by using the iconography of ‘brain-training’ games, and features a genuinely gripping and subversive car chase that is reminiscent of one of the early Grand Theft Auto games. The film’s low budget necessitated a small cast and limited number of locations, but as in Richard Linklater’s underrated Tape, creative set design, superlative camera work and intelligent use of the resources mean a lot of enthusiasm and a little money go a long way.

The film, like its characters, is flawed. No one in the film is as interesting as the plot thinks they are, and having everyone operate under a pseudonym distances the characters more than the story necessitates. And, because there’s no real concern for the characters, or their dual identities, this device does occasionally make the film a purely intellectual exercise, like a game of Cluedo.

As a film that lauds genius, the plot treads a double-edged sword. The characters in Fermat’s Room are aided in their escape by their common interest in maths and puzzles but are equally handicapped by their all too human vices. In the same way, the film is likely to attract an audience that has seen other examples of the genre and will probably spend the picture trying to double-guess the plot and spot the references. This kind of obsessive study could ruin enjoyment of the film, even though the story celebrates such activity. It might seem disingenuous to state there’s a lot to be appreciated in a movie that comes across as a more intelligent and family friendly version of Saw, but in this case familiarity doesn’t breed contempt.

Alex Fitch

Format: Cinema

Date: 8 May 2009

Distributor: ICA Films

Venues: ICA Cinema, Renoir (London) and key cities

Director: Kornél Mundruczí³

Writers: Kornél Mundruczí³ and Yvette Biro

Cast: Félix Lajkí³, Orsolya Tí³th, Lili Monori, Sí¡ndor Gí¡spí¡r

Germany/Hungary 2008

96 mins

In an insular rural community where cattle and people exist alongside one another, a man struggles with a shrieking pig as his wife’s son Mihail returns after a long absence. Delta is Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczí³’s award-winning third feature film and it is named after the geographical location where the story unfolds. Set in the verdant Romanian Danube Delta, the film is a simple, universal tale of true love between siblings Mihail and Fauna.

Shortly after Mihail’s arrival, Fauna leaves the parental home in order to devote herself to helping Mihail build a house away from the village. The community’s disapproval of her decision and of the introspective Mihail is felt strongly, encapsulated in a real Straw Dogs moment when Mihail enters the local village bar, his discomfort palpable as the hostile attention of the entire room turns towards him.

The disquiet intensifies as it becomes clear that the pair intend to live together when the house is completed. The stepfather rejects the idea of Mihail and Fauna ‘living together like pigs’. Fauna’s very name alludes to this assimilation of animal and human behaviour in Delta, although the animal metaphor is a complex one. In a scene of sexual violence that recalls the opening pig-handling scene the viewer is distanced from the action by long shot framing and this sense of restraint is characteristic of the film.

As brother and sister grow closer, their flourishing physicality is elliptically suggested rather than explicitly shown and the viewer is again denied another voyeuristic opportunity. In one scene, Mihail and Fauna lie contentedly on the wooden floor of the unfinished house, intimating that their relationship has been consummated. They are framed from above, Fauna gently caresses her tortoise, and in the microcosm of this moment they seem perfectly happy. Their self-containment is interrupted when Mihail opens a door in the floor to board his boat, visually bisecting the space. Fauna’s reluctance to see him go is unsettling, a portent of events to come.

Delta‘s brilliant soundtrack was created by virtuoso violinist Félix Lajkí³, who also played the role of Mihail. Taking inspiration from the Delta region, he composed the music as filming took place. Also notable are the hammer symphony that scores the building of the house and the fervent cacophony of insects whirring over an earlier scene of acute sexual tension between Fauna and Mihail. The use of Popol Vuh’s music to accompany the ethereal floating funeral procession made me wonder if, like Werner Herzog, who used their music in several films, Mundruczí³ wishes to impart to his audience the indifference of nature to mankind.

Drawing from Shakespeare’s classic revenge tragedy Hamlet and Euripides’ Electra, the siblings’ downfall is duly played out, their circumstances and familial relations contriving towards their destruction as surely as the river flows. I am reminded of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s debut The Return (2003), which also features a fractured family floundering amid a vast and tranquil wilderness. The natural setting of both films is cinematically impressive and the characters are not hindered by their environment but by each other; the brutality of human nature ultimately overcomes and destroys the protagonists of Delta of in spite of their resilience. The immutability and impartiality of nature further accentuates the humans’ violent tendencies; in the closing shot of Delta, Fauna’s adored pet tortoise crawls slowly along in total oblivion to the fate of its keeper.

Jessica Dickenson

Format: Cinema

Date: 8 May 2009

Distributor: Diffusion Pictures

Venues: London and key cities

Director: Azazel Jacobs

Writer: Azazel Jacobs

Cast: Matt Boren, Ken Jacobs, Flo Jacobs

USA 2008

94 mins

On paper, Momma’s Man sounds uninspiring: a thirty-something man named Mikey (played by Matt Boren) with a wife and baby in Los Angeles visits his parents’ New York loft while on a business trip and finds himself incapable of returning to the West Coast. But this quietly astonishing film from Azazel Jacobs is much more than the sum of its parts; it’s a smart, beautifully constructed lo-fi meditation on childhood, family and aging. Jacobs filmed his follow-up to The GoodTimes Kid (2005) in his childhood home in lower Manhattan and cast his own parents, Ken and Flo Jacobs, as Mikey’s parents. Although they have little acting experience, they are both important artists in their own right - Ken an influential experimental filmmaker and Flo a painter.

Mikey, already on his way back to the airport, suddenly decides to delay his flight by a day. After his exceptionally kind, patient mom cooks him dinner, he heads up to his bedroom in a ramshackle alcove, drapes himself in an old Halloween costume, finds a guitar and thumbs through a high school notebook, full of badly written lyrics about break-ups like ‘I hope you die too’. As the days start to pass by, he keeps delaying his flight home, repeatedly making excuses for prolonging his stay, jeopardising his relationship and his career.

Haunted by the idea of watching his parents get old, he begins to revert back to adolescence, seeming more juvenile with every day that passes. He creeps back into the house after getting drunk playing arcade games, and sits around reading comic books in bed wearing nothing but shabby long johns. His mother fusses over him, constantly trying to feed him, making sure that he’s dressed warmly enough, and even gives him pocket money - in short, fulfilling all of the endearing, yet exasperating, rituals of parenthood. Eventually, Mikey becomes more childlike, more helpless, unable to even leave the loft by himself.

What makes the film so exceptional, aside from a great performance by Boren, are the filmmaker’s inspirational parents, and the loft itself. It’s packed with eccentric ephemera collected over the 40 years that the family have lived there, from dancing plastic robots and a collection of snow globes to 78 records, which Ken lovingly listens to. His son, with the help of the cinematographer Tobias Datum (who also shot Gerardo Naranjo’s Voy a explotar), seems to document his home for the sake of posterity, but it’s also an intimate exploration of a very personal space, laid bare for the audience. The incredibly genuine performances delivered by both Ken and Flo seem to further blur the line between biography and fiction; scenes of them watching Ken’s films, projected in the loft, add another beguiling dimension to the picture.

Although the laid-back pacing demands a little patience, Momma’s Man is full of comic moments, while the poignant relationship between parent and child is rarely portrayed on screen with so much honesty. It’s a tribute to both Jacobs’s parents and to childhood, not to mention a bohemian New York lifestyle on the verge of extinction.

Sarah Cronin

Format: Cinema

Date: 8 May 2009

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Venues: Curzon Soho, Ritzy, Screen on the Green (London) and key cities

Director: Bent Hamer

Writer: Bent Hamer

Cast: Bí¥rd Owe, Espen Skjí¸nberg, Ghita Ní¸rby, Henny Moan

Norway 2007

86 mins

I think I understand this film. Not that it’s difficult, but I think that there is something to ‘get’ about the film.

It is a film about Odd Horten. A taciturn train driver who has just retired. It is obviously a film about old age and death. That is what the narrative is about. But the literal depiction of this subject is embedded in its metaphorical and symbolic representation. The things that are done and said are not just things that occur in a few days of an old man’s life: they poetically express his human condition.

It is all over for him. He sits quietly amid fun and noise. He gets left behind. He gets stuck. He is late, he is missing, he escapes, he can’t be contacted. He gets shut in. He casts off his possessions. He puts the cloth over his canary’s cage. He is alone and in the dark.

He meets another old man. This man is lying in the snow. Odd goes to where he lives, in a dark place full of ice and strange things from other places in the past. This man shows him something very old, and tells him that though it has come to rest, its journey is not over. Odd accompanies him as he goes blindly on a last journey.

Finally, Odd sees someone from his own past. He takes a leap into the unknown. And he is reunited with someone who thought she wouldn’t see him again.

Here are a few things that the film is not:

It’s not weird, contrived, or surreal. All these events happen plainly, gently. The mood is sombre but not grim. Sad but not depressing. Melancholy but not maudlin. Slow but not boring. A cliché would be ‘bittersweet’, but in fact it’s better for being neither bitter nor sweet. It looks unblinkingly at some of the most difficult things in life without ever dipping into the sentimental.

Here are some reasons to see the film:

It looks beautiful. It shows a dignified, old-fashioned side of Norwegian urban life, set off against the gleaming winter landscape that surrounds it, and the svelte iron machines that master that landscape.

It sounds beautiful. The Norwegian dialogue is a delight for an Anglophone to listen to, with its pleasing resemblance to a quaint form of English (for instance someone who ski-jumps appear to be a ‘hopper’). And there is a suitably icy soundtrack featuring glockenspiel and pedal steel.

It is about age, loss, and death, and it reflects on these things in a calm, quiet way.

Peter Momtchiloff

Format: Cinema

Release date: 10 April 2009

Venues: Cineworld Haymarket, Gate, Curzon Soho, Rio, Ritzy (London) and key cities

Distributor: Momentum Pictures

Director:Tomas Alfredson

Writer: John Ajvide Lindquist (based on his novel)

Original title:

Cast: Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson, Per Ragnar

Sweden 2008

115 mins

According to the established lore, vampires cannot enter a house uninvited. In Let the Right One In, 12-year-old Oskar discovers what happens if a vampire bends the rule when he dares Eli (for all appearances, a 12-year-old girl who has recently moved in next door) to enter his apartment without formally inviting her in. As Eli steps across the threshold, she begins to alarmingly ooze blood from her mouth, nose, eyes and skin pores. Horrified, Oskar hastens to say the magic words and the bleeding stops. In a striking reversal of the tradition, the vampire is not a frightening figure threatening penetration of the victim’s private space, but a vulnerable creature harmed by her friend’s reluctance to trust her. A lonely, passive, sleepy-looking boy who can only dream of revenge against the bullies who torment him at school, Oskar learns that letting in the seemingly dangerous other is the best thing he can do. In Eli, an outsider like him, he finds the possibility of love.

Let the Right One In is one of a recent number of vampire films that have focused primarily on love. Since its appearance in Victorian literature, the vampire has always symbolised socially unacceptable sexual practices and desires, and film adaptations have thoroughly mined the steamy repressed sexuality that underlies Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla. But as female desire, lesbian relationships or fellatio, for example, have stopped being seen as risqué subject matter, a preoccupation with love, rather than sex, has become more central to recent revisitations of vampire mythology (although the success of Twilight shows that in the USA’s current neo-Puritan climate at least, the vampire as metaphor for the dangers of teenage sex still has life in it – no pun intended).

Let the Right One In takes the focus on love further than some of the recent vampire films on the subject in that the relationship it centres on is entirely asexual. Even when Oskar and Eli share the same bed one night, there is nothing sexual about it. When Oskar asks Eli to be his girlfriend, it is through the sweetly quaint ‘Want to go steady?’ Eli, whose main objection is that she’s not really a girl, agrees when Oskar explains that it wouldn’t involve anything more than hanging out.

In this, Let the Right One In is close to Guillermo del Toro’s debut feature Cronos (1993), a vampire movie that revolves around the relationship between a little girl, Aurora, and her grand-father. Both Cronos and Let the Right One In are concerned with a love that is not only asexual but also unconditional. In Let the Right One In, Oskar gradually learns to love and accept Eli for what she is, whatever that may be. In Cronos, there is a great tenderness between Aurora and her grandfather and she unquestioningly accepts him, whether human or ghoul, alive or undead.

In both films, it is an imperfect, tainted kind of love: the first time Eli sees Oskar, he is stabbing at a tree with a knife, repeating ‘squeal, pig, squeal’ in a fantasy of revenge against his tormentors. From the start, their relationship is marked by intimations of violence, and in the end their love is indeed sealed in blood. There is an ever-present sense of danger whenever Eli and Oskar are together (subtly maintained through evocative sound effects): her animal nature is revealed early on and we can never be sure that she would not harm him. It is this threat underlying their love that makes the film so touching and melancholy, so real and unsentimental. Let the Right One In, perhaps more subtly than its predecessors in the sub-genre, perfectly captures the nature of love as a delicate and dangerous balancing act, lovers poised for a fleeting, magical moment between need and defiance, trust and menace, sweetness and violence.

Tina Park

This is an edited extract from ‘A Stake Through the Heart: Vampire Love’. Read the whole article as well as an interview with writer John Ajvide Lindqvist in our spring 09 print issue. Focusing on Tainted Love, it includes articles on incestuous cinematic siblings, François Ozon’s tales of tortuous relationships, destructive passion in Nic Roeg’s Bad Timing, Julio Medem‘s ambiguous lovers and nihilistic tenderness from Kôji Wakamatsu. Also in this issue: Interview with Pascal Laugier (Martyrs), the Polish New Wave that never existed and comic strip on the Watchmen film adaptation + much more!

Format: Cinema

Release date: 24 April 2009

Venues: Odeon Covent Garden, Phoenix, Renoir (London) and key cities

Distributor: Revolver Entertainment

Director: Werner Herzog

USA 2007

99 mins

Sheets of ice expand beyond the borders of the screen in Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World. The director draws our attention to the enormity of the glacial shelves, reminding us that ice was once the means through which nature destroyed planetary life, through which it undid its own handiwork. The memory of this first apocalypse is called to mind as prelude to a coming one. In Herzog’s world-view, we are only guests on the planet, the continental surfaces of which will long outlast the human species. His title is in this way doubly suggestive.

Our encounter with these vast spaces is also intended to remind us of all that we fail to see. Where the blue-grey ice meets the blue-grey sky, we detect nature’s purpose emerging only now and again from behind a niveous veil of fog just as it had in Herzog’s Heart of Glass (1976), Nosferatu (1979), and The Dark Glow of the Mountains (1985). Encounters thus tells us more about the director’s distinctive perspective than it does about McMurdo Station, the Antarctic research centre where the film was shot. Herzog’s impatience with the human race, his antipathy to our clumsy and intrusive presence, here takes centre stage. Yet in this film, as in his other works, we are presented with a contradiction: though Herzog may be annoyed with mankind, awaiting the apocalypse and even simulating it on the screen in the form of those desolate, empty spaces where he finds little more than abject traces of human industry, the director likes people, especially the ‘dreamers’ who inhabit Antarctica. He appears to find them endearing, just as he did Timothy Treadwell, the late star of Grizzly Man. How can Herzog have so much antipathy toward humans – taunting and objectifying them, even comparing them unfavourably to ants, apes and other animals – while at once offering them a steady supply of sympathy?

That nature is titanic and we are trivial is a point Herzog makes by repeatedly including images of the Ross Sea, a frozen surface so extensive that it would cover the state of Texas. The sun reflecting off the surfeit of snow and ice can be blinding, but Encounters implies that we have blinded ourselves. In one sequence new arrivals to McMurdo prepare for the dangerous eventuality of a white-out, a massive snowstorm, by placing plastic buckets over their heads. During a two-day training exercise called ‘happy camper’, they learn to construct survival trenches and igloos. The activity that involves white plastic pails – each with an eerie happy face scrawled upon it – is known as ‘buckethead’. Predictably the bucketheads lose their way; as is often the case in Herzog’s films, his protagonists find themselves, either despite or because of their intentions, wandering in circles. Self-imposed blindness is, of course, his point. Snow and ice, however powerful they may be, are not our enemies. In willfully forgetting that we are guests on this planet, it is we who have placed the buckets atop our heads. Though Herzog includes historical footage of Ernest Shackleton struggling heroically to overcome the perils associated with Antarctic exploration, our real foe is not the ice, it is us.

Herzog has a history of making nature films that seem to set themselves against other nature films. He is slowly reshaping the genre, and in this regard Encounters is no exception. It recalls its many predecessors: a visit to Mount Erebus, an active volcano on Ross Island, suggests scenes from Herzog’s La Soufrií­Â¨re (1977); the seal-scientist sequence reproduces images from Bells from the Deep (1995); and footage of a plane landing on a wide frozen space brings the opening moments of Fata Morgana (1971) to mind. Each of these films are stages in the director’s continuing dialogue with the nature film, but even more they concern our relationship to nature itself. In making sport – more or less directly – of the family-friendly film March of the Penguins (2005), Herzog teasingly asks an Antarctic penguin researcher about ‘gay penguins’, about the possibility of their ‘strange sexual behaviour’, and about whether or not there is ‘insanity among penguins’. This is clever, and it confirms for us that Herzog is refusing a quaint portrait of the penguin world, yet his point becomes poignant when we watch one penguin wander off course, parting from the pack. Herzog describes the penguin as ‘deranged’, and as we observe the lone wanderer helplessly crossing the snowscape Herzog informs us that ‘he is heading towards certain death’. The director’s aim, however, is not to depict animal insanity – he has little interest in penguin psychology – but he instead wants to let the image of the penguin resonate with us. It is doomed and lonely, small and stubborn, and will in the end have been tormented by its own volition. Whether we are penguins or bucketheads makes little difference: though at times we may be likeable, the ice will long outlast us.

Brad Prager

This is an edited extract of ‘Snow Blind: Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World‘, first published in the winter 08 print issue of Electric Sheep, which focused on snow in cinema. For more information about this issue, go to our Archive.

Read about other films by Werner Herzog: Rescue Dawn, Fitzcarraldo, The Wild Blue Yonder.

Watch the trailer

Format: Cinema

Release date: 10 April 2009

Venues: ICA Cinema (London) and selected key cities

Distributor: Network Releasing

Director: Pablo Larrain

Writers: Alfredo Castro, Mateo Iribarren, Pablo Larrain

Cast: Alfredo Castro, Paola Lattus, Héctor Morales, Amparo Noguera

Chile/Brazil 2008

97 mins

Given that Chilean films only make rare appearances on British cinema screens outside of specialised festivals, Pablo Larrain’s second feature Tony Manero is a welcome, engrossing and utterly disturbing surprise. Set in Pinochet’s Chile in the late 1970s, the film takes its title from John Travolta’s main character in Saturday Night Fever, with whom the middle-aged, tight-lipped and highly damaged protagonist Raíºl is fatally obsessed. Spending most of his days in the local cinema watching Travolta’s moves again and again, he gets himself a tailor-made white disco suit, dyes his hair black, meticulously rehearses the slick choreography with his girlfriend, her daughter and the daughter’s boyfriend, and even builds a flashing glass floor in the bar where the group performs at the weekends. Raíºl aims high, and he will stop at nothing to become Chile’s official Tony Manero lookalike in a national TV contest.

As the plot unfolds and the magnitude of Raíºl’s fixation becomes apparent, it is clear that the hero of Larrain’s strangely affecting South American disco nightmare has barely anything in common with Travolta’s American working-class kid trying to dance away his boring life. Raíºl Peralta is a loner, a psychotic and nihilistic murderer, but played with heartbreaking dedication by Chilean stage actor Alfredo Castro (who is also co-author of the film’s script), he’s a riveting character, his blunt roughness and unprepossessing appearance masking a skewed inner grace.

This bizarre charm infuses the film as a whole, and is emphasised by the grey and grainy texture, apt cinematography and handheld camera, which seems to weigh down on the central character as it follows him, almost perched on his shoulders. Larrain thrusts the viewer into the feral rhythm of Raíºl’s desperate march towards showbiz stardom, focusing on the character’s endless perambulation, and offering a gripping portrait of a restless existence lost in a socially and politically repressed society at a dead end.

The film’s greatest strength lies in the unsophisticated manner in which it presents the evil deeds that Raíºl is driven to commit in the pursuit of his goal. This crudeness is compounded by the film’s sparse use of music, which is only occasionally enlivened by snippets of the original Bee Gees soundtrack and a romantic Latin-American song played on an old tape recorder. In that latter scene, Raíºl’s girlfriend tries to reach out and offer some warmth to her isolated companion, but he foolishly chooses her sensual daughter instead, merely proving once more his inability to connect with others in the screwed up world he lives in.

Superbly paced, deftly acted and pervaded with satirical wit, Tony Manero is full of a dangerous, manic energy that comes directly from its main character, a man capable of dazzling gestures and a remarkable self-control in spite of his confusion. But ultimately there is little respite in Tony Manero, and that’s what makes it a film of such peculiar emotional intensity.

Pamela Jahn