Category Archives: Cinema releases

Check it out, Cinema releases, Festivals

The Duke of Burgundy

The Duke of Burgundy
The Duke of Burgundy

Format: Cinema

Release date: 20 February 2015

Distributor: Curzon Film World

Director: Peter Strickland

Writer: Peter Strickland

Cast: Sidse Babett Knudsen, Chiara D’Anna

UK 2014

104 mins

Peter Strickland’s follow-up to the impressive Berberian Sound Studio is a strange and methodical study of a relationship under strain. We are introduced to Evelyn and Cynthia, the former apparently a servant to her cold lepidopterist boss, dutifully doing her chores, being found wanting, and suffering abuse. But it slowly emerges that this is an elaborate dominant/submissive game, in which both are playing their parts. The supposedly submissive Evelyn is actually in control, creating the scenarios that Cynthia has to precisely act out, selecting the clothes that her ‘master’ wears. Evelyn seems to be deliriously happy with the scenario at first, but for Cynthia the strain of maintaining the performance is beginning to show. As the days repeat the cycle of servitude, transgression and punishment, cracks start to form in the façade, and it seems inevitable that something will break.

If a lesbian sub/dom two-hander already seems to be a singular enough cinematic prospect, this does not begin to prepare you for the oddness of Strickland’s treatment. We are in an unnamed location; although it was shot in Hungary, British accents dominate, and the trappings of the story suggest a rural home counties university town. We are adrift in time, too, though the technology, dress and pastiche title sequence suggest that it is set in the 60s-70s. There appear to be no men, and the evening’s entertainment consists of lectures about butterflies, moths and crickets, which are attended by immaculately styled ladies, and the occasional shop window dummy. The suggestion is that everybody in this world is in a similar relationship to Cynthia and Evelyn’s: the services of a specialist bondage furniture maker are in high demand, and Cynthia suspects her lover of betrayal in polishing another woman’s boots. This appears to be an attempt to allegorise and abstract the nature of all relationships. The Duke Of Burgundy is focused on the moments where passion gives way to obligation and duty, and the demands made on a couple as they try to keep each other happy begin to eat away at the affection they are trying to maintain. It’s a film about performance and the people we have to be.

It’s also a film of very precise and measured derangement. The production design, wardrobe (by Andrea Flesch) and set dressing seem to have been agonised over, creating a specific, very sensual world of patterned tile and wallpaper, pencil skirts and corsets, silk, mushrooms and endless mounted butterflies. The soundtrack is an extraordinary thing: the music by Cat’s Eyes ranges from dreamy folk to near Morricone operatics, supplemented by foregrounded foley work and amplified insect noise. As with Berberian Sound Studio, there is a growing sense of insanity, of reality slipping its moorings. The editing brings to mind the work of Nic Roeg and Donald Cammel, cross-cutting from scene to scene, repeating visual motifs that all culminate in an extended nightmarish sequence where Cynthia’s anxieties burst into a riot of moth wings and horror movie symbolism. In its emphasis on power shifts it recalls Joseph Losey’s The Servant (1964). In its dreamy look it brings to mind the 70s euro-sleaze of Rollin and Franco.

But all of this would be worthless without the committed work of Sidse Babett Knudsen as Cynthia and Chiara D’Anna as Evelyn, both giving performances of performances for much of the running time, leaving the moments when the masks slip to display the increasing desperation and dissatisfaction, the fleeting moments of joy. D’Anna’s glowing face as she waits expectantly for chastisement is funny and affecting, Knudsen’s slow breakdown as she fails to deliver the requisite level of bitch is quietly devastating. At 104 minutes it overstays its welcome a little, although it is both amusing and entrancing. It is hermetically sealed, and some will find it suffocating, too mannered and strange for proper engagement, but Strickland is aiming for something ambitious and transcendent, and pretty much gets there. Pay attention at the end for some of the oddest credits you’re ever likely to read.

This review is part of our LFF 2014 coverage.

Mark Stafford

Watch a clip:

Check it out, Cinema releases, Festivals

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Format: Cinema

Release date: 22 May 2015

DVD/Blu-ray release date: 24 July 2015

Distributor: Studiocanal

Director: Ana Lily Amirpour

Writer: Ana Lily Amirpour

Cast: Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Dominic Rain

Iran, USA 2014

100 mins

One of the top picks in the outstanding selection of this year’s Etrange Festival, Iranian filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour’s debut feature mixes sumptuous high contrast black and white cinematography, Italian Western music, Jim Jarmusch driftiness, comics influences, Farsi language and a chador-wearing skateboarding vampire girl to create a seductive, singular world entirely her own.

In the Iranian ghost town of Bad City, a hard-working boy with a 50s car and a junkie father tries to confront the nasty drug-dealer who has them under his thumb, and encounters a strange, silent black-cloaked girl in the process. Tentative love slowly develops between the two even though unbeknownst to Arash the Girl continues to stalk the streets at night and feed on the desperado denizens of Bad City.

The loose narrative meanders with achingly beautiful melancholy through one poetic moment after another. The Girl’s skateboard rescuing of a tripping Arash dressed as Dracula in a deserted street is sweet and funny. The oppressive, forbidding-looking machinery in an oil field is a recurrent backdrop, most notably in a scene where a romantic gift is received in a way that undercuts any potential sentimentality. Similarly, a slow-motion scene of developing intimacy set to White Lies’ ‘Death’ is both tender and charged with an undercurrent of danger.

The love between Arash and the Girl slowly grows amid a sombre world where relationships are all tainted: Arash’s parents, the tragic prostitute Atti with Arash’s father Hossein and the abusive drug dealer/pimp have woven webs of desperation, selfishness, violence and untold grief, sometimes punctuated by awkward, misdirected affection. As the bond between Arash and the Girl tightens, they discover that love is about accepting the other’s ‘badness’ and finding the human warmth you didn’t even know you longed for.

Detached and alone, the Girl is a terrific character, both touching and fearsome, combining childlike ingenuity with a menacing edge. Her charismatic presence quietly dominates the film, and she only needs to appear to create a force field of dark energy on the screen. There is also the clear intimation that she and Atti, the only two women in the film – and maybe the street urchin who has a few alarming encounters with the Girl – know more than the hapless male characters, who do not seem to perceive the forces that influence their lives.

Rich in atmosphere, deliberately slow and stylized, the film is in the vein of Let the Right One In, Only Lovers Left Alive and Nadja, using the vampire figure to dreamily evoke loneliness, desperation and the slim hope for a non-toxic human connection. With very little dialogue, the film uses a striking, luminous visual language of its own creation to tell the beginning of cautious new love. A true gem that is not to be missed.

Virginie Sélavy

This review is part of our Etrange Festival 2014 coverage.

Watch the trailer:

Check it out, Cinema releases, Festivals

Pasolini

Pasolini
Pasolini

Format: Cinema

Release date: 11 September 2015

Distributor: BFI

Director: Abel Ferrara

Writers: Maurizio Braucci, Abel Ferrara, Nicola Tranquillino

Cast: Willen Dafoe, Maria de Medeiros

France, Italy, Belgium 2014

86 mins

It’s not difficult to understand why a director with a back catalogue like Abel Ferrara’s would have an attraction to fellow director Pier Paolo Pasolini. As Ferrara has said, ‘I was a student of his, of his films’, and both share a filmic vision that encompasses and embraces political/cultural transgression and social marginality. Both have chosen to walk their own path and remain as independent as possible with regard to ‘the industry’ and both are culturally engaged. Ferrara, a maker of films with a decidedly pessimistic point of view whose oeuvre has addressed rape, revenge, corrupt cops, serial killing artists, tyrannical directors, vampirism as addiction, drug trafficking, apocalyptic scenarios and sexual assault at a high political level has developed a cinematic menu that Pasolini would no doubt relish. So it is with some disappointment that Ferrara’s take on Pasolini screened in Toronto could only be met with a lacklustre response by me and the rest of the press.

Ferrara and co-writer Maurizo Braucci have chosen to eschew the usual tropes and conventions of the biopic – a narrative arc that usually takes the audience on a journey through the trials and triumphs, comprising the subject’s key life moments and clarifying just who he was and why we should be interested – by setting the entire film during Pasolini’s last hours on 2 November 1975. It was a time when the director was simultaneously dealing with the moral backlash resulting from his film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, working on his unorthodox metafictional novel Petrolio as well as his screenplay for Porno – Teo – Kolossal, giving his last ever press interviews before he was brutally murdered (or assassinated) on that fatal day – in an irony Pasolini would no doubt have savoured – the Day of the Dead in Mexico. So much territory is covered and condensed into such a small time frame that audiences who are not previously acquainted with Pasolini and his importance to 20th-century Italian culture might find it hard to engage with the film.

Pasolini is not so much an evocation or re-enactment as a poetic and impressionistic view of the man, and this structure proves to be a little too elliptical and confounding. Willem Dafoe, who bears a striking resemblance to Pasolini and is an actor who satisfyingly takes chances and seems to revel in extreme roles, has a good stab at the role but when Pasolini’s pronouncements on poetics, politics and culture come out of Dafoe’s American-accented mouth, credibility is undermined. Though Dafoe tries hard with his spoken Italian in certain scenes (the film bounces in and out of English/Italian) this compromise for English-speaking audiences weakens the film considerably (there is apparently an all-Italian version for the home market). Personally, I would have preferred subtitles.

Dafoe in an interview stated: ‘I didn’t “play” him. I just tried to be his flesh, his voice, his presence in the last days of his life… Like with Jesus: I wasn’t playing THE Jesus, I was playing a Jesus… we set out to make a portrait.’ The issue here is that this ‘portrait’ is fragmentary and revealed in various non-sequential vignettes: great for the arthouse crowd but probably anathema to any general audiences, and it can be assumed that Ferrara and team are hoping for a wider audience than some of his previous films got. The ‘facts’ of Pasolini the man in Pasolini the movie are revealed through conversations, voice-overs, random thoughts, gay cruising and lunch with his beloved mother.

Indulgently perhaps, a major sequence of a film within a film occurs wherein a once-a-year sexual orgy between gay men and lesbians takes place, a lovingly imagined scene from the screenplay of Porno – Teo – Kolossal – which was of course never made. In spite of being well-imagined and shot in a Pasolini sort of way, this inclusion/intervention by Ferrara seems to either be a misguided homage or a bit of a conceit for him to want to film. Is he saying that he and Pasolini are cinematic soulmates? If so, I am afraid to say that the directors here are mismatched. There are other cinematic accounts of Pasolini – Ebbo Demant directed the documentary Das Mitleid ist gestorben (1978) about Pasolini and Stefao Battaglia made Re: Pasolini (2005) – and my regretful feeling about this new effort was that – however sincere, unsentimental and heartfelt – Abel Ferrara was not really the director to make a film version of the phenomenon that was Pier Paolo Pasolini.

This review is part of our TIFF 2014 coverage.

James B. Evans

Check it out, Cinema releases, Festivals

99 Homes

99 Holmes
99 Homes

Format: Cinema

Release date:
25 September 2015

VOD release date:
18 January 2016

DVD/BR release date:
25 January 2016

Distributor: Studiocanal

Director: Ramin Bahrani

Writers: Ramin Bahrani, Amir Naderi, Bahareh Azimi

Cast: Andrew Garfield, Michael Shannon, Laura Dern

USA 2014

112 mins

Ramin Bahrani is one of the best and most consistent of the new generation of American writer-directors who has a clear and precise filmmaking style and a consistent narrative vision of the ‘real’ America. By this is meant that he has a deep understanding of, and empathy with, America’s immigrants and outsiders. He is unique in sustaining what used to be called a committed cinema. His new film, 99 Homes is no exception. Different in tone than his previous excellent film, Goodbye Solo (2008), it is a hard-hitting and well-researched examination of the vagaries, cruelties, exploitations and de-humanisation of the home repossession ‘business’ in the US today.

This piercing and eye-opening film largely eschews sentimentality but rather poses tough moral questions whose ambivalences are left open for audiences to ponder. Bahrani has marshalled a strong cast of better known actors – presumably budgets have risen – while steadfastly maintaining his independence and integrity. The direct cinema approach to filming and the use of very real location shooting positions the narrative and film squarely in the world of docu-drama and faction cinema, and is all the more authoritative for that.

Behind in his mortgage payments, construction worker Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) finds himself and his dependents, son Connor (Noah Lomax) and single mother Lynn Nash (Laura Dern), being unexpectedly and forcefully evicted from their family home by the brutal and cold methods of Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) a property acquisitions and repo man who is one of the few taking full advantage of the market meltdown. Desperate to save the family home and provide a roof over their heads, Nash has few options and must reluctantly and bitterly accept a go-fer job from Carver, which leads him into a dark and shady world of questionable tactics and moral ambiguity.

Extremely well-written (by Bahrani, Amir Naderi and Bahareh Azimi) and directed, what sounds in this brief synopsis like a stock premise is in fact a challenging and not-to-be-missed film that is absolutely on the mark and as timely as a newscast. Ramin Bahrani continues on his successful journey as a purveyor of excellent and challenging films for the thinking audience.

This review is part of our TIFF 2014 coverage.

James B. Evans

Watch the trailer:

Check it out, Cinema releases, Festivals

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films

Electric Boogaloo
Electric Boogaloo

Format: Cinema

Release date: 5 June 2015

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Mark Hartley

Australia 2014

107 mins

Australian exploitation fan boy par excellence, Mark Hartley (Not Quite Hollywood, Machete Maidens Unleashed!) wraps his schlock doc trilogy with this suitably energetic ride through the highs and lows of Israeli film moguls Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus’s career – otherwise known as the bold, brash forces of nature behind infamous B-movie studio Cannon Films in the 1980s.

The pair – already the subject of Hilla Medalia’s Cannes-feted and officially sanctioned doc The Go-Go Boys – are notable in their absence from Hartley’s film (Globus and the late Golan reportedly wished to torpedo his efforts with Medalia’s project), and appear only in archive material (much of it drawn from the BBC). But Hartley rises to the challenge admirably. Talking heads – of which there are a staggering 80 in total – fire off anecdotes and sound bites with increasingly gleeful abandon, in an enjoyable ride through one of Hollywood’s more bizarre eras.

Oddly, there is scant mention (or analysis) of the cousins prior to their film association in Israel, nor does Roger Corman (whom Golan briefly worked with) appear to warrant a nod. The trash traders’ about-turn later in Cannon’s life, chasing credibility by pursuing the likes of John Cassavetes, Peter Bogdanovich and even Jean-Luc Godard, is also frustratingly not explored beyond a quick, cursory glance.

But what Hartley’s film does do, it does rather well. The absurdity of Cannon’s low-brow, worry-about-the-plot later mentality, its shameless pre-sales for so-called star-led vehicles that existed in poster form only, its Gargantuan output (up to 50 films a year) and appetite (buying up over 40 per cent of Britain’s film exhibition in one fell swoop) allowed its uncouth stars to shine briefly but brightly. Although few mourned the loss of the pair’s studio – brought down by box-office bombs such as Superman IV and Masters of the Universe, amidst reports of false accounting – many of those interviewed clearly look back with bemused fondness at what went on.

Cannon, as several note in the film, evidently provided a blueprint of sorts for the likes of Miramax (and for recent bone-head franchises like The Expendables) to flourish. It made a star out of Chuck Norris (who is not interviewed), discovered Jean-Claude Van Damme and set a precedent with Sylvester Stallone (both of whom are also absent), with the latter scoring an absurdly inflated pay cheque, in excess of $US10million, for the doomed arm-wrestling romp Over the Top. At one point, Cannon even owned the rights to Spider-Man, Superman and the Captain America franchises, despite its shocking appetite for sexual violence (brazenly on show notably in Michael Winner’s Death Wish sequels).

Golan and Globus’s eventual falling out (and subsequent reconciliation) is less effectively visualized here (see Medalia’s film for that). But otherwise, Hartley’s geek-fuelled journey down memory lane (with its generous serving of clips in tow) delivers a vibrant, often frenetic look at a remarkable pair of film-fawning men who were – if nothing else – determined to take on Hollywood at its own game. That they ultimately failed (or were, at least, kept firmly on the periphery) only adds to the fascinating nature of their screen story. Some detail may be lacking (and the story is hardly ‘untold’), but a ‘wild’ ride it most certainly is. Cinephiles and Cannon obsessives should form a line here.

Ed Gibbs

This review is part of our TIFF 2014 coverage.
Check it out, Cinema releases, Festivals

Beyond the Reach

The Reach
The Reach

Format: Cinema

Release date: 31 July 2015

Distributor: Curzon Film World

Director: Jean-Baptise Léonetti

Writer: Stephen Susco

Based on the novel Deathwatch by: Robb White

Cast: Michael Douglas, Jeremy Irvine, Ronny Cox, Hanna Mangan Lawrence

USA 2014

90 mins

***1/2 out of *****

Beyond the Reach offers up happy corroboration that filmmaker Jean-Baptiste Léonetti’s astonishing dystopian science fiction masterpiece Carré Blanc was no first feature fluke. Léonetti is the real thing and he can direct rings round most contemporary genre helmers. Instead of all the tin-eyed boneheads who keep directing any number of visually challenged studio abominations, Léonetti has ‘go-to guy’ written all over him.

Read Greg Klymkiw’s alalysis of the soundtrack of Carré Blanc.

Based on Deathwatch, a hugely popular boys’ adventure novel written by the prolific author Robb White (who also toiled as William Castle’s screenwriter on such exploitation delights as The House on Haunted Hill, 13 Ghosts, The Tingler, Macabre and Homicidal), it was competently adapted by Stephen Susco. Updating the late 60s setting of the book, the script invests it with the right amount of macho existentialism, ultra-violence, hilariously nasty black humour and up-to-the-minute social commentary involving the haves and have-nots of the world.

I have to admit, however, that I originally went into the picture knowing only that it was Léonetti’s sophomore feature starring Michael Douglas, and it was only while watching the movie that I realized its literary pedigree. That it was based on one of many White books I read as a kid (and still proudly own some 40-plus years later) turned out to be extra layers of icing on this very rich cake. (Pathetically, I even remembered seeing the fine ABC Movie of the Week entitled Savages, which starred Andy Griffith and Sam Bottoms in the lead roles.)

This stirring mano a mano variant on The Most Dangerous Game faithfully sticks to the original main characters of White’s book, and for good reason – you can’t beat a winning formula. Madec (Douglas) is a disgustingly rich cell-phone-tied dealmaker who hires the impoverished Ben (hunky Jeremy Irvine of War Horse fame) to be his guide in the deadly Mojave Desert so he can bag a new hunting trophy (he boasts having many), the rare bighorn sheep. The two men are clearly oil and water, but their time together eventually yields a father-son-like bond. Alas, Madec accidentally shoots something he shouldn’t. When it’s clear Ben won’t go for a whopping bribe, the sportsman in Madec sends Ben into the desert so he can hunt him down, but also gives the lad a fighting chance. Ben proves to be a formidable adversary. This fuels Madec even further.

Léonetti keeps the suspense taut, the action blistering and his exquisite eye for placing man against imposing backdrops has not at all wavered since Carré Blanc. His delightfully grim sense of humour is also set to overdrive, especially since Michael Douglas is remarkably game to chew the scenery and spit out one nasty line after the other.

The only place L&#233:onetti is let down by Susco’s otherwise fine script is during the climactic moments, which feel like a perverse bargain basement Fatal Attraction. Given Michael Douglas’s involvement in that film, this could have been a cool borderline post-modernist touch, but the action is rendered far too straight up and oddly, and one can feel Léonetti not quite at ease. You can’t blame him. He’s handed gold, then when it counts the most, his producer (Douglas) and screenwriter toss him a smelly bighorn sheep turd.

Luckily for us, we don’t have to smell it for too long and its aroma doesn’t overpower the rest of the film’s smells of victory.

This review is part of our TIFF 2014 coverage.

Greg Klymkiw

Check it out, Cinema releases

Honeymoon

Honeymoon
Honeymoon

Format: Cinema

Release date: 26 September 2014

Distributor: Arrow Films

Director: Leigh Janiak

Writers: Phil Graziadei, Leigh Janiak

Cast: Rose Leslie, Harry Treadaway, Bem Huber

USA 2014

87 mins

In what was one of the highlights of the Discovery Screen programme at Film4 FrightFest, newly-married couple Paul and Bea arrive at her family’s cabin in the woods for their honeymoon. Although she hasn’t visited the cabin for years, her memories of the place are positive, and quickly the two settle into a peaceful routine: walks in the woods, pancakes for breakfast and the discovery of marital routine. However, each night when they fall asleep, a strange light starts circling the cabin. One night, when Paul wakes and fails to find Bea next to him, he heads outside to look for her, and things start to take a turn for the worse.

Effectively a slow-burning two-hander, Honeymoon is an impressive lesson in stretching a meagre budget to build up tension and unease. With strong lead performances, the film works best when it is exploring the marriage at a micro level: what works as an alien intrusion in their lives can also stand for the dissolving of their relationship due to changing personalities. It is this ambiguity, further emphasized by the surprise meeting of an old acquaintance of Bea’s at the local diner, that gives the film its sharp edge.

Director Leigh Janiak is terrific at creating atmosphere early on: although the cabin and the woods initially come across as peaceful, welcoming locations, it’s the contrast with what happens when the couple go to sleep that unnerves the audience. The encounter at the diner only adds to the sensation that something is wrong. As Rose Leslie’s Bea becomes a mystery even to her husband Paul, it’s the drip by drip delivery of clues that makes watching Honeymoon an exercise in unbearable tension.

This review is part of our Film4 FrightFest 2014 coverage.

Building to a convincing and eye-popping climax, Honeymoon is the sort of low-budget film that manages to frighten without ever resorting to cheap jump-scare tactics like some of its big-budget counterparts. The intense focus on Bea adds further intrigue to this genre offering at a time when finding strong female leads is still a rarity.

Evrim Ersoy

Watch the trailer:

Check it out, Cinema releases, Festivals

The Tribe

The Tribe
The Tribe

Format: Cinema

Release date: 15 May 2015

DVD release date:
14 September 2015

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy

Writer: Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy

Cast: Yana Novikova, Grigoriy Fesenko, Rosa Babiy

Original title: Plemya

Ukraine 2014

130 mins

***** out of *****

One of the most appalling legacies of Russian colonisation/dictatorship of Ukraine has, in recent years, been the sexual exploitation of women (often children and teenagers). Add all the poverty and violence coursing through the nation’s soul, much of it attributable to Mother Russia’s tentacles of corruption, organized crime and twisted notions of law, order and government, and it’s not rocket science to realise how threatening the Russian regime is, not only to Ukraine, but the rest of Eastern Europe and possibly beyond. Being a Ukrainian-Canadian who has spent a lot of time in Ukraine, especially in the beleaguered Eastern regions, I’ve witnessed first-hand the horrible corruption and exploitation. (Ask me sometime about the Russian pimps who wait outside Ukrainian orphanages for days when teenage girls are released penniless into the world, only to be coerced into rust-bucket vans and dispatched to brothels.)

The Tribe is a homespun indigenous Ukrainian film that is a sad, shocking and undeniably harrowing dramatic reflection of Ukraine with the searing truthful lens of a stylistic documentary treatment (at times similar to that of Austrian auteur Ulrich Seidl).

Focusing upon children, the most vulnerable victims of Russia’s aforementioned oppression, this is a film that you’ll simply never forget. Set in a special boarding school, it paints an evocative portrait of students living within a tribal societal structure (literally as per the title) where adult supervision is minimal at best and even culpable in the desecration of youth. Living in an insular world, carved out by years of developing survival skills in this institutional environment, the kids have a long-established criminal gang culture and they engage in all manner of nefarious activities including, but not limited to, thieving, black market racketeering and pimping.

Writer-director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s mise en scène includes long, superbly composed shots and a stately, but never dull pace. This allows the film’s audience to contemplate – in tandem with the narrative’s forward movement – both the almost matter-of-fact horrors its young protagonists accept, live with and even excel at while also getting a profound sense of the ebbs and flows of life in this drab, dingy institutional setting. In a sense, the movie evokes life as it actually unfolds (or, at least, seems to).

The violence is often brutal and the film never shies away from explicit sexual frankness. We watch the beautiful teenage girls being pimped out at overnight truck stops, engaging in degrading acts of wham-bam without protection, perpetrated against their various orifices by truckers who shell out cash for the privilege. Even more harrowing is when we follow the literal results of this constant sexual activity and witness a protracted unsanitary and painful abortion.

While there are occasional moments of tenderness, especially in a romance that blossoms between one young boy and girl, there’s virtually no sense of hope that any of these children will ever escape the cycles of abuse, aberrant behaviour and debasement that rule their lives. The performances elicited by Slaboshpytskiy are so astonishing, you’re constantly in amazement over how naturalistic and reflective of life these young actors are, conveying no false notes with the kind of skill and honesty one expects from far more seasoned players.

The special circumstances these children are afflicted with also allows Slaboshpytskiy to bravely and brilliantly tell his story completely though the purest of cinematic approaches. Visuals and actions are what drive the film and ultimately prove to be far more powerful than words ever could be. Chances are very good that you’ll ultimately sit there, mouth agape as you realize that what you’re seeing on screen is unlike anything you have ever seen before. The Tribe evokes a world of silence and suffering that is also perversely borderline romantic, a world where connections and communication are key elements to add some variation to a youth culture that is as entrenched as it is ultimately constant and, frankly, inescapable.

This review is part of our TIFF 2014 coverage.

Greg Klymkiw

Check it out, Cinema releases, Festivals

It Follows

It Follows
It Follows

Format: Cinema

Release date: 27 February 2015

Distributor: Icon Film Distribution

Director: David Robert Mitchell

Writer: David Robert Mitchell

Cast: Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Lili Sepe, Daniel Zovatto, Olivia Luccardi

USA 2014

97 mins

One of the highlights of the 20th Etrange Festival, which took place in Paris in September, was undoubtedly David Robert Mitchell’s follow-up to his well-received debut, The Myth of the American Sleepover. Impressively controlled and intelligently written, It Follows revolves around a simple, strong and horribly effective concept, which is neatly stated in a title that is both disarmingly concrete and rich in ramifications.

Following a sexual encounter with a boy she likes during the summer, 19-year-old Jay starts having nightmarish visions of ominous ghostly figures who follow her relentlessly. Warned not to let them touch her, Jay is continually forced to run from the incomprehensible menace, invisible to everyone else, or attempt to pass on the haunting by sleeping with someone. With the help of her sister Kelly and their friends, Jay desperately tries to find a way of ridding herself of the ghoulish infection.

Deliberately paced, the film weaves an atmosphere of inescapable dread around the characters, making unnerving use of 360-degree pans that almost casually reveal the slowly but inexorably approaching threat, brilliantly complemented by the Carpenter-style soundtrack. The locations are perfectly chosen, from the eerily empty, impeccably groomed suburban streets, only briefly troubled by a flimsily dressed girl running in fear, to a gloomy Gothic swimming pool where the friends will try to eliminate Jay’s ghost.

Normally out of bounds to the teens, the derelict swimming pool on the other side of the tracks stands in contrast to the sanitised suburbia of their homes: it is there that they will face the hideous consequences of sex. Like the best horror films, It Follows does not explicitly spell anything out, but instead plunges its audience into the prevailing mood of its time, creating an atmosphere of terror where having sex is never any fun, reduced to a fearful act performed solely with the aim of getting rid of the ghostly affliction. That pervading, consuming anxiety is economically planted in our minds in the opening sequence, the only gory scene in this masterfully restrained film. That the house number of the unfortunate first victim should be 1492 makes it clear from the start, in a similarly understated manner, that this is a film about America.

The world of It Follows is exclusively peopled by teenagers: adults play no role in fighting the threat and the youthful gang are left to their own devices in trying to understand what is happening. This adds to the sense of claustrophobia and tension, but the sense of adult disengagement may well also be part of Mitchell’s quietly damning observations. An unsettling horror tale and a chilling appraisal of contemporary American mores, It Follows is an accomplished modern gem of fantastical cinema.

This review is part of our Etrange Festival 2014 coverage.

Virginie Sélavy

Check it out, Cinema releases, Festivals

The Babadook

The Babadook
The Babadook

Format: Cinema

Release date: 24 October 2014

Distributor: Icon Distribution

Director: Jennifer Kent

Writer: Jennifer Kent

Cast: Essie Davis, Daniel Henshall, Noah Wiseman, Hayley McElhinny

Australia 2014

93 mins

The Babadook website

Championed by Rosie Fletcher, editor of Total Film, The Babadook was the big discovery of this year’s Film 4 FrightFest. Written and directed by Jennifer Kent, it is an oppressive Australian drama that uses a children’s story to talk about the monsters that lurk in the dark corners of the mind.

The Babadook is released in the UK on DVD and Blu-ray on 16 February 2015 by Icon Distribution.

Essie Davis gives a masterful performance as Amelia, the downtrodden mother who lost her husband in a car crash the day she gave birth to their son. Sam (Noah Wiseman) is a troubled, anxious young boy dangerously obsessed with fighting monsters. One night, Sam finds a mysterious book on a shelf in his bedroom. Puzzled, Amelia reads him the story of The Babadook, which becomes increasingly sinister and threatening as they turn the pages. Soon, it seems that by opening the book they have indeed invited a dark force into their house.

Skilfully directed, the film is perfectly poised between real and unreal and manages to be both emotionally rich and disturbingly creepy, remaining ambiguous to the end. The Babadook is a great new monster, both childish and chilling with its striking silhouette and unnerving cry. Under its spell, roles shift to reveal that things may not be as straightforward as they had first appeared.

The relationship between mother and son is beautifully complex and poignant, and Essie Davis and Noah Wiseman are compelling to watch, shifting between various moods with nuance and conviction. Initially agitated and irritating, Sam becomes sweet and brave when Amelia has to confront the monster. And while at first he appeared to have behavioural problems that isolated him from other children, it soon looks like he may understand the situation much more lucidly than the adults around him.

Confirming the subtlety and profound individuality of her approach, Kent refuses to follow conventions and ends her film in an entirely unexpected and heart-breakingly resonant manner. As the book says, once the Babadook is in, you can never get rid of it. But you can learn to live with it.

This review is part of our Film4 FrightFest 2014 coverage.

Virginie Sélavy

Watch the trailer: