Category Archives: Festivals

The Untamed

the-untamed-2
The Untamed

Seen at L’Étrange Festival, Paris (France)

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Distributor: Arrow Academy

Release date: 22 May 2017

Director: Amat Escalante

Writers: Amat Escalante, Gibrán Portela

Cast: Kenny Johnston, Simone Bucio

Original title: La región salvaje

Mexico, Denmark, France 2016

100 mins

Amat Escalante’s SF exploration of Mexican society’s attitudes to sexuality is compelling despite its overuse of the supernatural.

Two Mexican films shown this year at the Etrange Festival – The Darkness and The Untamed – happen to focus on a small house in a forest clearing where strange things happen. But this is as far as the comparison extends. Awarded the Silver Lion for Best Director at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Amat Escalante’s The Untamed borrows its premise from Pasolini’s Theorem: a family is disrupted by the arrival of a very attractive stranger who seduces all of its members and turns theirs lives upside down. Where Pasolini was lashing out at the Italian bourgeoisie of the 1960s, Escalante similarly confronts a contemporary Mexican society still hopelessly bogged down in machismo, misogyny and homophobia.

The opening sequence, which contrasts two visions of female sexuality, gives a good insight into what Escalante is driving at. After a shot of a meteorite in outer space, the camera zooms on a naked Veronica (Simone Bucio) slowly reaching a climax in a dark room, eventually revealing a glimpse of the receding long tentacle that has just given her pleasure. She then leaves the wood cabin wounded and bleeding. In the next scene we witness a couple – Angel (Jesús Meza) and Alejandra (Ruth Ramos) – waking up in a sunlit bedroom. Without any preliminaries or even a kiss, Angel takes Ale from behind while the camera zooms in on her face, still and expressionless on the pillow as she waits for him to come. She then wipes herself, gets up and masturbates under the shower until she is interrupted by their kids… After meeting Ale’s gay brother Fabian (Eden Villavicencio), who works as a nurse in the local hospital, Veronica intrudes into the lives of those three characters, changing them for ever.

She is the visitor here, and Escalante plays on the name given to Terence Stamp’s character in Theorem, as the Visitor in this story is also an alien creature from outer space. The director justifies his recourse to the supernatural by the fact that reality has already gone beyond fiction, but by including a long explicit sex scene between Ale and the alien (and why not one of the men?) – which was greeted by laughter among the audience of the L’Étrange Festival – he undermines more than he enhances the film’s social criticism. In Possession (1981), Andrzej Żuławski (whose influence is acknowledged in the final credits) explicitly opted for the realm of madness, altogether forsaking realism. But Escalante wants to have it both ways and fails to solve the conflict between the genres. Showing the demon in Possession made sense in order to blur the boundaries between fantasy and reality. But since Escalante’s alien is established as real from the outset, it is hard to see the point of a sex scene that, far from producing the disturbing effect it had in Żuławski, seems to be revisiting Hideki Takayama’s manga and animés with an Overfiend redesigned by H. R. Giger. Escalante would have been better advised to follow the example of his Mexican compatriot Daniel Castro Zimbrén in The Darkness and retain more mystery, so that the otherworldly presence might serve more efficiently as a metaphor for the Mexican social atavisms he has been so brilliantly exposing in his films since his 2005 feature debut Sangre. The Untamed tones down the violence that shocked in Heli (2013) or Los Bastardos (2008) in favour of a more diffuse atmosphere of sadness and despair that still succeeds to convey Escalante’s powerful social message – despite, rather than thanks to, the alien’s presence.

Pierre Kapitaniak

The untamed screens at the London Film Festival on 8, 10, 16 October 2016.

Beyond the Walls

beyond-the-walls
Beyond the Walls

Seen at Horror Channel FrightFest, London (UK)

Format: Cinema

Director: Hervé Hadmar

Writers: Hervé Hadmar, Marc Herpoux, Sylvie Chanteux

Cast: Veerle Baetens, Géraldine Chaplin, François Deblock

Original title: Au-delà des murs

France 2016

3 x 52 mins

One of the great surprises of this year’s FrightFest was this fantastique tale of an impossible house beyond a house.

One of the highlights at this year’s Horror Channel FrightFest was not a theatrical film but a three-part mini-series made for the French/German TV channel Arte and presented by the Duke Mitchell Film Club. The evocative opening credits of Beyond the Walls, accompanied by Agnes Obel’s haunting, melancholy ‘The Curse’, immediately set the tone and invite us to enter the chiaroscuro world of the series. Speech therapist Lisa (Veerle Baetens) lives a deliberately isolated and minimal life in a barely furnished flat, avoiding close relationships. Unexpectedly, she inherits a neighbour’s house across the road. She moves her few possessions into her new home, but is soon faced with the secrets hidden behind its walls.

The Rorschach wallpaper makes it clear early on that we are invited to enter a maze of the mind and that the impossible architecture of the house, with its disappearing entrances and internal forest, is to be taken as a mental space. The house itself stands quaintly decrepit in the middle of the bustling modern city, poignantly out of place and ominously gloomy. Unfolding like a dream, the exploration of her new home forces Lisa to confront a past that she had buried, but also allows her to form a new bond beyond the boundaries of time. The Borgesian circular temporality of the story fits perfectly with the paradoxical space of the house to create a vertiginous plunge into the richly furnished hollows of the mind and the different shades of loss and longing.

Veerle Baetens is a convincingly self-imprisoned heroine, forced to come out of her shell when faced with the perils of a space inhabited by the ‘Others’, who threaten its occupants with a mysterious and terrifying fate. Flawed and confused, but also resourceful and brave, she has to distinguish friend from foe as she looks for the door that leads out of the labyrinthine nightmare. That nightmare is eventually given a face, full of immense sadness and menacing, hardened beauty, ambiguous and unsettling, as everything else in the house. An intelligently crafted fantastique tale, Beyond the Walls conjures up an oppressive, densely atmospheric world bathed in muted, muddy colours, dimly lit by flickering candles and fragile oil lamps, which lingers long in the mind.

Virginie Sélavy

Beyond the Walls will be coming soon to horror streaming service Shudder.

She’s Allergic to Cats

Shes Allergic to Cats1
She’s Allergic to Cats

Seen at Fantasia 2016, Montreal (Canada)

Format: Cinema

Director: Michael Reich

Writer: Michael Reich

Cast: Mike Pinkney, Sonja Kinski, Flula Borg

USA 2016

82 mins

Premiered at Fantasia 2016, this throwback to 80s video art is deliriously inventive and perversely romantic.

**** out of *****

She’s Allergic to Cats is a terrific picture on many levels. Upon multiple viewings since first seeing it in Montreal at the Fantasia Film Festival in July of this year, I have to admit that one of the more potent aspects of the film was the manner in which it took me back to a period of artistic expression that’s been largely forgotten, in spite of its profound influence upon how movies began to be made and continue to be made to this very day.

The film is a deeply personal film, but as such, it also has inspired – in me – a myriad of personal reflections.

In the halcyon days of making movies in the not-so-bustling Midwestern Canadian winter city of Winnipeg, there was an old schmatta factory in the schmatta district of schmatta-central which had been converted into a six-story emporium of aesthetic exploration called the Artspace Building.

The third floor housed two important non-profit arts organizations. One was the Winnipeg Film Group where I lollygagged, slacked and made movies during the 1980s with the likes of Guy Maddin, John Paizs and a few other wing nuts. The other was Video Pool. We seldom ventured across the hall to visit. They made video art, you see. As far as many of us film snobs were concerned, Video Pool’s creative output was little more than belly button sludge. That said, on those rare occasions in which we actually dared lay eyes upon the matter regurgitated upon – ugh – three-quarter-inch video, even us film snobs had to admit there was occasionally something, dare I say it, cool going on.

The coolest video art, however, was practised on Winnipeg’s community cable station VPW where some of the most insane Chroma-keyed madness was belched out with such frequency and mad genius that I even grudgingly joined the charge and produced a talk show devoted to surviving nuclear annihilation. Masked and frothing at the mouth whilst Chroma-keyed images of nuclear test footage exploded behind us on blue screen, I starred in the show alongside Guy Maddin and Maddin regular Kyle McCulloch (star of Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Archangel and Careful).

At the time, all of us were obsessed with the simple, gorgeous video art techniques employed by the mesmerizing music videos generated by and for The B-52s.

Here it is, some 30 years later, and I’m not only re-obsessed with an arcane, but highly influential form of visual art, but it’s all because of one brand new and genuinely wonderful picture.

Once in a while, you see, I experience a film that reminds me of the joys in those days of generating no-to-low-budget features. The accent was always on the love of cinema, innovation, and most of all, cool shit that I and my colleagues would be happy to pay money to see ourselves. Given our collective cinematic predilections, our only nod to ‘marketplace’ was knowing there had to be whack-jobs like us ‘out there’ who’d pay money to see stuff that we thought was cool.

My personal credo was thus: if you’re making a movie for very little money, it better goddamn well be something that puts you and the film itself on a map. Impersonal ‘calling card’ films had only two results: making something competent enough that you might end up in regular network series television or worse; not being able to overcome the meager production value and generating a movie that nobody would want.

She’s Allergic to Cats made me happier than happy. From the opening frames to the magnificent cut from a hilariously poignant final image to the first of the end title cards, I found the picture endlessly dazzling, deliriously perverse and rapturously romantic. This is exactly the kind of first feature which an original filmmaker should generate. Writer-director Michael Reich boldly announces his presence with a friendly fuck-you attitude, a great sense of humour and a visual style that should make some veteran directors be ashamed of their by-the-numbers camera jockey moves.

Though there is no official genre called ‘schlubs who get to successfully seduce babes’, She’s Allergic to Cats would definitely be leading the charge if such a thing did officially exist – it’s kind of like a Woody Allen picture on acid through the lens of wonky, nutty 80s video art.

Mike Pinkney, the actor, plays Mike Pinkney, the lead character – a schlub extraordinaire who works a day job as a dog groomer. and in his off hours, makes retro-styled video art and/or endlessly watches the horrendous, compulsively watchable 70s TV movie with John Travolta, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. These viewings include Mike eating sweet, unhealthy breakfast cereals. His home is also disgustingly infested with rats that seem to devour everything – from bananas to condoms. The landlord’s only solution is to eventually ‘look up’ a solution on Wikipedia.

Mike’s dream is to make a feature film homage to Brian De Palma’s Carrie – with CATS!!! His producer thinks it’s the stupidest idea he’s every heard. Mike is dejected and persistent all at the same time. Amidst the slacker/McJob existence he leads, Mike miraculously hits it off with Cora (Sonja Kinski – Nastassja’s daughter, Klaus’s granddaughter), a mega-babe who happily agrees to a date.

Here, director Reich deserves to win some manner of official accolade for creating the most depraved ‘meet-cute’ in cinema history. All I will say is that it involves the incompetent clipping of a dog’s nails on the quick, causing them to bleed.

The entire love story is mediated through Mike’s filmmaking/video-art perspective. The result is a chiaroscuro-like mélange of garish ‘video’ colours, cheesy (though gorgeous) dissolves and plenty of sexy video tracking errors.

Though the film’s final actions can be seen from a mile away, ‘surprise’ is hardly the point. There’s a sad and deeply moving inevitability to where things go. Reich achieves the near impossible. We laugh with his main character, we laugh at him and finally, we’re given a chance to weep for him.

Yes, on many levels, She’s Allergic to Cats is a head film, but it has heart and soul. This is something of a miracle. Then again, this should come as no surprise. Getting the film made must have been a miracle and what Reich’s efforts have yielded is nothing less than revelatory.

Greg Klymkiw

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I, Olga Hepnarová

I, Olga Hepnarova
I, Olga Hepnarová

Seen at Fantasia 2016, Montreal (Canada)

Format: Cinema

Release date: 18 November 2016

Distributor: Mubi

Directors: Petr Kazda, Tomas Weinreb

Writers: Petr Kazda, Tomas Weinreb

Cast: Michalina Olszanska, Martin Pechlat, Klara Meliskova, Marika Soposka

Alternative title:
I, Olga

Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, France 2016

105 mins

The brutal, moving tale of an abused young woman’s revenge in Communist Czechoslovakia had its North American premiere at Fantasia.

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

While watching this grim, superbly realized feature-length dramatic biography about the last person ever executed in Czechoslovakia, my mind occasionally drifted to the famous tagline for Meir Zarchi’s rape-revenge exploitation classic I Spit on Your Grave. It read:

‘This woman has just cut, chopped, broken and burned four men beyond recognition… but no jury in America would ever convict her!’

Within the context of that vile, but oddly affecting grade Z drive-in picture, it’s hard not to agree with the provocative sentiments expressed in the aforementioned declaration. I Spit on Your Grave is, however, pure fiction, whereas I, Olga Hepnarová is hardly an exploitation film: it is based on a true-life revenge-crime story that actually occurred in Prague during the summer of 1973.

Watching it, I imagined my own tagline:

‘This woman has just hijacked a two-ton diesel truck in Prague and plowed it full-throttle into a street full of innocent bystanders… but no jury in Czechoslovakia would ever convict her!’

Ah, but they did.

Writer-directors Petr Kazda and Tomas Weinreb have crafted a compulsive, moving and shocking film out of their title character’s life and the events leading up to her capture, conviction and execution. Most importantly, their picture pulls you in so closely and deeply that it’s impossible not to feel for this lonely young woman living a life of neglect and abuse in the post-Prague-Spring world of Communist repression, one in which all of former Czech party leader Alexander Dubček’s progressive reforms were reversed with a vengeance.

The astonishing young actress Michalina Olszanska plays Hepnarová from age 13 to her death 10 years later. She manages to pull off the near-impossible task of a poker-faced intensity that forces us to look beneath the veneer and into her eyes, which alternate between shark-like death stares and deep humanity, ranging from innate intelligence, sensitivity and confusion, to pain and anger, and even, on occasion, humour. She delivers one of the great screen performances of the new millennium and it serves the superb screenplay and austere mise en scène perfectly.

Using gorgeously composed long takes, shooting in evocative monochrome (via the expert lensing of Adam Sikora of Jerzy Skolimowski’s Four Nights with Anna and Essential Killing fame) and presenting Hepnarova’s sad tale using voice-over excerpts from her haunting journals, the filmmakers offer a compelling arms-length plea for understanding. It’s their carefully controlled, often Kubrickian observations that deliver the kind of humanity and emotional core with which the late director of Dr. Strangelove, et al, was so often not properly credited with. Control and austerity does not mean the kind of coldness many critics mistakenly attribute to such work and in contrast, can often guarantee the film’s ability to reach right into the flesh and rip our hearts out.

I, Olga Hepnarová goes even further by tearing into us and exposing our nerve endings – pulling and tugging at the raw tendrils and putting us in as much pain as humanly possible to capture the life and emotions of this young woman. The film shares her life with us and we’re placed in the eye of the storm of this woman who spent a lifetime being callously neglected by her mother (‘To commit suicide you need a strong will, my child. Something you certainly don’t have. Accept it.’), raped by her father (captured with a subtlety that’s far more horrific than any graphic depiction), numerous attempts to kill herself, incarceration in a Soviet-style snake pit of an asylum (suffering even more physical and psychological abuse) and an early adulthood of exploring her sexual identity with often very sad results.

And finally, the filmmakers present us with the visuals depicting the results of Olga’s actual words:

‘I am a loner. A destroyed woman. A woman destroyed by people… I have a choice – to kill myself or to kill others. I choose to avenge my haters. It would be too easy to leave this world as an unknown suicide victim. Society is too indifferent, rightly so. My verdict is: I, Olga Hepnarová, the victim of your bestiality, sentence you to death.’

Of course we weep for her victims, but the film achieves the extraordinary by allowing us to weep for the ‘destroyed woman’ whose pain goes so undetected and neglected that her only choice seems to be the declaration of a death sentence upon a society bereft of caring.

To say the film takes a story from the 70s and makes it even more vital for our contemporary world would be an understatement. We weep for Olga Hepnarová, but we’re also placed in a position wherein we might be able to weep for those who carry out acts of violence and, in so doing, kill themselves.

Mental illness is a genuine affliction. It can result in evil actions, but the perpetrators are, more often than not, sick in mind, body and soul. Healing and caring has escaped them. I, Olga Hepnarová speaks not just for one, but all of them.

Greg Klymkiw

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We Are the Flesh

We Are the Flesh
We Are the Flesh

Seen at Fantasia 2016, Montreal (Canada)

Format: Cinema

Release date: 18 November 2016

DVD/BR release date: 13 February 2017

Distributor: Arrow Films

Director: Emiliano Rocha Minter

Writer: Emiliano Rocha Minter

Cast: Marìa Cid, Marìa Evoli, Diego Camaliel, Noé Hernandez

Original title: Tenemos la carne

Mexico, France 2016

79 mins

Emiliano Rocha Minter’s extreme theatre of the flesh was the climax of Fantasia.

Rituals and rebirth, libidinous excess and transformative violence: in his spectacular debut, Mexican director Emiliano Rocha Minter creates his very own Theatre of Cruelty, in a direct line to Alejandro Jodorowsky and Antonin Artaud, but with a fully formed personal vision. In a similar spirit to his illustrious predecessors, incest, cannibalism, orgy and slaughter are used to build an extreme sensory experience that brutally shakes up audiences’ aesthetic and moral preconceptions, forcing them into new forms of perception.

In what seems to be a post-apocalyptic world, a grubby middle-aged man goes about the business of survival in a derelict building. His solitary, wordless existence changes with the arrival of two ragged, starving young people. The older man, Christic, diabolical and off his head, feeds them eggs along with subversive thoughts, which recognize no conventional moral boundaries, until the boy – reluctantly – and the girl – readily – let go of all inhibitions and interdictions to descend into a lawless, frantic, primal state of blood and lust.

It is a film that fully, messily embraces the body, all gore and genitals, mucus and menstruation, sex and slime. Many of the acts performed take place in a psychedelically coloured womb-like, subterranean space, creating a world that is carnal and hallucinatory, crude and oneiric, explicit and artificial at the same time. It is an intense, confined performance of the flesh that reduces everything to the physical, in what is both a retreat and a rebellion. The shock of the flesh is a liberation from the rule (and in that, it is a very Sadean film), but it is also a withdrawal from the world, a refusal to engage with the outside reality. Indeed, despite initial appearances, We Are the Flesh is elliptically, obliquely about Mexico, with its distortion of Catholic rituals and its perverse rendition of the national anthem, and its final revelation of what lies above. A stunning masterwork, visually and sonically accomplished, radical, fearless, and nourished by an irrepressible, lush, dark energy.

Virginie Sélavy

White Coffin

White Coffin
White Coffin

Seen at Fantasia 2016, Montreal (Canada)

Format: Cinema

Director: Daniel de la Vega

Writers: Ramiro García Bogliano, Adrian García Bogliano

Cast: Julieta Cardinali, Rafa Ferro, Fiorela Duranda, Damián Dreizik, Veronica Intile

Argentina 2016

71 mins

In his latest offering, the Argentinian director Daniel de la Vega takes us into some delightfully juicy territory.

***½ out of *****

Who in their right mind doesn’t love George Sluizer’s 1988 shocker The Vanishing (aka Spoorloos)? It’s the Dutch suspense classic in which a man obsessively searches for his girlfriend who disappears without a trace at a roadside pitstop. As great and perfect as Sluizer’s picture is, Argentinian director Daniel de la Vega (working from a zanily inspired screenplay by the Bogliano Brothers) takes us into some delightfully juicy territory in White Coffin, which enjoyed its World Premiere at Fantasia 2016 in Montreal.

Imagine The Vanishing, wherein a smelly guy is substituted with a hot babe searching for her sweet little girl amongst a sect of evil-infused torture-hounds. Add plenty of supernatural frissons, a wham-bam no-nonsense 70-minute running time and some to-die-for action and you get the rich cocktail of powerful 100-proof homebrew that is White Coffin.

Shaken, of course. Not stirred. Belt it back and allow your nerves to be jangled and definitely not soothed.

Virginia (Julieta Cardinali) is taking a powder from her abusive hubby with cute-as-a-button daughter Rebecca (Fiorela Duranda) in tow. Hightailing it across the Pampas, the duo encounter a strange fork-in-the-road from which they’re warned off by Mason (Rafael Ferro), a hunky gaucho who appears to be taking far too much interest in them. When they arrive at a pitstop on the highway, the worst thing any parent can imagine occurs. Sweet little Rebecca disappears without a trace.

Luckily for Virginia (and mostly for the audience), she spots a glimpse of her daughter through the window of a souped-up tow truck and we’re treated to one of the most delightfully hair-raising chase scenes I’ve seen in sometime. (It’s up there with the recent and decidedly overblown Jason Bourne chases, but happily sans the herky-jerky of that otherwise dull blockbuster.)

There’s no point ruining some of the surprises in store, suffice to say that the outcome of the chase brings a return of Gaucho Mason who mysteriously appears ever so often to dispense cryptic advice and guide our hot heroine through a labyrinth of horror and suspense, which also involves a dangerous game played by two other hot mamas also missing their kids.

All I will promise you is white knuckle suspense, a perplexing puzzle of evil, a passel of devil-worshipping inbreds, detailed instructions on how to build a white coffin (in case you should need this yourself whilst vacationing in lovely Argentina), vice-like direction to manage all these elements of horror and, most importantly, you will enjoy some first-rate cat fights, with babes, naturally. The latter treat is like a jarful of maraschino cherries dumped into this mega-fun concoction of witches’ brew.

Greg Klymkiw

Gimme Danger

Gimme Danger
Gimme Danger

Seen at Cannes International Film Festival 2016

Format: Cinema

Release date: 18 November 2016

Distributor: Dogwoof

Director: Jim Jarmusch

USA 2016

108 mins

Jim Jarmusch’s film strikes a fine balance between a serious and comprehensive appraisal of The Stooges’ career.

Gimme Danger is the second film by Jim Jarmusch to be premiering at this year’s Cannes festival, and it’s a different beast entirely: an affectionate, loud, and thoroughly entertaining tribute to The Stooges and their universal, ever-lasting dirty, gutter-glam influence.

From their ambitious Michigan beginnings to their ironic Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction, Jarmusch passionately details the legendary band. With frontman Iggy Pop’s distinctive voice infusing the film from beginning to end, Gimme Danger reveals the band’s tumultuous birth in late 60s Detroit, their flirtation with stardom in the early 70s, their battles with critical and record company indifference and their descent into a drug-fuelled chaos and eventual implosion.

It’s true, much of this story has been documented before, but one way or the other Jarmusch manages to make it his own. Given the director’s close relationship to the subject at hand, the film strikes a fine balance between a serious and comprehensive appraisal of the band’s career and a somewhat bizarre and original representation of the their image and attitude. And while a lot of the focus is, of course, on the living legend that is Iggy Pop, Gimme Danger also shines considerable light on to the other founding members Scott and Ron Asheton, original bassist Dave Alexander and later guitarist James Williamson.

Witty, loving and fuelled by some of the finest rock n’ roll music, Gimme Danger is unashamedly nostalgic, yet it also makes you leave the cinema with a lump in your throat that there’s just no one quite like the young Iggy in music anymore. At least not for now.

Pamela Jahn

This review is part of our Cannes 2016 coverage.

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The Neon Demon

The Neon Demon
The Neon Demon

Seen at Cannes International Film Festival 2016

Format: Cinema

Release date: 8 July 2016

Distributor: Icon Distribution

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Writer: Mary Laws, Nicolas Winding Refn, Polly Stenham

Cast: Elle Fanning, Jena Malone, Abbey Lee, Keanu Reeves, Christina Hendrix, Bella Heathcote

France, Denmark, USA 2016

117 mins

The Neon Demon is a hollow, surface-level satire that is pretty to look at, but little else.

The latest offering from Nicolas Winding Refn, following his brilliantly accomplished Only God Forgives, was no doubt one of the hotly anticipated films of the festival – sadly, it failed to deliver.

Set in L.A. in the ruthless world of fashion, The Neon Demon centres around young Jesse (Elle Fanning) who arrives in the big city determined to work her way up in the industry by covering herself in blood and gold for an endless string of bizarre photo shoots. And things seem to be going well: first she meets make-up artist Ruby (Jena Malone), who takes her under her wing, then she lands a modelling agent (Christina Hendricks), and it doesn’t take long before she bewitches every man that crosses her path. However, being the small town ingénue she is, Jesse seems totally unaware of the competition and jealousy that is beginning to mount around her. And what starts as an overly stylised 1980s thriller slowly transforms into surreally morbid horror.

The Neon Demon appears to utilise the contrast of darkness with flashing bright neon lights to develop a somewhat mystifying atmosphere, which is maintained for the majority of the film. And it must be said, with its glitter showers, pulsing coloured lights and hazy sunsets, the film does look every bit as polished as the world it points its finger at – if only to fall victim to its own charms. If anything, Refn has created an aesthetic experience, a hollow, surface-level satire that is pretty to look at, but little else.

Pamela Jahn

This review is part of our Cannes 2016 coverage.

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The Wailing

The Wailing
The Wailing

Seen at Cannes International Film Festival 2016

Format: Cinema

Release date: 25 November 2016

Distributor: Kaleidoscope Entertainment

Director: Na Hong-jin

Writer: Na Hong-jin

Cast: Kwak Do-won, Hwang Jung-min, Chun Woo-hee

South Korea 2016

156 mins

A tense blend of genres, The Wailing succeeds at combining a mood of deep unease with visceral gore.

Na Hong-jin emerged on the scene in 2008 with his accomplished feature debut The Chaser, and two years later established himself as a talent to watch with his follow up, The Yellow Sea. Both films are dark thrillers involving lone, lost men caught up in events far beyond their control and, on the surface, The Wailing seems to follow a similar path.

The film tells of a small suburban village that is quickly overshadowed by a wretched sickness. The focus is on the beleaguered police sergeant Jong-Goo, played by Kwak Do-won with a brilliant mix of exhaustion, indecisiveness and fear, who is baffled, along with the rest of the local police force, by the onset of a series of horrifically violent and inexplicable murders. The killers all show the same zombie-like symptoms and as the bodies pile up and Jong-Goo’s own daughter is affected by the strange curse, he decides to team up with a mysterious woman and a spiritualist in a desperate attempt to break the cycle of hell.

A tense blend of genres, The Wailing succeeds at combining a mood of deep unease with visceral gore, buddy cop comedy, and a hallucinogenic mix of horror tropes, and in this sense the film becomes a unique creation of its own, setting its terrible events against the gorgeous landscapes and mountains of South Korea. And although overlong and not without flaws, there is enough in The Wailing to warrant a viewing, and the subtle force of the film confirms Na Hong-jin’s reputation as a director to be reckoned with.

Pamela Jahn

This review is part of our Cannes 2016 coverage.

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Endless Poetry

Endless Poetry
Endless Poetry

Seen at Cannes International Film Festival 2016

Format: Cinema

Release date: 6 January 2017

DVD release date: 6 March 2017

Distributor: Curzon Artificial Eye

Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky

Writer: Alejandro Jodorowsky

Original title: Poesia sin fin

Cast: Adan Jodorowsky, Brontis Jodorowsky, Leandro Taub

Chile, France 2016

128 mins

As you’d expect from the Chilean director, Jodorowsky follows no rules when it comes to artistic creation.

With Endless Poetry, Alejandro Jodorowsky follows on from his 2013 comeback The Dance of Reality in his reckless attempt to revisit his own life by means of cinematic therapy.

The story is simple: Young Alejandrito rebels against the medical career that his parents have planned for him and instead chooses to pursue his dream of being a poet. In the course of this adventure, he meets like-minded friends and lovers exploring all forms of art. Yet, far from being a realistic biopic, the film is unsurprisingly full of surreal plot elements, fantastic set design, and a narrative that constantly obscures its true intentions. Shot by Christopher Doyle, its flamboyant cinematography and sumptuous colour palette sync perfectly with its theme of celebrating life and art, resulting in an unforgettable fair.

As you’d expect from the Chilean director, Jodorowsky follows no rules when it comes to artistic creation. An earthquake shakes one scene when the protagonist gets into a furious argument with his parents, and a carnival sweeps the streets after he comes to realise that the meaning of life is to live in the moment. But the standout scene is when Alejandro meets his first love in a café where everyone dresses in black and moves in slow motion.

If one flaw (and there are more than one) must be mentioned, it is that every scene tries to be the most memorable, which ultimately leads to the conclusion that for Jodorowsky style might overrule substance. But if anything, the clue is in the title: Endless Poetry is a film that flows in its very own rhythm, fuelled with contagious passion and perpetual imagination.

Pamela Jahn

This review is part of our Cannes 2016 coverage.

Watch the trailer: