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

Format: Cinema

Release date: 24 April 2009

Venues: Cineworld Haymarket, Curzon Soho (London) and nationwide

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Eran Creevy

Writer: Eran Creevy

Cast: Riz Ahmed, Daniel Mays, Jason Flemyng, Nitin Ganatra

UK 2008

85 mins

Eran Creevy’s debut feature follows two former childhood friends reunited by chance, regret and the need for mutual consolation. Riz Ahmed plays the eponymous protagonist, a Muslim drug dealer who earns í‚£3000 a week, has as much casual sex as he can manage and lives at his older brother Rez’s, who gave him a second chance when their parents disowned him. His life is spent dodging the local addicts and the threats of a ruthless rival dealer while trying to ensure that his brother doesn’t find out about his secret business empire.

Enter Chris (Daniel Mays), Shifty’s estranged best friend who left their small town without notice four years earlier, leaving his accomplice to take the fall after a tragic incident involving his own sale of drugs. In the intervening years, Chris has cleaned up his act, with a job in recruitment and a steady mortgage, while Shifty has spiralled further into the business, selling crack to pensioners and gaining fresh young customers by force. Over 24 hours, Chris follows his old friend, rediscovering the life he left behind and finding out what’s become of the people who stayed, while attempting to counter the criticism levelled against him for his past actions.

From the outset, Creevy’s undeniably gritty drama distances itself from similarly themed tales set in small-town Britain. His protagonist is played neither for cool nor to deliver a moral lesson, but there’s a great depth to Shifty’s character, helped in part by a breathtaking performance from Ahmed, who inhabits the role with a sense of urgency and experience. At times there’s an unbearable intensity in his eyes, contrasted with the calmness of his voice, that convinces the audience, and perhaps Shifty himself, that he has what it takes to be a drug dealer. He also displays a beautifully underplayed vulnerability. For his part, Mays breathes some sensitivity into Chris, who spends the film walking the line between saviour and hypocrite, and the two share an undeniable chemistry. This is typified in a scene where they recapture memories of their youth in a children’s playground, the mood aptly complemented by Molly Nyman and Harry Escott’s delicate piano-driven score.

The film’s greatest strength lies in its structured fragility, much like the relationship between the two leads, which allows for reassuring banter to switch in seconds to uncomfortable and potentially threatening situations. This is perfectly exemplified in an early scene where Chris is invited into Shifty’s kitchen, considerately asked if he’ll eat Halal sausages, playfully mocked by Rez, then slammed with the question as to why he left. Moments such as this drive the film emotionally; in spite of their actions, the characters aren’t presented as devoid of compassion, and Creevy never condones the way they choose to lead their lives.

One of the first films to be funded by Film London’s Microwave, whereby selected filmmakers are challenged to shoot a feature film with a budget of í‚£100,000 with support from established industry figures (Creevy’s mentor was Asif Kapadia), Shifty is an accomplishment for both its filmmakers and the new scheme itself.

James Merchant

Format: Cinema

Release date: 6 March 2009

Venues: BFI IMAX, Odeon Leicester Square (London) and nationwide

Distributor Paramount

Director: Zack Snyder

Writers: David Hayter and Alex Tse

Based on the graphic novel by: Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore (uncredited)

Cast: Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson, Carla Gugino, Matt Frewer

USA 2009

163 minutes

While Watchmen hasn’t received the same amount of publicity as last year’s The Dark Knight, it has generated a level of anticipation unprecedented for comic book adaptations in recent years. After all, we’re talking about the ‘Citizen Kane of graphic novels’. Even the sober journalists of The Guardian Film Blog don’t seem to be immune and a recent roundup of early reviews of the film flirts with applying the Orson Welles comparison to the movie adaptation too.

I don’t intend to harp on about the fidelity of the film to the book as it has to stand on its own merits and based on these, Watchmen the movie is fairly average. Zack Snyder is an accomplished visual director, which was demonstrated to an even greater extent in his earlier 300 (2006), but is not the best director of actors. Paradoxically, the strongest aspect of the film is the plot, but its original author, Alan Moore, has had his name removed from the credits. As presented on screen, the story, set in 1985, is relatively simple. After an ageing vigilante is murdered, members of the superhero community worry that there might be a ‘cape killer’ loose on the streets while the world around them faces nuclear Armageddon. Recent attempts to bring Watchmen to the screen included revisionist takes that intended to relocate it to the post 9/11 world. Snyder sticks to the original period, and the 80s seem a particularly appropriate decade for the film, as it was an era that was book-ended by the first great superhero films Superman II (1980) and Batman (1989). The influence of those two films are writ large in the characterisation here, with Patrick Wilson’s Dan Dreiberg / Nite Owl played emphatically as a cross between Christopher Reeve’s nebbish Clark Kent and Michael Keaton’s introspective Bruce Wayne.

The 80s were a kitsch decade, in which gaudy outfits, neon lights and synthesised jazz didn’t seem too incongruous. This is something that Snyder recreates well, helped by comic book artist Dave Gibbons’s original drawings. Snyder also captures the violent 80s aesthetic of urban decay and riots, although not as well as Terry Gilliam did in Brazil at the time the original comic was published (in the history of great unmade superhero films, Gilliam’s Watchmen is neck and neck with Orson Welles’s Batman…). But the 80s aesthetic doesn’t always work well. One of the film’s most important emotional moments – the sex scene between Nite Owl and Silk Spectre – is shot and directed like something out of 9 킽 Weeks (1986) and is the weakest, cheesiest scene in the movie. The use of music makes things worse, the soundtrack mixing Philip Glass with Nena Kerner and Simon and Garfunkel. In the hands of a director with a better understanding of the possibilities of music as a counterpoint to action, this scattershot approach could have worked well – after all Quentin Tarantino has based his career on it – but in Watchmen the juxtaposition of ‘The Sound of Silence’ with a funeral scene and ‘Hallelujah’ with the Nite Owl/Silk Spectre coupling ranges from mawkish to downright embarrassing.

Snyder is a director who excels at stylised ultra-violence and his accomplishments in this field in both 300 and his remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004) led to his being hired for the Watchmen project. The high body count in 300 was tempered by painterly visuals that gave the film an almost abstract and otherworldly quality. Here the breaking of bones, spurting blood and entrails hanging from a ceiling seem excessive for a superhero movie. Alan Moore’s Watchmen may be known as a superhero comic for adults, but that reputation is based on its writing and structure, not on gratuitous violence. With much of the ironies and subtleties of the original graphic novel removed from the film, Snyder’s Watchmen is not much more than yet another superhero movie, and as such, its potential audience is largely adolescents. Yet, by upping the violence on screen, the director has excluded that audience from cinemas (unless they live in Ireland, the Baltic States or New Zealand, where it has a lower rating).

At the risk of damning the film with faint praise, it’s as good as the third films in the Batman and Superman franchises – mixing hysterical visuals with faux gravitas and absurd situations. The character that most resembles an early 80s reject, Jackie Earle Haley’s Walter Kovacs / Rorschach, is surprisingly the most engaging and likeable character. He may be an amoral and violent psychopath but he has the no-nonsense charm and gravely voice of mid-career Clint Eastwood. For all the debate about fidelity to the original graphic novel, it is Alan Moore’s unwilling input that rescues the film and stops it from being as bad as it could have been and often threatens to be. Watchmen the film is loud, kitsch, violent and flashy, like the decade it’s set in. For those reasons, it’s an enjoyable 1980s superhero film. But no way is it the Citizen Kane of superhero movies.

Alex Fitch

Watchmen can be seen on the BFI IMAX’s 20-metre high screen from March 7 to April 2. More details on the BFI IMAX website.

Read our comic strip on the Watchmen film adaptation in the new print issue of Electric Sheep. The spring issue focuses on Tainted Love to celebrate the release of the sweet and bloody pre-teen vampire romance Let the Right One In, with articles on incestuous cinematic siblings, Franí§ois 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), Berlin squat cinema, screen vamps, the Polish New Wave that never existed and much more!

Format: Cinema

Release date: 6 March 2009

Venues: Cineworld Wandsworth, Vue Shepherd’s Bush (London) and key cities

Distributor: Optimum Releasing

Director: Nanette Burstein

Writer: Nanette Burstein

Cast: Hannah Bailey, Jake Tusing, Colin Clemens, Mitch Reinholt, Megan Krizmanich

USA 2008

95 mins

Nanette Burstein’s 2002 documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture took a riveting look at the rise and fall of the legendary Paramount producer Robert Evans, who was responsible for some of the biggest movies to come out of Hollywood during the 70s. For her latest film, Burstein has shifted her focus from the rich and famous to the altogether more banal lives of suburban teens. The subjects in American Teen are five high school students from Warsaw, Indiana, and the film’s Breakfast Club-style poster is the first indication that Burstein’s documentary owes a debt to John Hughes – which for many film-goers might be no bad thing.

The stereotypes are all here: The Rebel (Hannah Bailey), The Geek (Jake Tusing), The Jock (Colin Clemens), The Heartthrob (Mitch Reinholt) and The Princess (Megan Krizmanich). Burstein’s team tracked the 17-year-olds throughout their senior year, and the result is an entertaining, and sometimes painful, reminder of the agonies of adolescence. Of the five students, the most compelling are easily Hannah/The Rebel and Jake/The Geek. Hannah gets dumped, works on her art, plays in a band, hooks up with The Heartthrob and gets dumped again when his friends dismiss his ‘outsider’ girlfriend. She’s desperate to get out of the small, narrow-minded town and move to California after graduation. Jake, cursed with acne, braces and a near-total lack of social skills, is desperate for a girlfriend. Watching the film, you wish you could pull Hannah and Jake aside and tell them that the geeks and the rebels are the ones who end up starting companies like Facebook and becoming filmmakers.

But the other students have their own problems too: Colin’s a star basketball player on a struggling team, and while his popularity is in little doubt, the pressure on him to secure a scholarship is intense – it’s his only hope of being able to make it into college when his dad, who has a sideline in Elvis impersonation, can’t afford the tuition. It’s a lot harder to have sympathy for Megan, the poor little rich kid who wants to please her surgeon father by making it into Notre Dame, his alma mater. But by scratching below the surface, Burstein reveals that even The Princess has had her share of tough breaks.

There’s always going to be an audience for this kind of teen biopic, if the popularity of Gossip Girl and the resuscitation of 90201 is anything to go by. American Teen may not have the immediacy of Frederick Wiseman’s classic cinema verité documentary High School (1968), and in some ways it feels less realistic than Antonio Campos’s fictional Afterschool (2008), one of the highlights of last year’s London Film Festival. But Nanette Burstein’s documentary is a fun, engaging look at a bunch of kids stumbling over the universal pitfalls that all teenagers struggle with.

Sarah Cronin

American Teen is also screening at the Birds Eye View Film Festival on Saturday 7 March at the ICA. More information on the Birds Eye View website. Read our preview of the retrospective strand of Birds Eye View on screen vamps in the new print issue of Electric Sheep. Our spring issue focuses on Tainted Love to celebrate the release of the sweet and bloody pre-teen vampire romance Let the Right One In, with articles on incestuous cinematic siblings, Franí§ois 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), Berlin squat cinema, the Polish New Wave that never existed and comic strip on the Watchmen film adaptation + much more!