The programme for this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival has been released, and as usual there is plenty on offer that will appeal to discerning genre fans such as your good selves. To save you from having to scour the website to look up details of every one of the scores of new films on offer, we have assembled a preview of those available that we think might interest you.
The UK premiere of Pixar’s summer release has been a staple of the festival for years, this year bringing us the family superheroics of Incredibles 2. You may have heard that the film’s general release has been pushed back a month because of some football tournament, so this will give you the earliest chance to see it. Another annual event is a screening of a seminal film accompanied by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra performing its score live, and this year comes the turn of the greatest shark move ever made, Jaws.
The festival’s self-explanatory Best of British strand has previously brought us the likes of the excellent My Pure Land and The Library Suicides. In Calibre, a pair of Edinburgh friends head up to the highlands for a weekend of deer hunting, only for an accident and its cover up leaving them facing a large group of gun-toting villagers, and since for the first time in years we appear to be missing a mental Japanese movie from the festival line up, perhaps this is continuing an alternative trend of ‘Deliverance with highlanders,’ although it won’t have to do much to top last year’s The Dark Mile in this regard. Dead in a Week (Or Your Money Back) is a black comedy about a suicidal young man who keeps failing at the task and hires an aging hitman with a quota to meet to do the deed for him, only for the situation to get complicated when he meets the woman of his dreams after the arrangement has been made. In The Devil Outside, a teenage boy raised in evangelical Christianity and taught that evil lurks around every corner makes a new friend in the local rebel, and believes that a dead body in the woods in a sign from God. In In Darkness, a blind musician hears the murder of her upstairs neighbour, a war criminal’s daughter, and after the death is written off as a suicide she is gradually drawn into London’s criminal underworld. Mary Shelley tells the story of a teenage girl who falls for a charismatic and married poet, and the ensuing scandal and passions that she channels into the creation of the world’s most famous piece of gothic fiction, Frankenstein.
The American Dreams strand showcases the best of new US indie filmmaking. The Negotiator is an ‘80s-set espionage thriller where an alcoholic former diplomat is brought in to mediate when an old friend is kidnapped in Beirut, his buried past subsequently resurfacing. Papillon is a new adaptation of the famous novel set in a brutal French penal colony, where two inmates set their sights on freedom. Searching tells the story of a widowed father looking for his missing daughter, the film’s visuals all taken from screens within it, be they TVs, computer monitors, smartphones, or any and all devices in between. Terminal is a neo-noir assortment of interlocking plotlines circling a tale of revenge, variously featuring a pair of mismatched hitmen on an assignment, a teacher with an incurable illness and an eccentric train station janitor, all linked together by an enigmatic waitress leading a double life.
The Night Moves strand can always be relied on to provide some quality genre fare. Anna and the Apocalypse is a horror comedy musical where a teenage girl bands together with her friends to defeat an undead horde that invades on the night of the school Christmas concert. Blood Fest is a self-aware horror comedy where a group of teens must utilise their knowledge of horror movies to escape an influx of monsters when a horror festival turns real-life bloody. Period piece The Most Assassinated Woman in the World sees an actress at the Grand Guignol theatre become embroiled in a series of brutal murders. In psychosexual drama Piercing, a new father who develops a compulsion to kill his child decides to instead take it out on a call girl, who turns out to be more than a match for him. Possum sees a children’s puppeteer return home to face up to his stepfather, and also try to deal with the control the eponymous hand puppet has over him. In Solis, an astronaut trapped in an escape pod is caught in the gravitational pull of the sun, with only a weak connection to a mission control commander to hear his urgent pleas for help. In White Chamber the near-future UK is ravaged by civil war, and a woman awakes imprisoned in a high tech torture room and interrogated for information she claims not to have, it soon transpiring that all is not as it seems.
Some other new offerings to put on your radar include Zombillenium, an animated children’s film set in a theme park staffed by the undead, where its first ever human employee teams up with his new friends to stop the vampires from taking over; haunting drama The Secret of Marrowbone, where four British siblings escape their abusive father by travelling to America to live on their mother’s decaying family estate, where a presence may be lurking upstairs; and documentary Life After Flash, showcasing the career of Sam J Jones beyond his brush with stardom as the saviour of the universe.
A retrospective of mainstream American horror movies of the early to mid ‘80s brings us big screen showings of seminal werewolf outing The Howling, early slasher A Nightmare on Elm Street, zombie classic Day of the Dead and ghost story Poltergeist, while cult vampire flick Near Dark and post-nuclear survival tale Testament screen as part of a showcase of the decade’s female directors.
A selection of European classics includes M, where a child murderer stalking the streets of Berlin is hunted down by beggars and criminals; La Belle et la Bête, the first ever adaptation of Beauty and the Beast; The Seventh Seal, where a knight returning from the Crusades challenges Death to a chess match to forestall his demise while searching for meaning in his nihilistic existence; and Solaris, where a psychologist travels to a distant space station whose crew have been experiencing visions and hallucinations, only to realise a greater force is at work when he is visited by his dead wife.
For more filmgoing fun, in the weekend prior to the festival St Andrew Square garden is transformed into an open-air cinema, offering free screenings of a variety of blockbusters and family fare, which this year features Wonder Woman, Casablanca, Top Gun, The Incredibles, Paddington, Paddington 2, Big, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Moulin Rouge!, Thor: Ragnarok, Jason and the Argonauts, The Greatest Showman, Ghostbusters, Big Trouble in Little China, and Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
Tickets for all films are now on sale, and can be bought from the festival website, where further information on each screening and their venues is also available. The festival itself begins on Wednesday 20th June and runs until Sunday 1st July.
