Review Category: Movie

In her feature debut, Izzy Lee (Innsmouth) presents a haunted house story with an edge. The director is no stranger to staging things with a pertinent, political slant, and it’s this angle that propels things above the standard horror fare.

Mia (Fanya Sanchez) has lost her husband, Adam (Mason Conrad), to what is ruled suicide, but not before being hounded on suspicion of murder. She’s now on a year-long house arrest after being found guilty of losing her baby (this is set in a ‘fictionalised’ town where abortion or even miscarriage is illegal). Her parole officer (Lee Boxleitner) epitomises the aggressive misogyny of the town and the ‘system’ that has convicted her. Trying to make things easier for her is her new boyfriend, Marc (Vincent Stalba, who disconcertingly looks a little too much like a young Jeremy Hunt for our liking), an old high school friend. Promising to look after her, things get strange when his phone and keys go missing and Mia begins to believe Adam is still around.

Opening strongly with a distinct sense of injustice, House of Ashes manages to play to its strengths throughout without bludgeoning you over the head with them. Beautifully filmed by Sophia Cacciola (The Once and Future Smash), there’s a sense of claustrophobia in Mia’s situation. Incredibly relevant, the story highlights the misogyny women find themselves subjected to in the US and elsewhere. From victim-blaming, anti-body autogamy, gaslighting, and white knight syndrome, Izzy Lee’s film brings the threads together perfectly, the politics not overpowering the fantasy elements, and vice versa. The haunting she suffers reinforces the patriarchal system she’s experienced all her life and continues to do so. An obnoxious social media ‘influencer’ (Laura Dromerick) who invades Mia’s privacy for her own profile hits the mark perfectly. We’ve all seen something similar in real life.

Although House of Ashes clearly has a low budget, the production value is much higher than expected, proving Izzy Lee has a bright future ahead.

HOUSE OF ASHES screened at Pigeon Shrine FrightFest Glasgow 2025.

Struggling Billy (Raúl Castillo) convinces his peace-loving wrestling friend Dom (Tony Cavalero) to sink all their money into a cryptocurrency with hopes of a rosy future. Billy wants to be able to buy a house so he can share custody of his daughter, but while he’s bragging of his good fortune to his ex-partner, the value of his bitcoin is plummeting faster than a bird carrying a boulder. The ‘crypto bro’ who started the Tulip coin, Charles Hegel (a brilliant Josh Brener) has apparently died in Kenya, forcing everything to be locked down and leaving Billy owing thousands in loans. Heading to Reddit, he finds a hacker, Eva (Melonie Diaz) who tells him Hegel has faked his death and pocketed millions from his shitcoin scam (something we’ve really seen happen recently). Billy and Dom team up with Eva to find Hegel and make him pay back the money.

Taking a well-timed swipe at how precarious the cryptocurrency world is, co-writer (with John Hibey) and director Cutter Hodierne gives this kidnap/home invasion caper a lighter edge, but doesn’t shy from some grittier moments. It also says a lot about greed and manipulating those in positions of power. Despite being bound a lot of the time, Hegel manages to get into his captors’ heads, attempting to pit them against each other. Hodierne adopts a Moby Dick metaphor, with the ‘little guys’ fighting the ‘big machine’, Billy fighting his instinct to get revenge versus doing the right thing for his family.

Castillo is captivating as he simple-mindedly falls for the crypto scam, genuinely believing his life has changed for the better with the promise of free money. That opening alone should act as a warning for those wanting an easy way out. His descent into thuggish criminality is tragic but handled with humour, with Cavalero’s Dom carrying the deadpan laughs. To compare Hodierne’s film to that of the Coen brothers’ is somewhat lazy, yet the parallels are too strong to deny – and that’s certainly not a bad thing.

COLD WALLET is released on digital platforms on March 3rd.

Set on a distant Earth-like planet that really is quite a lot like Earth, and whose 1999 seems to be playing it out in a distinctly Earth-like way, Chinese director Li Yang’s debut feature film Escape from the 21st Century is a whirlwind of action, silliness and teenage angst right from the word go. When three friends – Wang Chengyong (the cool one), Paopao (the slightly overweight and thus insecure one), and Wang Zha (the ordinary narrating one) – get into a fight for the honour of Yang Yi (the cool one’s girlfriend), they accidentally develop the power to sneeze themselves into a coma… and twenty years into the future.

Here the three discover that the future for all of them is less than ideal and that growing up, for all that they long for it in 1999, is far from what it’s cracked up to be. Despite the very silly central conceit, the dark future of 2019 is often surprisingly brutal. The film builds an unanticipated amount of depth and heart out of the three teenage boys’ simplistic yearning for a better, cooler future. With its exploration of time travel as a way to change and better the future, all while not being able to remember who you lent your copy of Street Fighter II to, Escape from the 21st Century could have an intense poignancy for anyone currently going through an early mid-life crisis.

The performances – of both adult actors playing unworldly teens and teenage actors spanning from start of the summer holiday hopefulness to despair and dead-eyed determination – are all very strong, but it really is the direction that stands out. Leaping back and forth in time without confusing the audience and hurling cultural references (western audiences will definitely get many, while some are almost funnier for being so unfamiliar) and both goofy and spectacular visual effects at the viewer, Li Yang refuses to give us a chance to get bored as we rollercoaster around from teen angst to brutal martial arts violence to cyberpunk to anime to Bond movie to goofball silliness. It’s easy to imagine this combination putting off some more sober cinephiles, as it can feel like the sugar rush of a pre-teen let loose with adult money in a sweet shop, but the earnestness of both the performances and Li’s exploration of lost childhood sell it far beyond mere dazzle and spectacle.

Filmmakers eager to find an audience for their small scale, post-apocalyptic story need to bring something new and distinctive to what’s long since become an overcrowded genre. The team behind Die Alone rise to the challenge to deliver an inventive and thoughtful tale of tragedy and survival which – while it includes some familiar dystopian tropes – feels fresh and original.

In a world laid waste by a lethal virus, the natural world has turned against the remaining survivors. Victims become an aggressive hybrid of human and plant life, driven to attack the uninfected. Youngsters Ethan and his partner Emma have fled the city to wait out the disaster in their isolated retreat. When a startled Ethan wakes up in their crashed vehicle, Emma is gone, and he’s only saved from raiders by Mae, a solitary, middle-aged woman who takes him to her rural homestead. Ethan is struggling with memory lapses and periods of disassociation, and his efforts to trace Emma take on an increasingly alarming timbre.

While Douglas Smith is great as the distressed and driven Ethan, Carrie Anne-Moss is simply superb as the resolute and guarded Mae. Writer-director Lowell Dean is an auteur with an eye for the twisted and macabre, and Die Alone mixes moments of explosive and bloody violence with periods of reflective restraint. It’s a well-plotted and well-paced affair. But it’s the film’s unnerving atmosphere, its sharp visual aesthetic, and the way in which the central mystery of Emma’s fate is resolved, which impress the most. Although the menace of the hybrid creatures is often peripheral to the main plot, Dean’s team do conjure up some extraordinarily vivid and unsettling designs.

DIE ALONE will be released on DVD and streaming platforms from 10th March

Two little boys come into possession of a cursed little toy in The Monkey, a loose adaptation of a 1980 Stephen King tale. Written and directed by Longlegs‘ Osgood Perkins, this comedy-horror film turns King’s story of a demonic childhood artefact into an absurdist Final Destination.

Twin brothers Hal and Bill (both played by Christian Convery) come into ownership of the titular monkey when rooting around their absentee father’s things in the attic. It doesn’t take long before they realise that the toy’s tune spells death – when the drums strike, someone dies. Yuckily.

Years later, and the boys are now estranged. The monkey comes crashing back into their lives when Hal (now played by Theo James) learns that his aunt has died… under suspiciously macabre circumstances. Figuring that this can only be the work of the monkey, Hal returns to his childhood home to figure out where it is and whether it can once again be contained. To complicate matters, he has his own son (Petey, played by Colin O’Brien) in tow. Can Hal put a stop to the monkey’s cycle of terror before it claims someone else he loves?

As Perkins turned Longlegs from a Silence of the Lambs-esque procedural into a work of Nicolas Cage-raising shamanism, so The Monkey takes its own maximalist approach to genre. Compared to his previous work, it’s a deeply unserious horror film, prioritising big laughs over scares and splatstick humour above tension.

An opening sequence with Adam Scott makes clear that its stars are all very much in on the joke. Elsewhere, White Lotus star Theo James is cast as both the film’s straight man and its biggest weirdo (Osgood Perkins cameo aside), while She-Hulk‘s Tatiana Maslany steals the show as the boys’ mom, giving the film its most bananas monologue. Those hoping for something a little more traditionally scary may be put off by the Treehouse of Horror approach to tone, but the laughs come as thick and fast as the horrific death sequences.

If the novelty wears thin after the first couple of roof-raising kills, the tight pacing and short runtime ensure that the film never outstays its welcome. The Monkey is an uproariously bleak work of comedy horror, powered by two of the genre’s brightest – sorry, darkest – minds.

THE MONKEY is out now in cinemas now.

The debut feature from Hayden Hewitt (Lips) is an unflinching kitchen sink horror that delivers both visually and emotionally.

Cara (a fantastic Elle O’Hara) is eking out an existence in a shared flat, doing webcam ‘shows’ to make ends meet. She attends a group therapy session with people she doesn’t relate to and is abused by people who feel they can buy her. She’s also determined not to return to the institution she left. She teams up with the manipulative John Fisk (a gloriously nasty turn from Johnny Vivash) to concoct a plan that’ll stop that and pay back in the most extreme way those who have had a hand in causing her mental issues.

Cara is a strong and disturbing picture of 21st-century England. There are no doubt problems like these in every estate in the country. We only hope the outcome for the real people isn’t as brutal. Cara’s life is bleakly realistic, and the ‘horror movie’ elements are depicted in a viciously natural manner. This is no exploitation film, no matter how gory things get. Although she’s a victim of her circumstances, it’s difficult not to sympathise with Cara, which is a testament to Elle O’Hara’s commitment to the role. Likewise, Johnny Vivash once again proves he’s one of the most versatile character actors in the UK. The supporting cast deserves praise, too. James Dreyfus, as the social worker who draws the short straw of having Cara as a client, perfectly depicts the weary, tick-boxing drone who has had all his empathy kicked out of him by a broken system. There are also small but pivotal performances from Laurence R. Harvey as a cafe owner and Michaela Longden as Cara’s suffering flatmate.

The themes raised by Cara are often hard to face head-on, and the outcome difficult to stomach, with Hewitt pushing the audience to breaking point along with the titular character. The dialogue is unflinchingly believable and could see Hewitt being the Ken Loach of horror.

CARA is set for a digital release on Feb 17th. Read our interviews with actors Elle O’Hara and Johnny Vivash and writer/director Hayden Hewitt.

Captain America: Brave New World doesn’t rise to match its star’s obvious preparedness for the moment. Anthony Mackie is Captain America. He’s ready for his new role, but the role – and its place in the MCU – isn’t quite ready for him. Indeed, very little about his first true outing as Steve Rogers’ replacement evidences Marvel’s supposed confidence in this pivotal passing of the torch. Brave New World has its bright spots, but they can’t smudge the film’s sobering bottom line: it’s a shockingly uneventful mainline addition to a franchise in dire need of some direction, one that even Harrison Ford’s spirited attempt to sell us a softer, less growth-averse Thaddeus Ross can’t save.

Many of Brave New World‘s shortcomings are technical. Breathless pacing and shoddy editing render long stretches of the story nearly incomprehensible. Key moments – such as the first act’s expository get-together at the White House – end far too early, again reflecting the MCU’s inability to let its proceedings breathe. Couple that with its many sloppy action sequences, and you’ve got a superhero movie that’s more confounding than enjoyable.

This latest Marvel entry isn’t too interested in advancing the grander MCU narrative (not a problem in and of itself), but it also doesn’t stand especially well on its own (definitely a problem). This is a shame, because besides being eager to fill Cap’s spangled fit, Mackie is already more than worthy of both shield and mantle. The movie just doesn’t showcase him the way it should, though it’s not for lack of trying. It’s clear that director Julius Onah, working from a script he co-wrote with Peter Glanz and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier collaborators Malcolm Spellman, Dalan Musson, and Rob Edwards, wants to nail this.

Onah’s efforts are most apparent in his handling of Ross/Red Hulk. Ford, replacing the late William Hurt, deftly communicates the character’s torment. Until now, the MCU has mostly kept Ross and his baggage at arm’s length. The guy has recurred throughout Marvel’s big screen continuity, but even his more substantial appearances in The Incredible Hulk and Captain America: Civil War feel guarded compared to what Brave New World hopes to achieve. We see – and occasionally feel – how heavy his regret is for him, and had the script wiggled that knife just a bit more, the movie could’ve been nearly as much of a showcase for Ford as it’s meant to be for Mackie.

The Cap/Ross tension could’ve been Brave New World‘s greatest asset, but instead, it’s in their charged political sparring matches that all the script’s flaws lay themselves bare.  During the last act, after much squabbling, Cap levels with Ross, saying he, too, feels like he has something to prove. The diabolical Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson) has manoeuvred both of them into direct conflict with each other, meaning, of course, that their salvation is only possible if they work together. This moment, like so many others here, glances when it could’ve been a gut punch. Sam’s inner struggle is only visible in the way others treat him. Nameless adversaries taunt him, underestimate him, and unfavourably compare him to Steve Rogers, but that just isn’t enough. Deciding what kind of Cap he wants to be is Sam Wilson’s whole deal, yet the film treats his struggle as an afterthought, bringing it up when it’s rhythmically appropriate but not doing the work to hammer it home for the viewer.

It’s not all bad, though. Sam Wilson has had a few in-universe years to adjust to his new title, and it shows. He upgraded his suit, upped his hand-to-hand combat skills, and found new uses for his trusty drone, Red Wing. More importantly, though, Mackie instantly channels the requisite integrity and sturdy character of a worthy Captain America: doing the right thing even when it’s the hardest way to play it, confronting power when it’s out of line, and moving with the beautiful, infectious earnestness of someone who takes their duty seriously. His banter with new Falcon Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), echoing early Sam/Steve interactions, also goes a long way in endearing him to us further. Sadly, though, none of these highlights amount to an enjoyable experience.

With Captain America: Brave New World, the MCU tries – and mostly fails – to rally behind its new Cap, slamming us with poorly shot action, half-assed emotional beats, and an unwillingness to realise its socio-political potential. Sam Wilson deserves better.