Review Category: Movie

This debut feature by writer-director Luna Carmoon is an extraordinary and original psychological study that takes evident delight in its refusal to be easily classified. A mix of kitchen sink, coming-of-age and postmodern family drama, Hoard explores how the impact of longing, disconnection and loss together shape the life choices of a rebellious but far from robust young woman.

In 1980s Lewisham, seven-year-old Maria (Lily-Beau Leach) lives a chaotic life with her loving but dysfunctional mother Cynthia, a compulsive hoarder. At school, she’s seen as an oddball and an outsider and spends most of her time caught up in Cynthia’s obsessive rituals. When Social Services intervene after a domestic crisis, a disconsolate Maria is placed in the family home of a warm-hearted foster mum. Ten years on, seventeen-year-old Maria (now played by Saura Lightfoot-Leon) is still seen as a weirdo by her peers, and is struggling with her identity. As she navigates the challenges of adolescence, her small social circle provides invaluable support. But any hope of stability disappears when the return of Michael (Joseph Quinn), a former foster child, becomes the catalyst for an explosive and intense romantic entanglement. But for Maria, despite the messy fallout of this abnormal affair, the experience ultimately proves cathartic.

Beautifully evoked and shot, with riveting and risky performances by Lightfoot-Leon and Quinn, Hoard blends life-affirming, alarming and awkward moments in a wild and unpredictable tale. Carmoon’s distinctive storytelling and visual style immediately mark her out as an auteur to watch. It’s easy to see why Hoard won the backing of both BBC Films and the British Film Institute. This is unusual, unsettling, and irresistibly vivid, next-generation British filmmaking.

HOARD is available in the UK now on a limited cinema release.

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is a documentary about the life of Mats, a World of Warcraft gamer. The 25-year-old died from the degenerative muscular disease that kept him in a wheelchair most of his life, leaving his parents with immense regret that they could not offer him a ‘normal’ social life full of acceptance. Through his WoW account and blog, his parents and viewers can discover the place where Mats didn’t just escape into but thrived in and became a kind-hearted, loving, and beloved young man.

The story of Ibelin is the story of a generation. Those elders who, as young people, snuck into their private lives through bedroom windows are trying to understand the children who enter their screens for the same effect. The current wave of young adults escaped their households by diving into Discord servers, MMORPGs, Instagram DMs, and other digital spaces. The places children feel truly seen are now created online in social media spaces, audio chats, or sandbox and roleplaying games. How can they explain to their parents the significance of ‘ranking up’ in a game or the digital ‘wartime’ bonds they’ve created in FPSs with people they’ve never met?

Mats’ persona as Ibelin is a kind-hearted, loving adventurer. He shows such attention to everyone around him in ways that would be more challenging for Mats to express in real life. But his impact was real to the people who knew and loved him as he was, without having seen the adversity he overcame in real life. Rather than simply using the digital plane to hide, he used it to improve other people’s lives. Perhaps we all could more easily bridge the generational gap if we took a cue from Mats and Ibelin.

Strange in the most terrifying ways, Cuckoo lives up to its title with a bonkers concept. Gretchen, a teenage daughter played by Hunter Schafer, discovers that living at a resort with her dad’s new family has a few odd quirks to it. As she unravels high-concept horrors, Gretchen discovers the truth about her new step-family. To say any more of the plot would be to spoil its treasures.

The cast’s off-the-wall performances make this into a whacked-out oddity. Even the charming Hunter Schafer, a mostly grounding element, contains elements of genre trope self-awareness. Her reactions pull audiences along through imaginative horrific delights that feel so fresh you can smell them. Cuckoo is a strong candidate if you’re looking for a horror movie that you need help getting a grip on. The rabbit-hole approach can drag on, but it’s worth it for the film’s queasy reveals. By its end, when every element is in place, you feel you’ve been on a nonstop rollercoaster, even when the slow and dull build to understanding that’s taken place was actually pretty cookie-cutter.

Gretchen’s story feels like another self-validating one. Many who grew up in splintered families might characterise new blood as invasive to the status quo. Here, that fear is literalised in an almost childish way. Like a fairy tale that’s a metaphor for not being afraid of the dark, Cuckoo delivers a simple allegory for adults to deal with a juvenile issue. Cinema like this has found a welcome place among a generation that feels like kids in adult drag. Although Cuckoo is a fine picture, it’s a shame that the talents behind it couldn’t create a more culturally productive work.

CUCKOO is in UK cinemas on July 23rd.

Director Alexandre O. Philippe has established a name for himself with a number of smart, unconventional documentaries exploring various pop culture icons; whether it’s David Lynch in Lynch/Oz, Alien in Memory: The Origins of Alien, zombie movies in Doc Of The Dead, Star Wars in The People vs. George Lucas, and even an entire movie devoted to dissecting Psycho’s shower scene in 78/52.

Like Lynch/Oz, his latest, You Can Call Me Bill sees Philippe direct his focus on an individual, in the shape of William Shatner. As usual, eschewing the traditional documentary approach – there’s no interviewees save for the great man himself – and little direct focus on his life of career, the director turns the camera on Shatner and just lets him talk.

Anyone who’s seen Shatner interviewed or onstage will know that he’s one of the world’s great raconteurs. He’s able to pontificate for hours on whatever subject takes his fancy with a wry humour and an intelligence that belies the comic persona he often likes to play into. And while his frequent Star Trek convention appearances often see him playing the hits and telling the same, often fanciful stories of his time as captain of the Enterprise (for example, contrary to what he likes to tell people, he did not single-handily save Paramount from burning down during filming of The Search For Spock, he merely posed for photos with a hosepipe after), he frequently goes off-script, and talks about whatever’s on his mind. And he has a lot on his mind.

It’s this more insightful Shatner that Philippe goes for here. Gone are the tales of frequently hiding tales of Leonard Nimoy’s bike (that one’s true as far as we know), and instead, Shatner is given leeway to talk about the subjects that interest him. Now in his 90s, mortality is on his mind, and he expounds on his thoughts on death, as well as other subjects, including climate change, travelling into space, fame, love, comedy, and his oft-mimicked acting style. Shatner has said that, as he nears the end of his life, he wanted to make the film for his family to help them remember the real him. And while you never feel that Philippe entirely gets under his skin (there’s little in the way of cross-examination), this may be as close as it’s possible to get.

If this all sounds a little dry and overly serious, don’t worry. Besides his interviewees’ natural charm, Philippe peppers the film with numerous clips from throughout Shatner’s career. Trek unsurprisingly features frequently, as do the likes of Boston Legal, The Twlight Zone, Kingdom Of The Spiders, T.J. Hooker, Airplane 2, and his gentle onstage teasing of George Lucas (“may I call you George? You can call me Mr Shatner.”) Philippe also includes clips from Shatner’s frequently mocked singing career, including his infamous Rocket Man, to more recent (and far better) work, expounding on travelling to space and, in the epilogue, his thoughts on death and his somewhat unconventional desire to be have his ashes planted under a tree, giving nourishment back to the Earth. It’s a typically unconventional insight into an unconventional man, and typical of the film’s offbeat approach to approaching Shatner, which may give us more insightful look at the man than many conventional documentaries.

YOU CAN CALL ME BILL is released on Blu-ray on May 27th.

Written, directed, and produced by John Krasinski (who also features in the cast), IF (Imaginary Friends) is a film that doesn’t really seem to know what audience it wants. It’s part Toy Story/Monsters Inc. – big friendly fluffy doofuses and wise-cracking anthropomorphic animals and insects – and it’s part adult wish fulfilment stuff about lost youth, lost innocence, and a yearning to be back in simpler, kinder times. Tearing itself in two directions, IF is a film that’s likely to frustrate both audiences who will find the parts not aimed at them uninteresting, distracting and, at times, downright dull.

Bea (Cailey Fleming) is an almost impossibly cloying 12-year-old whose mother passed away from cancer and who now finds herself staying with her grandmother (Fiona Shaw) at her New York apartment whilst her father (John Krasinksi) is in hospital awaiting heart surgery. She meets up with Cal (Ryan Reynolds), who has an apartment in the same block and a menagerie of colourful creatures who, he explains, are ‘imaginary friends’ abandoned and forgotten by generations of children as they grow up. Bea decides to help Cal in his mission to help match the disenfranchised IFs with new children and, eventually, to evoke memories of their IFs in grown-ups long since swallowed up by the chaos of adulthood.

That’s pretty much it for your plot. Kids may be briefly delighted by the colourful creatures (voiced by the likes of Steve Carroll, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Emily Blunt, George Clooney, Bradley Cooper, Matt Damon, Sam Rockwell, and even Brad Pitt) but as characters, most of them are underdeveloped and don’t really do anything particularly interesting or amusing beyond Carrell’s lumbering Blue. Adults may be charmed by the film’s shameless attempts to tug at the heartstrings by playing the “remember how wonderful and innocent it was to be a kid” card, but there’s nothing else going on here beyond mawkish sentimentalism.  It’s quite an old-fashioned film – refreshing to an extent, perhaps – in that there’s no action, no high stakes, no villain.  But as a consequence, there’s no real drama and absolutely no excitement as the characters just stand around gazing wistfully into the distance or mourning the passing of more innocent times.

Krasinski previously created the thrilling world of A Quiet Place, and this new effort sees him move in an entirely different direction and that’s to be commended. But IF is unlikely to capture the attention of a younger audience because it focuses too heavily on its determination to resonate emotionally with adults at the expense of anything colourful and exciting for the children. Well-intentioned, well-executed and not without the odd moment likely to bring a brief tear to the eye, at the end of the day IF misses the mark because it’s trying to hit two targets but doesn’t have enough to offer to engage with either. Ultimately, it’s a film that commits the cardinal sin of being really rather boring.

IF (Imaginary Friends) is in cinemas now.

Sleepwalking has always been a frightful real-world phenomenon. This delightful South Korean film takes those fears to the next level when a wife must contend with her husband’s fearful late-night escapades. This marriage exploration has the couple test their limits of how much they can take of one another when these late-night walks heighten to dangerous levels for themselves and their newborn. As the story goes on, both husband and wife have to deal with each other’s peculiarities and decide where to draw the line between self-preservation and independent violation of their marriage vows to take on problems together.

Directed by Jason Yu, Bong Joon Ho’s second unit director on Okja, Sleep feels as much a character drama as a horror movie. The family at its centre can stand in for your own; the metaphor works well for any significant other’s behaviour, especially one that involves mental illness. Through jump scares from unexpected places and fearful moments of high suspense building towards revelatory horror, the film taps into a primal fear inherent to tethering yourself to someone for the rest of your life. Love itself is the real conflict. When your loved one becomes inherently untrustable outside of their control, only the strongest can stick around through it all.

What elevates Sleep above more complex horror movies this year is its focus on the audience’s thoughts. The story anticipates and explains away our solutions, while the cinematography keeps a distance from the characters, allowing us to feel like we’re commenting on the crazy lives of our neighbours. By keeping the horrors imaginative yet believable, we are made to participate in this psychological horror’s twists in sickness and in health, for better or worse.

Handling the Undead takes the zombie formula and slows it to a crawl. In all three of its storylines that make up a World War Z-like tableau, a family member returns from the dead in a dazed, unspeaking, clearly zombified state. As their undead nature is uncovered, each of the three families must grieve the final loss of their loved one. Shot with low energy and unobtrusive observation, Handling the Undead is the kind of film that has one looking up synonyms for ‘slow’. Executing its family dramas mostly wordlessly, the leisurely plot doesn’t add much new to the zombie canon. The few scares are rare and far between, tossed between sluggish storylines that never crystallise into much of anything.

We lose interest from the moment the unhurried families each take in their slogging undead members. These are zombies, grey, rotting, and barely breathing. Audiences already know what zombies do and how they work, leading to frustration with the characters. There are lethargic moments in which loved ones try to feed them food, speak to them, and cuddle them; as you can guess, it doesn’t go so well! The whole thing plays out exactly as expected but without excitement. The lackadaisical film wants to be a study of grief, loss, and the psychology of letting go, but its lack of personality and characterization and its over-leaning on archetypes and standard zombie tropes leave us feeling hollow.

This failed experiment in horror is, like this year’s In a Violent Nature, an attempt to elevate the genre while executing its simplest version. The story of the first day of a zombie apocalypse is a monomyth now; to make that story torpid, stagnant, and loitering is a supreme miscalculation.

In modern cinemania, horror movie fans seek validation for their fandom. Too long, they say, has the canon rejected such great additions as Halloween III: Season of the Witch and Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. Companies with arthouse sensibilities like A24, Neon, and Monkeypaw, among others, have capitalised on this through the creation of ‘elevated horror’, a slang-level term for horror movies with typically slower pacing that are often excellent such as the works of Ari Aster and Jordan Peele. There’s no reason to define these movies separately; be proud of being horror, or don’t make horror.

Enter In a Violent Nature. In a film compared too favourably to the works of Terrence Malick and Jonathan Glazer, a killer is irreverently resurrected from undead sleep, dons a mask, grabs a distinctive weapon, and kills a ton of stock horny twenty-somethings in a lakeside cabin in the woods. It’s a familiar story with a gimmick: we follow his point of view for most of the runtime. It turns out that between kills, Jason, Michael Myers, and Leatherface et al. spend a lot of time just walking alone in the peaceful woods and experiencing unoriginal dialogue from afar.

The film takes the simple slasher formula and places it just out of focus, leaving those unoriginal bones untouched. There’s an old legend, plenty of stupid ‘bro’ dialogue, valley-girl escapades, a child-minded killer, a ranger with a shotgun… all the cliché writing packed into the margins of a story about a zombie taking a walk. Simply slowing the pacing of a film to a crawl doesn’t elevate it to a worthwhile art piece; in fact, it kills the ominous momentum of rollercoaster reactions most slashers can produce. This is not arthouse or elevated horror; it’s a boring failed experiment.