Review Category: Movie

It’s not hard to work out why I.S.S. – that’s International Space Station to you – belly-flopped at the US box office. Given the world’s current geopolitical situation, this isn’t really the time to ask a cinema audience – especially an American one – to engage with a film in which Russians and Americans are working together and are actually quite pally. It’s a shame because I.S.S. is a decent, taut space adventure thriller that uses its unusual and claustrophobic setting to ask simple questions about who we can trust when the chips are down and, in this case, the world is burning.

NASA astronaut/former marine Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose) arrives at the ISS to join her two fellow Americans and the three Russians already aboard conducting scientific experiments. Despite their cultural and language differences, they seem to rub along together well. Everything changes when Kira notices several huge and clearly nuclear explosions flowering across the world’s surface down below. America has suffered a devastating Russian attack, and both sides on the station receive instructions to secure the ISS – also in a low orbit and in danger of plunging from the skies – “by any means necessary”.

It’s quite a dilemma – and one that plays out rather well across the film’s tight 95 minutes. Attempts to maintain a status quo aboard the ISS quickly fall away, and before long, Kira is fighting to maintain order as crew members on both sides act on the instructions they’ve received.  Tense and compelling – one scene in which an American on an EVA discusses his and Kira’s love lives as the world turns bright red beneath them is an unnecessary and misjudged attempt to give the characters some emotional heft – ISS is a superior slice of sci-fi drama that definitely doesn’t deserve to be lost in space.

I.S.S. is still on general release in the USA and is awaiting a UK release.

Jodie Comer delivers a powerful performance as a young mother who will do anything to protect her newborn child as a terrible ecological disaster sends her on a dispiriting journey through a grey, desolate, rain-sodden landscape in Mahalia Belo’s gripping adaptation of Megan Hunter’s brief but haunting 2017 novel. Comer plays a character we know only as Woman, patiently waiting to give birth in the London home she shares with her husband R (the excellent Joel Fry). Biblical storms are battering the country, and when the house is flooded, the pair rush to the hospital, and it’s not long before Mother’s own waters are breaking and the baby is born. The pair flee the beleaguered city for the apparent safety of the farm owned by R’s parents (Mark Strong and Nina Sosanya), but soon, events overtake them, and they’re forced to take to the road again in search of sanctuary and safety.

The End We Start From is a gruelling watch at times, often disorientating as it relies heavily on striking visuals rather than heavy dialogue. The countryside through which Mother travels is cold and unwelcoming, and sometimes the people she meets are less than kind – human nature at its basest – but when she meets up with Benedict Cumberbatch’s grieving AB, the real themes of the film emerge like the sun peeking out from constant rainclouds. This is a film about family, survival, the importance of home, and fighting to save everything you believe in. The film’s budget undermines its attempts to depict the rain-lashed country, but ultimately, The End We Start From is about so much more than the disaster; it’s about living through it and prevailing. An interesting contemporary companion piece to Cornel Wilde’s gritty, distressing 1970 dystopia No Blade of Grass.

THE END WE START FROM is still in UK cinemas.

Out of Darkness (originally titled The Origin) has a lineage that dates back to the likes of Quest For Fire and Hammer’s 1960s prehistoric monster fantasies like One Million Years BC and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. Out of Darkness is, though, an entirely different and grittier proposition; the Stone Age family here are well acquainted with fire, and mercifully, there’s no sign of immaculately-coiffed cavemen anachronistically fighting off Ray Harryhausen-style dinosaurs.

It’s about 80,000 BC (possibly a Wednesday), and our little group of grunters (they actually speak a usefully subtitled ‘Tola’ language created for the film) – a family unit and a stray they’ve picked up along the way – are searching for a new ‘promised land’ they can call home. We don’t know where they’ve come from and what’s driven them to leave. But when they arrive, they find the land inhospitable and the terrain bare and unwelcoming. “There’s fuck all here,” as one of them apparently says – which seems like an unusually 21st-century response to their environment. They opt not to travel on through a nearby forest for fear of ‘demons’ and suchlike – but when one of their number is snatched in the night by something that emits unholy screeches and shrieks, they’re forced to venture into the darkness to face an enemy that might be unspeakable and unearthly.

Andrew Cumming’s first directorial effort is impressively realised thanks to evocative location filming in some of the wildest wilds of Scotland, evoking a genuinely bleak and gloomy Stone Age world where life is nasty, brutish and short. An unusual and oddly gripping tale with a striking percussive soundtrack by Adam Janota Bzowski, Out of Darkness is something very different carved from the dark, harsh, misty realities of humankind’s distant past. Striking – in every sense.

OUT OF DARKNESS is released in selected UK cinemas on February 23rd.

When it comes to found footage films there is always a knack to standing out, as there are a great many out there, and in this Welsh-shot chiller, we have past and present meet in very interesting ways. In this superbly made folk horror from director Matthew Butler-Hart (The Isle). Which was backed by one Ian McKellen, and shot entirely on iPhones. 

On the winding country roads of Wales…evil awaits two young women constantly seeking internet fame, via their controversial YouTube channel. In which they steal luxury items from the wealthiest people and businesses in a middle finger to the elite. However, in this current stunt, posing as caterers at a fashion shoot at a house in rural Wales, they find something far more frightening than dislikes awaits them! 

The Kill List touches and The Blair Witch homages are felt in this age old cautionary tale of heeding local warnings, traditions and superstitions, which is brought very appropriately up to date in our current moral tightrope culture of subscriber-hunting and internet clout chasing. Like Bobcat Goldthwait’s Willow Creek, Dagr takes its time to carefully get to where it needs to and when it does the results are atmospheric and well orchestrated, with a welcome darkly comic streak.

Starting with Thea (Ellie Duckles) and Louise (Riz Moritz) past YouTube triumphs, we soon head on the road with these two, as we also see the advert shoot playing out at the reclusive location in which they are heading. These two narrative chapters eventually meet in gruesome fashion, with some much-appreciated ghostly subtlety along the way. 

The film is at its best when delivering these shadowy glimpses and “did you see that?” moments but even in its more full-on moments of supernatural attack, it retains an edge of authenticity, no doubt via its believable dialogue (some of which was improvised) and characters, with an impressive cast who help bring the story to life (so to speak). The commendable handheld filming techniques and great uses of budget also help bring that real feel to the proceedings.  

Taking the defiantly durable found footage sub-genre to the extremities of contemporary influencer culture, while conjuring the most old school of evils in the process. Dagr is a tense, slow-burning, slice of British folk horror.

Dagr is out now in select cinemas, and releases on Digital 8th April.

It’s rare that remembering a moment from a film a few days after having seen it can bring you to tears. Such is the power of memory, of emotions strongly felt, and such is the power and emotion of the extraordinary All of Us Strangers.

What if you had the chance to revisit lost loved ones years later and forge a new relationship with them as the authentic you, not the child they left behind? What if this started to unlock your ability to truly, genuinely, love?

Lonely Adam is a writer, trying to evoke memories of his childhood for a script, so he spends his days emerging himself in old Top of the Pops re-runs and photographs of his family. He has only one neighbour, Harry, in a tower block where they’re the first residents. Later, Adam decides to visit his childhood home where, with no sense whatsoever of the fantastical, he is welcomed by the parents he lost to an accident 30 years ago. As Adam’s several visits to them progress, so does his relationship with Harry.

This film is remarkable on every level, as a (gay) love story, a possible ghost story, and a meditation on loss, grief, and memory. Andrew Haigh has crafted something special, brought achingly to life via four brilliant performances. Claire Foy and Jamie Bell are tremendous, but Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott give us the two best performances of the year.

In the controversy over award-nomination snubs, the biggest mystery of all is that Scott won’t be walking away with all of them. There are heartbreaking moments here that will live in your memory, perhaps forever.

ALL OF US STRANGERS is in cinemas now.