Review Category: Reviews

SYNCHRONIC / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR: JUSTIN BENSON, AARON MOORHEAD / SCREENPLAY: JUSTIN BENSON / STARRING: ANTHONY MACKIE, JAMIE DORNAN, KATIE ASELTON, ALLY IOANNIDES / RELEASE DATE: TBC

Steve and Dennis, a pair of New Orleans paramedics, encounter a series of bizarre deaths involving people dying from injuries seemingly impossible for them to have sustained, all somehow linked to a new designer drug. They soon find themselves pulled into a surreal underground of altered perception, which begins an inexorable encroachment on everyday reality.

Like director duo Jason Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s previous work with Spring and The Endless, Synchronic is certainly a genre movie, but one difficult to classify simply. To attempt to do so would be something of a spoiler and ruin much of the film’s early mystery, and would also oversimplify its setup to the point of doing it a disservice. As with the pair’s other work, this is a very human tale of people who happen to get caught up in cosmic events beyond their comprehension that they are pulled into and must learn to navigate if they want to make it out the other side.

The film opens with some beautifully shot but contextually baffling scenes that take some time to take on any narrative relevance, but once they do they become an intrinsic aspect of the tapestry of chaos being woven on the streets of the ancient city.

The story largely focuses on Steve as the hectic challenges of his job make way for the surreal madness that awaits him. Terminally ill, he sleepwalks through an empty existence of anonymous sex and recreational drug use in an attempt to fill the empty black pit in the depths of his soul wherein used to reside hope for the future and the will to carry on. He gradually uncovers the mystery of the titular narcotic and how it’s connected to the disappearance of Dennis’ teenage daughter, and with his illness leaving him uniquely attuned to the drug’s capabilities that other matured minds are denied (in the process tacitly referencing Stuart Gordon’s sophomore Lovecraft take From Beyond), he decides that her rescue might be perhaps the one thing he can do that will allow his truncated life to take on some meaning.

His partner Dennis, proving that Jamie Dornan is actually capable of expressing recognisable human emotion when the material actually allows him to do so, provides a more functional perspective on life, the family struggles he undergoes being painfully relatable and refreshingly banal. Some humour interspersed between the tales of human strife and confusion – a running joke about their terrible ambulance driver being a highlight – alleviates the emotional turmoil the characters and the audience are otherwise perpetually subjected to.

Meditating on mortality, the passage of time and the cycle of life, Synchronic is a deep and meaningful experience that requires some thought to fully absorb the significance of. The message at its heart suggests that life is to be cherished as you can never be certain how much of it you will have. Even in the face of the infinite complexities of the universe, simple humanity is a gift not to be squandered, and the connections we make with one another leave a mark on the world long after we have left it.

DEATH OF A VLOGGER / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: GRAHAM HUGHES / STARRING: GRAHAM HUGHES, ANNABEL LOGAN, PADDY KONDRACKI, JOMA WEST, STEPHEN BEAVIS / RELEASE DATE: TBC

Vlogger Graham is desperate to achieve Internet fame, but gets more than he bargained for when some minor but apparently genuine poltergeist action is accidentally caught on an unrelated video. As he is catapulted into notoriety, the ensuing investigation into what’s going on soon spirals out of anybody’s ability to control, while a documentary pieces together what happened after the fact.

Sometimes when a film is made with limited resources you need to be forgiving of the associated production restrictions, which can often leave a lot to be desired regardless of the enthusiasm with which the film was made. But despite Death of a Vlogger being such a creation, such considerations aren’t required to be able to appreciate it. Not only are an assortment of flashy effects unnecessary for its compellingly simple story, had they been included they would have proved an unwelcome distraction.

Told in visual epistolary, the unusual structure takes a little while to properly establish itself, but once it does it becomes an integral aspect of what makes the film so memorable. Everything the viewer sees is presented as a recording, be it one of Graham’s videos, talking head interviewees discussing the escalating situation, recordings of meetings between various people both open and clandestine, and other online denizens offering their opinion on developing revelations.

The lo-fi ghost house antics really shouldn’t work in any kind of eerie capacity, but with the film presenting itself as straightforward reality, the viewer is able to accept any apparent supernatural activity as having no other explanation. Familiar horror movie shots abound throughout, but are crafted in such a manner that they are still disquieting, the proxy fear invoked through the lens of the host seeping through to infect the viewer with its insidious contagion. Even moments leading to a telegraphed jump scare manage to remain unsettling, since it’s not entirely clear at what point it will be thrown at you.

There is an ongoing ambiguity over whether or not the events are real or being faked, and in the proxy discussion the film also touches upon just how much it would mean to some people if concrete proof of life after death were discovered.

As the scale of the happenings begin to escalate you become genuinely concerned for Graham’s ultimate safety. It’s partly due to his lack of inclusion in any of the documentary segments, which makes you consider the decidedly finite number of possibilities that could account for his absence, and also on account of the film’s very title and the lack of available ambiguity in its interpretation.

Death of a Vlogger is a sinister and compelling tale of how perception affects the nature of an observed reality, and an example of just how gripping a moviegoing experience can be crafted out of a simple idea with enough creativity and imagination.

THE MORTUARY COLLECTION / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: RYAN SPINDELL / STARRING: CLANCY BROWN, CAITLIN CUSTER / RELEASE DATE: TBC

Anthology movies, naturally, rise and fall on the quality of their segments, but also on how well they fit together as a whole. In the case of The Mortuary Collection, the framing device for its series of lethal and humorous tales of death is not just an excuse to launch in to the next short, but remains an integral part of the film in its own right and just as significant an aspect of the experience.

In this case, death-obsessed teenager Sam is interested in a working in the local mortuary, and challenges its aged mortician to tell her the most gruesome tales of death to which he has been privy over the decades. As the magnificently monikered Montgomery Dark, Clancy Brown, seemingly made up to look like the Tall Man from the Phantasm movies, has a lot of fun looming ominously and orating in tombstone rumbles, while the far younger Caitlin Custer holds her own opposite the veteran, Sam never appearing cowed by the intimidating presence and revelling in the gradual unveiling of the surreal and death-ridden history of the town in which they live.

Each tale is efficiently alluded to in an opening sequence that drips with nostalgia for the ‘80s when films such as these were popular, and variously involve a thief at a party discovering something otherworldly in the bathroom; an obnoxious and womanising frat boy getting exactly what he deserves after tricking a fellow student into unprotected sex; a melancholic account of a middle aged man caring for his chronically ill wife; and a teenage girl facing the fight of her life after a murderer escapes from a nearby mental hospital.

The highlight of the quartet is the final of these, director Ryan Spindell’s slasher short The Babysitter Murders that ran the festival circuit a few years ago. Rather than just splicing in some pre-existing material its events are deftly incorporated into those of the movie, turning what was a simple standalone tale into an integral piece of the setting’s history that comes back around to resolve the movie’s narrative in a neat and satisfying manner.

While certainly first and foremost a collection of horror tales, an undercurrent of humour also runs strong, keeping the tone light amidst the practical effects gore and gruesomeness that (sometimes quite literally) explodes onto screen. The tone is amplified by the visuals being colourful, hyper-real and heavily stylised, feeling like the stories are live action adaptations of animated shorts shown at 2 am on [adult swim].

Although each tale is set in a different decade and visually styled to the associated aesthetic, they each also possess a timeless quality that allows you to imagine them taking place right up to the present day, relating human foibles that are realistic and relatable whatever the point in time. This also applies the wraparound story, the gothic ambience of the funeral home appearing as something lifted directly from a Victorian backstreet and transplanted into the coastal town.

The Mortuary Collection is a mixed bag that won’t be for everyone, but a distinct assortment of tales of humorous death with practical effects that add to its charm and amplify the retro stylings make the collection as a whole worth seeking out.

A NIGHT OF HORROR: NIGHTMARE RADIO / CERT: TBA / DIRECTOR: OLIVER PARK, JASON BOGNACKI, A.J. BRIONES, JOSHUA LONG, SERGIO MORCELILLO, ADAM O’BRIEN, LUCIANO ONETTI, NICOLÁS ONETTI, PABLO S. PASTOR, MATTHEW RICHARDS / SCREENPLAY: MAURO CROCHE, MICHAEL L. FAWCETT, MICHAEL KRAETZER, GUILLERMO LOCKHART, MATTHEW RICHARDS, SANTIAGO TOBOADA / STARRING: IAN COSTELLO, MUUCHELLE COSTELLO, CLARA KOVACIC / RELEASE DATE: TBC

A late night radio host fills the airwaves with tales of encroaching death and supernatural terror, regaling his listeners and inviting them to contribute their own stories and experiences. As the night stretches into the small hours, a series of mysterious phone calls pulls him into a world of terror far more personal.

The best anthologies are ones that ultimately have a purpose and function as a whole either thematically or content-wise. A Night of Horror: Nightmare Radio is not one of them. It doesn’t help that the shorts were not actually made for the anthology, but assembled from previously filmed material then strung together with a framing device of the radio DJ that does little more than introduce them, like an excessively bearded Crypt Keeper who has swapped bad puns for cheesy dialogue.

The wraparound story does itself have a small plot but is interspersed too little to make any kind of impact, and as the film goes on for so long by the time it comes around to be revealed it’s become unimportant, ultimately being just a jarring way of ending the film on some unconvincing ambiguity as if that neatly wraps things up rather than posing more questions. It’s entirely possible that the shorts were intended to introduce themes and concepts that tie into this ultimate revelation, but it doesn’t always work, leaving the collection feeling highly disjointed and reinforcing its artificial construction.

Taken individually, some of the tales are suitably eerie, such as Post-Mortem Mary, featuring the creepy experiences of a young girl working with her mother as a corpse photographer; In the Dark, Dark Woods, a fairy tale about an invisible woman and the evil she perpetrates from a life confined to the shadows; or The Disappearance of Willie Bingham, seeing a convicted murderer undergoing a series of retributive amputations ordered by the family of his victim. However, by and large they blur together into a series of uninspired twists that inspire little other than an awaiting for their inevitable final revelation.

The tales are so disparate there is not much to warrant them being brought together like this, with the only real theme being a disproportionately high recurrence of young women being stalked, abused, assaulted or otherwise menaced. You’d have really thought we’d reached a point where we can do better than this.

Nightmare Radio is mildly entertaining as a film, but despite its moderate running time still feels stretched out for far too long with little in the way of true development to maintain much interest for the viewer, and then once it’s finally got where it’s going it just… ends.