London Film Festival report 2018

Disappointingly this year I was away on a work trip for a week, missing almost the entirety of the London Film Festival. The only day I could make was the very last day, the Sunday. So that morning I scrolled through the ticket list online and quickly picked two films which looked entertaining and intriguing. As with previous years, even these two films were a pretty mixed bag. But after having seen 6 films in 2016, 4 in 2017 and 2 this year, I hope this downward trend won’t continue, and I hope I’ll get more chance to see more next year (and have more time to research the films!).

The Spy Gone North (2018, Yoon Jong-bin)

Despite how most movies choose to show it, spying in real life I can imagine is very often a lonely, tense, and tedious profession – one fuelled by both the thrill of the operation and a deep-rooted paranoia that could very well take you to the brink. What I admired about this film is that it is unafraid to show this side of the spying world.

Very much taking its inspiration from John Le Carré more than James Bond, The Spy Gone North is a handsomely made thriller, one which is unafraid to take its time, to fully immerse one in the often excruciatingly drawn-out and cumbersome processes involved in political spying. The film takes inspiration from the true story of Park Suk-Young, codenamed Black Venus, an ex-military intelligence officer who is recruited by the South Korean government to infiltrate North Korea posing as a businessman, in order to learn more about their burgeoning nuclear programme. The film begins in 1993 – he has already been recruited at this point, and is beginning the long, painful process of tearing down his old life in order to appear to all as an alcoholic dropout, working to rebuild his life as an ambitious salesman. We learn next to nothing of his personal life – his life over many years is dedicated exclusively to the mission. Even talk of a family back home reveals nothing; we never meet relatives, and he never expresses any desire to give up the mission.

Indeed, the first hour of the film shows in minute exacting detail the steps he and the South Korean government take to establish his backstory – creating a naïve bumbling but ambitious character willing to do anything to make money. He starts small, forging deals with low-level merchants, but with some complicated string-pulling by the government which involves creating an international dispute over the import of nuts, Black Venus begins to make a name for himself. It is quite a dry film, but it is never dull. Despite the length, director Yoon Jong-bin and the vast script creates a sense of pace and scale which builds a surprising degree of tension and builds big stakes. You can’t help but marvel at Black Venus’ skill and dedication, and the lengths he begins to reach within North Korea are truly dazzling to behold. That the film can continue to ground these leaps within a sense of reality (a trip to Pyongyang is magnificently filmed) is to its credit.

Reading the reviews, I think I personally found this film more engaging than some. It can be a little hard to keep up at times, and a little background knowledge in Korean politics, particularly South Korean elections, would have proven helpful. Once Black Venus becomes so deeply embedded, you begin to lose track of what his mission actually entails. But the construction of the script and the steady direction maintains that degree of tension and intrigue that keeps you sucked in.

 

The Prey (2018, Jimmy Henderson)

Looking back now, I really wish my second choice had been something other than this film. I’d gone in hoping for some deliciously pulpy thrills – watching the beautifully crafted exploitation shoot-em-up Let the Corpses Tan last festival gave me hope that I could find something similar this time. And well, The Prey wasn’t bad. Just painfully average and even dull at times, despite its slight running time.

The premise sounded juicy enough – a Chinese undercover cop investigating illegal gambling rings in Bangkok is arrested and thrown into a jail deep in the jungle run by a rogue warden (Vithaya Pansringarm, best known for playing the karaoke-loving vigilante detective in Only God Forgives) who offers wealthy visitors the chance to hunt his prisoners for sport in the surrounding wilderness. A gleefully basic and trashy story, cheap thrills, some martial arts and gunfighting action – what more could you need from a film like this?

It’s obvious that The Prey is made by someone with a deep love and understanding of the genre. The setup is ambitious, the fight scenes are wisely filmed generally in medium close-ups with not too much editing, the plot is thin. But frankly there’s nothing here that felt at all original or compellingly new. The lead character is sketched so thin it’s virtually impossible to care what happens to him. Honestly none of the characters are remotely engaging, even with the cheap tactic of throwing an innocent man and his mute child into the messy mix. None of the action scenes are easy to recall once the film has ended, which is probably the greatest crime this film commits.

The Prey surely has ambitions of meeting the quality of something like The Raid, but the sheer relentlessness and the awe-inspiring stuntwork of that film can’t help but outclass The Prey in every way. Throw in a completely boneheaded and unnecessary depiction of mental illness and you’ve got a film which disappoints from being simply uninspiring.

My favourite songs of 2017 part 2

Plenty of extra songs have come on to my radar since my last post in August, so I thought it was definitely worth sharing my love for them.

Bicep – Aura

I first heard the sweeping atmospheric synth waves of Aura late one night in my room and ended up listening to it over and over a couple of time in a row. Equally at home on the dancefloor or in headphones, this slow-build closing track on their debut EP is probably the most outwardly ‘classic’ house track on their album which takes cues from rave culture, garage and techno. It’s a vast euphoric track and their album has gone on to become one of my favourites this year.

Nick Hakim – Cuffed

Cuffed is a feverish and hypnotic track, steeped in yearning and aching for a past lover. It roots itself in his story when as a young man, he meets an adventurous woman who expands his sexual horizons and literally ensnares him in. Influenced by soul with a more psychedelic edge, the song breaks down in the final moments to a slow drum beat, his soft voice layered by subtle cymbals as the story drifts into a hazy memory.

Charlotte Gainsbourg – Deadly Valentine

One of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s savviest moves in her work as a musician is finding the collaborators who bring out the best of her. For this track, the standout on her grief-driven album Rest, it’s French producer SebastiAn, bringing French house disco beats and pulsing synths on top of sweeping string melodies. It’s a bombastic yet also mysterious song, with Gainsbourg’s subtle understated voice almost struggling to be heard over the music. It’s a dreamy and earnest song about the quiet overwhelming experience of marriage and eternal love.

Big Thief – Haley

Big Thief’s second album Capacity is an achingly sad record of painful memories and tragic family stories, but lead singer Adrianne Lenker’s gorgeous velvety voice and masterful storytelling help push this away from being an unbearable listen, and it comes will a feeling of hope. Haley is almost a standalone single, driven by crisp guitar melodies and sweeping optimism, despite detailing memories of a since-ended relationship. Like the album, it is rooted in a sense of welcome catharsis – she’s not bitter or upset, but glad of the time that she did have.

Lorde – Homemade Dynamite

2017 has undeniably been the year of our Lorde. Melodrama is critically adored, and lead single Green Light is featuring on practically every Best Of song list. Personally I love Homemade Dynamite, a brutally yet almost poetically honest song about the discoveries, pleasures and dissatisfaction of parties, friends and youth itself. Boasting a beast of a chorus, her voice and the accompanying synths both at once airy and punchy, it’s one of those tracks that just demands to be listened to over and over again. The remix with Khalid, Post Malone and SZA is a blast too.

Lambchop – The Hustle Unlimited

I have to admit I’ve never listened to Lambchop, and indeed don’t really know anything about them. Spotify recommended a track called The Hustle off their new album, which turned out to be an 18 minute compelling drone track, one that was quite sparse and almost eerie. But this is a beautifully lush alternative take, sweeping and cinematic, evoking an almost classical era of vast dances at ballrooms populated by beautifully dressed folks living their own heartbreaks and personal dramas. But the lounge music roots of this rack give it a more intimate scale.

Ezra Furman – Love You So Bad 

Ezra Furman returns! And it’s so good to have him back. Another one of my favourites returning with a change in sound – this time from bluesy 50s early guitar rock with do-wop saxophone, to something more dramatic and vastly original. The lyrics are achingly nostalgic, sweetly capturing that era of heady teenage self-discovery and romance. The strings that mark the backdrop of this coming-of-age novel give it a cinematic feel, with the sort of sweeping evocation that you can imagine will see it used in a beautiful montage scene in a teen movie.

Mac DeMarco – On The Level

This new sound from good ol’ Mac took a bit of readjusting to at first. Entirely ditching the jangly guitar and bedroom stoner vibe for something sunnier, hazier, altogether more American West Coast feeling. It’s unbelievably smooth and mellow, with barely any instrumental variation and warm synth chords played endlessly throughout, giving it an endless sunset-time-of-night kind of feel. But it’s also a little disconcerting, the repetition giving it an almost overbearing presence, and the lyrics offering a tale of disappointment and failing to live up to expectations.

Downtown Boys – Promissory Note

That voice! When I first heard Downtown Boys on the radio, I couldn’t get over singer Victoria Ruiz’s strained bellowed vocals. It took a few more listens to really appreciate the amazing combination of political punk, powering sax and Ruiz’s compelling lyrics, a literal ‘fuck you’ to those who refuse to accept the band for who they are. With a surprisingly danceable bassline and a big chorus, it makes this defiant confrontation to invasive patriarchy incredibly listenable. You feel her exasperation – that she feels like she has to bear all the world’s ills in favour of others, that she has to light herself on fire to keep them warm.

Sinkane – Telephone

Sinkane’s album Life and Livin’ It brought him to wider attention this year and was my introduction to his music. An infectious song actively designed to be danced to, it blurs classic old school disco with a more contemporary edge of afro-rock and electronica, and tells a story of a failing and difficult relationship despite the upbeat nature of it.  The blend of instrumentations and production works perfectly, and builds to a rousing big brass finale.

Fever Ray – To the Moon and Back

The long awaited return of Fever Ray! New album Plunge dropped in without fanfare in October, and this lead single gave a glimpse of what was to come. Her debut eponymous album is one of my top five albums ever – a haunting atmospheric record that literally drapes itself onto you. This is altogether closer to her work with The Knife, frenetic and colourful, bracingly so on first listen. It’s a provocative track, erotic and energetic, which is fearlessly unapologetic about Karin Dreijer expressing her sexuality and queerness, and the immense pleasure that brings for her. She’s more willing to expose herself here, ditching all the vocal effects and pitch-shifting that previously disguised her voice.

Beck – Up All Night

Beck is one of my all-time musical heroes so it’s always a pleasure to have him back, especially with the return of upbeat playful Beck. His new album Colors is his unashamed out-and-out pop record and with that he mostly succeeds. Lyrically it disappointingly lacks so much of the distinctive ramshackle poetry that made his earlier work unique. And at first, I wasn’t sure if this isn’t at all removed from the plain pop of something like Justin Timberlake’s Can’t Stop the Feeling, which I’ve got to admit I find irritating. But each time I heard that goddamn soaring chorus, it slowly won me over. Beck’s here proving he can make pop songs like the best of them, and still retaining a lot of his inimitable style.

Extra Mentions – Pins – Serve the Rich; Boxed In – Pushing On; Noga Erez – Noisy; LCD Soundsystem – Tonite; Mary Epworth – Me Swimming; Arcade Fire – Put Your Money on Me; Tom Williams – Everyone Needs a Home; Beth Ditto – Fire; Moses Sumney – Lonely World; Joan as Police Woman – Warning Bell; Thundercat – Friend Zone; Childish Gambino – Redbone; St Vincent – New York; My Baby – Cosmic Radio; Floating Point – Ratio; Hannah Peel – All That Matters; Vessels – Mobilise; Ghostpoet – Freakshow; Elbow – Magnificent (She Says)

London Film Festival 2017 report

So I’ve survived in London long enough to make it to my second Film Festival and whilst the pressure of full time work during one of the busiest times of the year was exhausting, the draw of strange new films was too enticing. In the end I saw 4 films in about a week, which really didn’t help with my lack of sleep and general weariness, but I think it was definitely worth it. There were fewer knockout hits than I saw last year, but each of these films offered their own unique pleasures.

Rift (Erlingur Thoroddsen; Iceland; 2017)

The original title of my first viewing, an eerie, chilly and compelling film called Rökkur, roughly translates from Icelandic as ‘twilight’. But as the director joked at the Q&A afterwards, that name was already taken. I think that Rift is a much better title anyway, describing not only the underlying theme of the film about the distances that can grow between those in relationships, but also the vast landscape of caverns, plains and faultlines that play an important part of the story.

Several months after a break-up, Gunnar (Björn Stefánsson) receives a call in the middle of the night from ex-boyfriend Einar (Sigurður Þór Óskarsson), sounding distressed and paranoid. Worried, Gunnar drives up to the isolated cabin (the eponymous Rökkur) to check on him. Stuck together, the two are forced to confront the issues that drove them apart as painful memories resurface. All the while, strange things happen at night – mysterious banging on the door and ghostly presences in the lava fields around them.

I went in expecting a cryptic relationship drama, a literal ghosts of relationships past sort of film. And at its core it was. The depiction of the central relationship, from the younger and more unstable and romantic Einar to the more pragmatic but troubled Gunnar, is convincing and enthralling. The actors fully realise their characters and their chemistry and interactions feels genuine. Scenes of them simply talking, discussing their feelings, or reliving the past (at one point almost in a trance-like state) are among the film’s highlights and I feel they would have worked effectively on their own. And there’s no ignoring the harsh and wild beauty of the landscape around them and that too is used effectively, handsomely shot and making clever use of abandoned buildings interacting with the local geography.

It’s the tying of this story with the horror elements and much more beside that that complicates things. A lot of the tense moments are cliche, but effectively so. The shift in the second half to more outward horror territory is gripping, with one or two genuinely chilling moments which caught me off guard, particularly one scene involving GoPro camera footage. But the film tries to juggle too many strands at once and that causes it to lose focus and coherence. I imagine it was the director’s intention to make it unclear whether the threat is real or supernatural, to ramp up the uncanniness.  But multiple themes and subplots keep being brought to the fore, and it gets a little frustrating when the film can’t decide which way to head beyond splitting in multiple directions. I respect his ambition in trying to cover so much, from depression to homophobia, self-destructive behaviour to childhood trauma, and the uniquely magical properties of this distinct landscape. It’s a shame it gets a little lost in its tussle between the real and the unreal, the outward and the inward, to the point where I don’t think the director himself really felt he could disentangle himself from the mire of ambiguity. I think this had the potential to be a truly great film, it just falls a little short. But that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it a lot, and have to admit it was the most unnerving film I had seen at the cinema for a while.

 

Mutafukaz (Shoujirou Nishimi, Guillaume ‘Run’ Renard; France/Japan; 2017)

Now this one looked fun. A French-Japanese anime, rooted in hip-hop music, the freneticism of Luc Besson and Wachowskis action films, the broad and brazen cultural stereotyping and casual violence of the GTA games, and the dense appropriation of graphic novels and comic book lore. Adapted from a French comic book series, the sheer weight of counterculture references and midnight movie thrills make this feel like a future cult classic, even if it does feel like it’s trying quite too hard to be a future cult classic. But that’s no faulting what is essentially fanboy servicing – a gleefully bombastic checklist of cheap thrills, skillfully presented to be devoured with maximum stoner cravings.

We follow Angelino, a loser pizza delivery boy crashing in a cockroach-infested squat of an apartment with his best friend and fellow down-and-outer Vinz. The fact that Angelino has a giant round black head and Vinz is a flaming skeleton just plays into the loose logic of this film. They survive in the sprawling Californian metropolis Dark Meat City, here rendered with a staggering ragged beauty, full of shitty diners, sun-drenched decay and graffiti-drenched ghettos. After Angelino cracks his cranium in a bike accident he begins to see strange visions of demon shadows. He tries to brush it off as a result of the crash, until the bulky men in black appear with even bulkier guns, determined to take him down.

What follows is a pretty loose, nonsensical escape adventure. We find out more about the mystery men and their plots, and this is a source of some cute jokes about their plans to change the world. But that’s not what really matters in this film – it’s all about the ride, not the destination. Like the best animes, this has a fierce eye for action and the keen focus on little details in the animation make this a hell of a good ride.

I enjoyed this a great deal whilst watching the action scenes. The rest is pure teenage boy fan-fic fantasy, including the lone female character in the entire film being no more than a foil for Angelino to be drawn to. And after leaving the screen, it hardly left much of an imprint on my mind to dwell on afterwards. But the buzz of energy this film offered was more than worth the cost of the ticket

 

Let the Corpses Tan (Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani; Belgium/France; 2017)

And so came my second night in a row of Gallic pulpy thrills. The title alone gives a pretty good idea of what to expect – this is a bold, brash, confrontational film. It’s also a complete riot and a feast for the senses. This is the film that Free Fire wishes it was. Not that that film was bad, but Corpses has so much more impact, is so much more taut, and has more outlandish thrills and distinct setpieces. It’s very much a case of more is more.

Set in the harsh sun of the Mediterranean coast, an artist (Elina Löwensohn) lives in an isolated villa, inviting guests happy to be away from wider society. It just happens that her latest visitors are a gang of robbers, hiding a heist of gold bullion in their car boot. Two cops make the mistake of getting involved before a ridiculously complex shootout for survival bursts alight.

At first, the entire thing feels like it is just going to be a blatant spaghetti western pastiche, apeing Sergio Leone’s distinct style – hip-level framing of stand-offs between characters; an excessive use of extreme close-ups on eyes and hands; bursts of scuzzy colour; a sparseness of landscape that positively drips with sweat. One character even has a necklace that plays like a music box.
It’s once the action setpieces kick in that the husband and wife directing duo really hit their stride. Everything is designed to overwhelm – gunshots burst with the sound of small explosions, and the constant creasing sounds of leather jackets and gloves give this an almost fetishistic level of obsessive detail. Playfully animated camera movements give even simple conversations an ridiculous degree of animation.

Subtle it ain’t. I think your level of enjoyment with this film will depend on how patient you are willing to be with their excessive obsessions and the complete lack of anything resembling a plot or character development. It’s the directors gleefully fucking around with your sensibilities with their wonderfully crafted piece of exploitation. Sound and vision is central – the sheer level of rough sheen granted to shots of ashes billowing gracefully from a burning car, or the impact of the explosion of bloody matter from a skull tells you everything you need to know about where this film’s interests lie. I really enjoyed it – frankly just thinking about it now is making me want to see it again. I’m so glad I got to see it on a big screen.

 

Ex Libris – The New York Public Library (Frederick Wiseman; USA; 2017)

So what comes to mind when I tell you this is a 3 hour and 17 minute documentary about the New York Public Library? On first impressions, it seems like it could probably be one of the most dull and drawn-out things ever made. But this is the latest work from Frederick Wiseman, the living legend documentarian still going strong in his 80s. I’d been meaning to try one of his films for a long time, from his earlier work with High School and Hospital, to his recent films exploring institutions of learning, National Gallery and At Berkeley. I was lucky to get to see this at a busy screening the BFI with the man himself doing a Q&A after.

This film is peak definition of fly-on-the-wall doc. He said he and his cinematographer filmed over 150 hours over 12 weeks, and he spent nearly a year editing it down. There’s no overarching story or protagonist, no narration, no sense of mass upheaval or change. This is literally just some highlights and everyday footage of working life in the vast caverns and many buildings and spaces the library occupies across New York. We see kids classes; what members of the public are doing on their computers; talks with authors including discussions with Patti Smith and Elvis Costello; seminars about topics ranging from slavery to the history of Jewish delis; senior team meetings; afternoon concerts. The range of content is dizzying, and it gives a wonderfully vast portrait of how important an institution like this is, how much it offers to so many, and how much work goes into keeping it going.

At times dull, sometimes charmingly odd and funny, often inspirational, Ex Libris is very much a film one can get lost in. It’s a huge testament to how seamlessly it was edited together that it flows so smoothly, and that it can cut together an hour-long board meeting into a 5 minute clip that gives an immersive view on how they discuss the future of the library.

This is a film which celebrates a love of learning and curiosity, and simply portrays the unparalleled good such an institution can bring to so many. We see meetings to discuss the need to share resources more fairly with underprivileged communities; an engaging lecture about the importance of sign language; a scheme to grant poorer families their own wifi routers. It’s a heartening film, steeped so overwhelmingly with snippets of people working hard to help others, share knowledge and better themselves. I probably won’t need to see it again, but as a study of the wonderful everyday, it’s a fine piece of work.

 

Certain Women (2016)

Writer/Director: Kelly Reichardt

I’ve not actually seen a Kelly Reichardt film properly through, so I suppose this was my first genuine introduction. I have been aware of her approach which makes her unique even within the artier circles of cinema today: her dislike of neat endings and conventional plotting; the immersion of often side-lined characters within vast landscapes, and the stories of marginalised women presented without any explicit theme.

Certain Women, which won Best Film at the London Film Festival, is a triptych of three women living in Montana, and the little things that occur to them over a short period. Laura Dern is a lawyer dealing with an unstable client, Michelle Williams plays a mother whose lofty intentions in building a new house is distracting her from the increasing distance between her and her family, and Lily Gladstone steals the show as a lonely ranch-hand who falls for Kristen Stewart’s night school teacher.

Each story unfolds gradually and quietly, actively foregoing anything majorly dramatic or any sort of conflict. The unassuming ordinariness of these lives, often filmed in uncomplicated medium close ups, or amongst wide shots of the vast still landscapes, is given added expression by the actors who fill the naturalness of their conversations with a genuine sense of the lived-in, the rugged realness of women simply working and surviving.

Very often it’s the little gestures, or the moments left unspoken, especially between Gladstone and Stewart, that breath life into this film. At first I found the seeming emptiness and almost aimlessness of these lives depressing, and I left the screen with an almost gnawing sense of feeling lost. I think partly it was because I had to adjust myself to Reichardt’s more casual rhythms, but I later realised that perhaps that was intended – Reichardt empathetically exploring the extent of women’s lives in midstate America, where many struggle to find meaning, and many more struggle simply to get by.

 

 

The Red Turtle (2016)

2016
Writers: Michael Dudok de Wit, Pascale Ferran
Director: Michael Dudok de Wit

The Red Turtle is such an effervescent, almost transcendental film. It forgoes plotting, structure, even dialogue, to produce a film at once grand yet intimate. Thinking about it now, it’s hard to recall a huge amount of specific detail about it – moments of it float in my mind now almost like faded memories of a dream.

The film is a collaboration between Studio Ghibli and European distribution company Wild Bunch (which has previously distributed many of Ghibli’s films), the film marks the feature debut of Dutch animator Michael Dudok de Wit, who had previously won an Oscar for Best Animated Short (I’ll definitely be looking that up). Concerning a man shipwrecked and stranded on a deserted island, at first it understandably follows his struggles to survive and his attempts to escape. But The Red Turtle quickly goes beyond a simple survival narrative, using its largely blank canvas to explore feelings of all kinds, from profound loneliness and loss, to love found, and presenting a genuinely moving account of how life can be granted meaning in the most basic and unexpected of ways.

The missing dialogue (bar some shouting and sounds of movement) puts the animation and the sound design centre stage. As expected with Ghibli, it looks insanely beautiful, in this case retaining their incredible skill at designing lush, detailed landscapes and backgrounds, but forgoing the more dynamic and bolder lines in the foreground towards a softer style, more in tune with a children’s picture book or an expressionist landscape painting. The island is as much its own character, with the man presented rarely in close ups, instead dwarfed by the vast beaches, cliffs and bamboo groves, and giving the animators ample opportunities to display their skill at bringing convincing life to his movements.

But at it’s heart, as with most Ghibli films, this is a film about nature, and how we as humans are simply bit parts and decor, our stories enhanced by the natural world. The man’s experience on the island is as much down to the whims of the weather as much as anything. Nature is both cruel and kind. This is pushed further as the film begins to blur towards more fantastical territory, giving a genuinely universal yet intimate portrait of what we as humans crave – love, comfort, and somewhere to call home.

The sheer simplicity of the film entails that you will get out of it as much as you bring to it. It can be a profound study if you want, or simply an engrossing and beautiful experience of a film to be savoured in the moment. I think my deeper readings of The Red Turtle are me trying to recall something more solid in what is largely a delicate film which can only really be experienced in the absolute present. I don’t think it’s really meant to be pored upon and studied; rather it’s something to be immersed in for its relatively slight 80 minutes. Plus it has one of the most quietly devastating ends of anything I’ve seen in a while.

London Film Festival 2016 report

I was lucky enough to catch 6 films at this, my first ever film festival. The sheer number of films on offer was a little dizzying, and I would have loved to have caught even more if time and money had allowed it. I had a ticket booked to see Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper, which I was really looking forward to but sadly couldn’t make in time after work. But the films I saw gave a small glimpse of the sheer range of films available, and I loved the breadth of content, quality and experiences even this small number of films offered. Here are some quick thoughts in the order I saw them.

Ten Years (Ng Ka-Leung, Jevons Au, Chow Kwun-Wai, Fei-Pang Wong, Kwok Zune; Hong Kong; 2015)

Local Egg from Ten Years

My first film was one of the most unusual: a portmanteau of five short films, all offering differing interpretations of how the directors imagine Hong Kong to be in 2025. The varied approaches they all take are fascinating, and the final result is undeniably incendiary and stirring, even for someone like me who knows little about the current situation in the region. The real-life story surrounding the film is just as compelling as the film itself. Made on a shoestring budget and released in only one cinema in Hong Kong, word of mouth quickly spread and the film became a sleeper hit, often selling more tickets than the new Star Wars film in many cinemas. The film was nominated for Best Picture at the Hong Kong Film Awards, and ultimately won, but all mentions of the film in the media were blocked by the Chinese government and the award itself from the ceremony was cut from all TV broadcasts.

In a way, this true scenario serves to further enforce the radical messages of the film. This was a compelling protest film, and all the different approaches create a more complete and varied picture than a single narrative could. One film, Season of the End, which depicted a couple collecting and preserving specimens from homes which had been demolished, felt jarringly out of place from the others, perhaps because it took a far more abstract approach, and because it focused entirely on the couple at the expense of the wider story. The opening film though, Extras, takes an unusual but intriguing approach, depicting a government-backed assassination of two major Hong Kong political party leaders from the point of view of both the bickering politicians debating how best to set-up the attack for maximum impact so as to push through draconian security measures, to the two men, the pawns, tasked with carrying out the executions.

Lighter but equally informative and thought-provoking takes come from films Dialect, depicting a taxi driver struggling to work following a new law forcing drivers to speak only Mandarin instead of Cantonese, and Local Egg, which shows how the government-backed closure of the last chicken farm in Hong Kong affects the family of a shopkeeper, primarily the father trying to keep his son questioning of all propaganda. The real standout for me though was Self Immolator, which cleverly combines the story of student protestors with a faux documentary, offering perhaps the most explicitly emotive and political call-to-arms.

That many of these films found inspiration for their stories from real-life laws and scenarios makes the work even more compelling in hindsight. This is political cinema where perhaps its greatest impact is in its interaction with the outside world, far more so than the film within itself. It’s also a testament to the potential for independent filmmaking to really go beyond the walls of the cinema screen and start to creep out, perhaps to cause meaningful change. This was a unique and insightful film, and I was very glad I had the chance to see it.

King Cobra (Justin Kelly; USA; 2016)

As far as I know, this is one of the few (if only) films I’m aware of which deals with porn in the Internet age. Drawing much from that cinematic bastion of porn industry exposés, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, King Cobra similarly takes a tragicomic approach to the constantly wavering highs and lows of the lost souls, young upstarts and sex-crazed fiends that seemingly make up the entire porn industry.

King Cobra is a biopic of the real life scandal involving gay porn star Brent Corrigan aka Sean Lockhart and the producer who first discovered him, Bryan Kocis (named Stephen in the film, and played very well by an against-type Christian Slater). Garrett Clayton plays Lockhart, desperate to escape from his mom’s house in San Diego and so makes the move to Los Angeles to work with Stephen, a closeted producer who runs Cobra Video productions from his non-descript suburban home, filming videos in his basement. The newly baptised Brent Corrigan soon becomes an Internet hit, causing him to realise Stephen might not be offering him the fairest of deals, with him being one in a series of young men Stephen has recruited to live out his masturbatory fantasies in the safety of his home. Meanwhile, producer Joe (James Franco) and his boyfriend Harlow (Keegan Allen) from rival production company Viper Boyz have their eye on Brent, and will do anything possible to get him to join them.

For a film which dealt with some quite serious subjects, including hints towards exploitation and child abuse, I admired how King Cobra was able to maintain such a darkly comic tone without feeling like it was exploiting or trivialising the issues. The performances are strong, from Clayton’s careful balance of youthful naiveté and self-awareness, to Allen’s taut edgy physicality, hinting at a tension between violence and a desperation for affection. This plays out best in the bristling energy of his relationship with Franco’s Joe, here played with a similar outlandishness to his role as Alien in Spring Breakers. Less cartoonish than that film, but drawn to similarly overblown outbursts, it’s clear Franco is having a lot of fun with the role.

It’s insightful how director Justin Kelly realises how the four main leads have used porn and its performative and intimate nature to make up for lacks in their lives, and to explore the boundaries of the shame some have for their own homosexuality. Saying that, in some ways King Cobra is a slight film, with stylistic tics and fast pacing often drawing away from moments which could offer greater insights into the characters. It clearly is aiming for a neon-drenched exposé of underground culture a la Spring Breakers, with similar salacious content and synthy soundtrack, but sometimes can’t decide between going for the quieter plot-driven moments or the flashier set-ups. Overall though, I found this to be a gleefully enjoyable thrill, especially for being so completely fearless in topics which would so often be softened by film studios. Throw in some frankly extraordinary cameos by Alicia Silverstone and Molly Ringwald (Justin Kelly must clearly have loved having these figures of 80s/90s nostalgia on only his second feature) and you get something very fun, if a bit forgettable.

Heal the Living (Katell Quillévéré; France/Belgium; 2016)

I went into my third film knowing very little beyond the basic topic it focuses on. I hadn’t heard of the director or seen any of her films. But I was really blown away by how sublime, how deeply moving and humane this film was. It was fantastically shot as well, with a real insightful eye for detail and some particularly impressive scenes, especially an early scene of surfing.

The film centres on various seemingly unrelated stories, all involving the ethically and emotionally fraught issue of organ donations and transplants. Heal the Living is an unassuming and uncomplicated film, but Quillévéré achieves this by taking multiple complex and interrelated strands and allowing them to play out in their own simple but observant fashion. The film takes its time, and this grants us a wonderful insight into the lives, backgrounds and quirks of all the characters, including even minor roles which feature minimally. There are little moments, some funny and some even a little fantastical, which give even background characters just little hints of depth amongst the frenetic activity of the busy hospital. It’s also helped by a fantastic cast including Anne Dorval, Emmanuelle Seigner and Tahar Rahim, who all give truthful, nuanced performances.

This isn’t a film particularly driven by high drama or tension. It simply offers a surprisingly universal portrait of perceptions of our own mortality, and of the fragility of the human body. At times the film has an almost documentary-like approach in depicting the processes of an organ transplant, most specifically in the surgery and transportation. This is a topic which I can’t really remember having featured in cinema much, bar some scenes in Almodóvar’s All About My Mother, which is surprising, considering it offers the potential for a number of dramatic scenarios. But what I really respected about Heal the Living was how it avoided overblown melodrama and instead offered an unassuming, realistic glimpse into the lives of families simply surviving amidst personal tragedies and health scares, and this for me made it a far more engaging and immersive. This was genuinely one of the best films I’ve seen this year, and in a lot of ways, I thought it was genuinely very special indeed.

The Dreamed Ones (Ruth Beckermann; Austria; 2016)

This was a spur-of-the-moment choice when I had a free afternoon, and I went in knowing absolutely nothing. I probably wasn’t in the right mood for it, but in the end I found the film to be a bit of a drag, visually uninspired and with material which I personally didn’t find compelling, even over a relatively slight 90 minutes.

The Dreamed Ones is essentially an essay film with documentary elements, depicting two decades of correspondence between two post-war writers who met in 1948: poet Paul Celan who had survived the concentration camps, and Ingeborg Bachmann, whose father was a Nazi. They hardly met, but maintained a regular impassioned, often tempestuous relationship through their letters. The film dramatizes these letters by having two actors (Anja Plaschg and Laurence Rupp) read them aloud chronologically in a recording studio, often filmed in tight close ups focused on their faces. There are glimpses of their downtime between recordings, often sharing cigarette breaks and discussing their interpretations of the letters. But the film never strays from the correspondence, and barely even leaves the recording studio, a relatively blank space.

The letters were fairly intriguing at first, with the obvious flourishes of language and phrase that would come from two writers finding inspiration in each other. But I quickly found myself tiring of their self-contained woes, which I struggled to find any engagement with. I could tell others in the audience with me were getting far more involved than I could, but I got bored fairly quickly. I was hoping there could have been more focus on how the reading of the letters and their close proximity would have affected the relationship between the two actors, but nothing ultimately comes from it, perhaps with the filmmakers not wanting to intrude upon the real-life story. In the end, I couldn’t see what differentiated this film from what could easily just have been an audio recording of the letters, as that is ultimately what it became.

The Wailing (Na Hong-jin; South Korea; 2016)

I chose this film purely on the strength of having loved director Na Hong-jin’s debut film The Chaser, a breathtakingly intense and brutal police thriller, and for the dizzying promise of seeing him tackle something a bit more fantastical. Frankly, I think this film is an epic achievement in all senses of the word. At two and a half hours long, it certainly takes advantage of its vast running time. It throws everything it has at the screen and then some, and thankfully, most of it sticks.

The Wailing is a slightly unholy blend of genres which frankly shouldn’t work but it just about gets away with it. It begins in similar territory as his previous work, with a competent but bumbling police detective in a small rural village on the edge of a vast forest investigating a bizarre murder, with the culprit found in a seemingly zombie-like trance. This kickstarts a series of disturbing deaths, with theories and accusations running wild and fears that the village has been cursed. From here, The Wailing shifts into a chillingly effective 21^st century take on The Exorcist, with some deafeningly visceral takes on supernatural ritual which provide a satisfyingly grounded counterpoint to the more ridiculous moments of that horror classic.

What really impressed was the sheer level of control Hong-jin has over the construction of this film. It’s obvious a lot of time and thought went into staging the shots and building the scenarios to create maximum impact; the editing is impeccable and the slow build in the first hour or so possessed some of the most genuinely creepy moments I’ve watched in a long time, with subtly effective jump scares and an overwhelming feeling of dread. But what surprises is how the shifts in tone never feel jarring. The film is surprisingly funny, and even manages to find humour in setting up potential scares. But even where the wild shifts in genre and weight of content threaten to overwhelm the film, it never loosens its grip on you. The film is heavy with so many themes (deep rooted xenophobia; the clash of religions and beliefs; questions over how realistic/allegorical the supernatural elements are) and subplots that it threatens to drag the second half down. Indeed, it almost gets lost amidst all of its twists, many of which admittedly caught me by surprise, that it did leave me wishing it retained some of the tautness of the first hour.

But I think it’s testament to the sheer level of skill involved both in front of and behind the camera that The Wailing pummels like a jackhammer. It’s vast, overblown and completely batshit crazy but also achingly tense and mysterious, and the long runtime seemed to fly by. A lot of this review does feel hyperbolic, but I think that’s the easiest way of conveying how drastically I was involved with this film. It may not be perfect, but I think it’s got to be up there as one of the best horror films I’ve ever seen.

Staying Vertical (Alain Guiraudie; France; 2016)

I don’t really even know where to begin with this one. Guiraudie’s follow up to the mesmeric and magisterial Stranger by the Lake is certainly a mixed affair, content to drift along on its own whims and fancies, presenting an unusual series of vignettes and setpieces in place of anything resembling a coherent script or character study. Similar to Stranger, Staying Vertical centres on a remote countryside setting, a fearless approach to graphic content, and a series of chance encounters for the male lead which sparks some unexpected repercussions.

We follow Leo (Damian Bonnard), an uninspired writer and filmmaker who is rambling through the French country hills. He creepily flirts with a young man (Basile Meillurat) he meets by the side of the road by offering him a part in his next movie. Duly rejected, he skulks around some more before encountering Marie (India Hair), a shepherdess tending her herd of sheep. It’s not long before the two are making out, and before we know it, he has moved into her remote farmhouse with her two sons and father. One graphic sex scene later, then a cut to an unnecessarily gory scene of childbirth, the two are almost immediately parents to a baby boy. At the same time, Leo continues to drift back and forth to a nearby town, seemingly attempting to work on a new screenplay, but making practically no effort, and making false promises to his producer on top of asking for more advances of money. Leo finds newfound love for his son, but Marie struggles with postpartum depression and makes no effort to connect to the constantly crying child.

It’s hard to really convey much more without either rambling endlessly or giving away too much. This is a film which happily flows to its own rhythm, and if you are willing to go along with it, it presents a bewildering and somewhat compelling journey. This film could easily have been a character study of a lost man finding purpose in fatherhood, but it’s hard to tell where Guiraudie’s interests really lie – certainly not something so ordinary. Leo is presented as such an unreadable character, often dour and expressionless. His writer’s block seemingly turns into such a complete disinterest in work of any kind that it’s hard to really detemine what he wants, especially as he drifts back and forth, from random re-encounters with the young man from the road and the elderly racist man he seems to cohabit with, to visits with a new-age healer who lives in a swamp. Instead, it feels like Leo is simply a blank vessel which Guiraudie utilises to introduce the increasingly surreal and metaphorical scenarios throughout the film, but put together with such dissonance that it ends up seeming like a scrapbook of ideas stitched together for no other reason than that Guiraudie found them interesting at the time.

There are some intriguing themes hinted at, primarily, gender relations and the perceived responsibilities of men and women, with several characters mentioning what they feel is the norm for differing roles of work and parenthood. The title is a reference to survival, about standing tall against the threats and low blows life has to offer. But the setting of this world seems so far gone from anything resembling reality, and Leo, the one guiding constant in this strange hodge-podge, is too empty a character to really resonate as a protagonist or emotional barometer, that the film ended up having little to no staying power with me. What really stuck is how I found this quite a cynical film, with a very unpleasant view on the nature of relationships, both sexual and familial, that it left a fairly bitter aftertaste, even for someone with a pretty unromantic view of such things like me.

Living and Dreaming like nobody has done before: Knight of Cups (2015)

2015
Writer/Director: Terrence Malick

Maybe old Terry Malick needs another few years hiatus. His pace of new output seems positively frenetic compared to the work of years past (6 years for The Tree of Life, 7 years for The New World, 20 years for The Thin Red Line), and Knight of Cups was shot simultaneously with the upcoming project Weightless. Both shot around 2012, this film then spent about 2 years in post-production, being edited then re-edited before receiving its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in 2015, to mixed response.

This is undeniably Malick’s most experimental film yet, a lush audiovisual poem of loss and alienation within the glossy, glassy excesses of Los Angeles. Christian Bale plays a depressed screenwriter Rick, filling the emptiness in his life with affairs with various women and finding temporary solace at glamourous parties and on the simulated worlds of film sets. Relations with his father (Brian Dennehy) are strained, and his brother (Wes Bentley) remains unhinged and reckless following the death of another sibling. But any solid foundations of a plot are tantalisingly, almost frustratingly absent. Structure is of no interest to Malick, instead preferring the effervescent aura of mood and tone. This is his search for the soul of the frustrated artist, an odyssey into the turmoil at the heart of a modern metropolis where simple sensual and romantic pleasures are routinely displaced.

Rick’s various relationships with women, displayed unchronologically under the sub-chapters of various tarot cards (The Hanged Man, The Hermit, The High Priestess), attempt to present his search for the physical and emotional sensations that he feels are lacking. Endless walks along the beach in the golden hour of sunset, disjointed Hollywood pool parties, silky fumbles in bed. Many of Malick’s trademark tropes are present – magic hour scenes, fluid and loose camerawork, an existential and philosophical approach to characterisation and scenario, whispery voiceovers. Yet the near-simulacrous Hollywood setting of glass mansions and sun-draped boulevards feels at odds to Malick’s approach, proven to be more suited to the uncomplicated and feasibly more poetic lives of ordinary small-town Americans, as seen in Badlands, Days of Heaven and The Tree of Life. It’s a setting I couldn’t really imagine Malick having any great interest in, beyond the clichéd approach of the film industry as hollow commerce. Bale’s Rick, supposedly the ill-fitting centre of this catwalk show, is left so blank and unknowable that it feels impossible to marry the gorgeous shots and whispery quotes to Rick’s feelings and thoughts. He barely speaks, instead looking perplexed in various locations.

It comes as completely no surprise that Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography is absolutely eye-swimmingly gorgeous. I could happily watch it for hours – smoothly freeheld cameras glide and whip around the onscreen players, often nauseatingly so. From sunkissed and sharp garden parties, to the lush neon of probably the most tastefully filmed strip club ever, mesmerising submerged shots of dogs playing in a swimming pool filmed from below, and the vast jagged Nevada deserts, it is undeniably the most beautiful film I’ve seen this year – every scene made me want to dive into the clear clean streets of LA, which presented a tantilising contrast to the tonal message of dissatisfaction Malick was trying to present. This married with Malick’s indubitable soundtrack choices, often repeated across the film to create a deeper thematic consistency, helps make this a wonderfully absorbing audiovisual feast.

The problems for me occurred at about the hour mark. After 60 or so minutes of this, I was beginning to get bored. Malick’s dedication to his near-unknowable poetic stance is admirable, but I found it too transient and too transparent to engage with on a deeper level. The one scene that had resonance with me was Bale’s with Cate Blanchett playing his ex-wife, their obvious shared connection with each other providing a viable character basis that much of the film is lacking – especially the scenes with his family which cannot display their animosity beyond abstract shots of arguments.

At times I was almost laughing at the sheer deadpan pomposity of the film – whispery voiceovers quote The Pilgrim’s Progress, whilst Bale looks pensively offscreen, intercut with sweeping shots of deserts and giant houses as scantily-clad women play around a pool, it often felt like a parody of a Terrence Malick film. It is obvious Malick and Lubezki have a vision, a revelatory and mesmerising one at that. I just couldn’t help but feel that the displacement of focus from character onto the auidovisual poetry ultimately made this a hollow experience for me. It was a delicious exercise in visual pleasure, but also a deliberately alienating study of an alienated man that proved too distant to be nothing more to me than a passing fancy, a brief affair.

Looks like the rot’s set in: High-Rise

2015
Director: Ben Wheatley
Writer: Amy Jump

Lavin had high hopes for the High-Rise. Its component parts were of the highest quality: an on-the-rise director, stellar cast, and fine production team. The preview materials promised a stylish, raucous study of society collapsing in on itself. Anticipation was palpable. Yet something felt a little off about the High-Rise – underlying issues beneath the pristine surfaces. Lavin was disappointed.

Inspired by J. G. Ballard’s 1975 novel, Ben Wheatley’s finely crafted film depicts a brutalist vision of the future, dominated by several gargantuan concrete tower blocks, perfectly composed geometric stacks of pillars, walls and balconies. They provide the future of modern living – state of the art apartments and all amenities on site – school, supermarket, swimming pool. Into the first of these developments moves Dr Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston), a physiologist hoping to start afresh in a new building. Moving onto the 25^th floor, he’s firmly ensconced within the increasingly widening gulf between the poorer residents at the bottom, and the self-contained and decadent top floor residents. Overseeing but detached from the whole affair is the architect Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons), who’s isolated himself in his penthouse following an injury, while his estranged wife (Keeley Hawes) dominates the parties of the higher floors.

The depiction of the upper floors, all Georgian-themed costume parties and talk of hating the poor for being greedy is a little on-the-nose to be taken entirely seriously. Their opulence leads to greater disparity between floors, and power failure throughout the building. Royal blames the rising qualms on “teething problems”, but soon problems escalate. The building remains so self-contained that residents begin to stop leaving, and increasing pressures pushes them to their more basal instincts, as tribal factions begin to form.

There’s no denying the sheer ambition and achievements of this film. The little details that evoke the specificities of this unusual alternative 70s Britain are spectacular, from the concrete stylings of the apartments walls and balconies, to the kitsch hair and fashions, whilst the general non-descript design of the building interiors and even the look of the food in the isolated supermarket gives the scenario a sense of blank separateness which is inspiring to look at. The way the film can immerse you in this world is exciting. The problems for me started once the film attempted to delve deeper beneath the surfaces.

High-Rise is certainly a film which attempts to address big themes about the human condition and our propensity towards violence and self-preservation once the unspoken rules of our social contracts are broken. The brave decision to set it within the 70s setting from which Ballard’s novel drew from had the potential to create an incredibly ambitious portrait of a predicted future, an alternate reality which could have proved a fascinating counterpart to our current reality. I’m sure that was Wheatley’s and screenwriter Amy Jump’s intention.
Instead, by the film’s second half, the depiction of the chaos engulfing the high-rise overwhelms the clearer intentions of the script. Whilst the gradual formal breakdown of plot structure and filming style undoubtedly immerses us within the vicious hedonistic behaviour of the tenants, this also draws us further from consequences and character relations we had spent the first half of the film building. Simply showing the increasingly debauched and excessive behaviour of the characters inadvertently just covers up the lack of content beneath the surface. A whole multitude of characters and plotlines come and go out of focus, seemingly without any decision on where they are going or which deserve attention at different times beyond superficial reasons. For example, a reveal about a character’s background which might otherwise have proven an important plot point in another film is simply brushed off here, and hardly referenced again. It might be seen as an alternate take on plot points to avoid clichés, but in this case, bundled together with a whole plethora of other unanswered and unrelated stories, it simply makes the film feel aimless and messy.

I haven’t read Ballard’s novel, but I can imagine his trademark clinical descriptions married with his lyrical flourishes would allow his story to delve further into the processes and reasonings behind this microcosm societal breakdown. Instead, the film seems only able to present the increasingly destructive behaviour on a formal level, and struggles to delve further into the actual conflicts taking place between characters, or the specific reasons for individual characters’ actions. Dr Laing is presented as an apathetic observer, mostly keeping to himself and striving for the perfect apartment. In the novel, this could provide a fine set-up for an observational narrator, but here it leaves Laing an underdeveloped and ultimately uninteresting character, only proving his relevance later in the film when other characters demand action from him. The standout character is undoubtedly Richard Wilder, played fantastically by Luke Evans, a motivated documentary filmmaker who becomes the unofficial leader of the lower floors. In a film in which so much of the action is driven by apathy and ennui, his actions stand out for their drive and determination, even as they become rapidly more repulsive.

I respect Wheatley and co. so much for attempting to make a movie that’s truly about something, a film with a vision in both its visuals and design and its thematic focus. Unfortunately for me, the stylistic flourishes which most often really draw me towards a filmmaker and inspire me seemed to cause High-Rise to lose its focus. The rich/poor divide, and the analogy of a society in miniature under pressure have been covered many times before, with much more drive and focus in films like Snowpiercer (2013) and The Mist (2007), both highly stylised genre pics. I think both those films having dramatic aims as the ultimate goals for their protagonists helped give them a greater focus and sense of engagement which I personally found lacking in High-Rise. Simply including a Margaret Thatcher quote about self-sufficiency may seem a neat little nod when we watch in hindsight, but it’s not enough to make up for the lack of thematic focus.

The Tribe

2014
Director/Writer: Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy

Just hearing about it, The Tribe sounds like the epitome of pretentious arthouse film, or the antithesis of mainstream (not that these are bad things to be!). A big success and prize winner at Cannes last year, The Tribe is a Ukrainian drama told entirely in sign language, with no subtitles or dialogue, and no music. The film follows a teenage boy Sergey (Hryhoriy Fesenko) as he joins a new school, a boarding school for deaf students. From what we see though, not a great deal of schooling goes on. The boy is drawn into the activities of a gang which rules the yards and dormitories through intimidation and threat. The conditions are so poor that they survive off racketeering, robbery and violence, and through pimping out girls as prostitutes.

The Tribe is a tough watch, though not necessarily through the lack of language. It’s obvious the director has carefully studied the works of recent extreme European feel-bad cinema, from the likes of Michael Haneke to social dramas such as Ulrich Siedl’s Import/Export and Cristian Mungiu’s excellent 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days; films where situations play out for an uncomfortably long time and cruelty is casually depicted as events that occur insubstantially like any other. This film plays out in unbroken long takes with cuts only occurring between scenes. We adapt to and draw understanding from the lack of dialogue through the expressiveness of movement and stillness. The camera watches from distances with a clinical eye, giving space for the exaggerated gestures of the characters, often expressed through arguments or displays of violence. Scenes switch between expertly staged tracking shots, the camera drifting eerily behind lurching figures and down grey overbearing corridors, to deathly still shots that play out in real time. An early scene uses the familiar setting of a classroom to introduce us to how familiar and readable a scene can be through visuals alone. The whole thing has the effect of keeping viewers very much at a distance, but one can’t help getting curiously involved as scenes build slowly and unexpectedly amongst the bleak repetitiveness of their daily lives.

It’s this distance however that sometimes makes it hard to discern any greater meaning of what the film is aiming to comment on, beyond it being firstly an almost documentary style depiction of the harshness of life for a small group of characters, and secondly an excuse for the filmmakers to show off their skills. It could be about the place of Ukraine in Europe – the above-mentioned classroom scene is a lesson about Europe. Two characters are shown as being in the process of getting passports to go to Italy. The depiction of the school as a self-contained system where the older, stronger boys dominate is definitely open to readings about political exploitation of the weaker and poorer in society. The very fact that all these deaf, schoolchildren have been marginalised and left to fender dangerously for themselves could play clearly as an allegory for Ukraine itself, abandoned by those that could help them successfully integrate with the rest of society.

I was left wondering whether to what degree, if any, the lack of language comes across as a gimmick. The setting certainly allows for it, but I did wonder how conscious the filmmakers were as to how much this concept would make the film stand out amongst other difficult, low-budget art films. It certainly did work on me – I was genuinely fascinated to see how something like this would play out. To that end though, there is absolutely no faulting The Tribe in displaying the potential of the visual language of cinema. Through the carefully constructed tracking shots, it is remarkable how well the film can express the rituals and dynamics of the gang and individual characters. Praise also has to go the importance of the sound design in how it can engross us into the story through the smallest of noises, to the dynamic cast. I was surprised how the film was able to evoke genuine feelings of anger and helplessness in me as the bleak story of exploitation and bitter revenge continued. It’s also notable for avoiding misconceptions of disabled people as being inherently noble or needy, with many here depicted as being actively individual, resourceful but also capable of rage and cruelty.

It could be off-putting and almost a little sickening how cruel and unpleasant parts of this film could be. It’s not like I’m a stranger to bleak nihilistic films like this, and it speaks well for the film how effectively it was able to convey the potential for evil and violence in certain situations. That said, the frosty stillness and distance does make certain scenes feel like they’re playing out violence as a display, like a museum piece almost. Some shot compositions come across as a little too precise, feeling a bit staged. They probably are intended to shock, and I just hope there was a serious intent behind them. Lovers of cinema should most definitely watch The Tribe, if at least just once, to marvel a remarkable and unique take on how films can tell stories in ways unlike any other art form.

Daring Drama on Channel 4 part two: Glue

Well, E4 to be precise, but there’s no point being so pedantic! Not that the fact that it’s on E4 is a problem, when you remember plenty of great shows had their starts on the channel, from Skins to The Inbetweeners, Misfits and My Mad Fat Diary. Glue is also focused around the lives of a group of teenagers, but is far more grounded and serious than these other shows. Early ads for the show seemed to promote it as a kind of rural version of Skins, with clips of forest parties and good-looking teens making out, intercut with shots of rolling landscapes. One commenter on the Youtube video of the trailer called it “a mixture of Skins and Broadchurch“, and from first impressions that seemed fairly accurate.

Now I’m five episodes in, I can say it’s definitely much more than that. Glue was written by Jack Thorne, who won BAFTAs for his work on The Fades on BBC3 and This Is England ’88, as well as writing a few episodes of Skins, and the quality of this new show continues the success of his previous work. It follows the lives of a group of teens living in the country; their work, relationships, secrets and ambitions. The opening scene shows them taking drugs and jumping into a grain silo to experience the feeling of the fall, and texture of the grain as they sink. The bliss of that night is broken when one of them is found dead in a field the next day, murdered.

The murder mystery element is definitely what sets this teen drama apart from other shows, and the gradual plotting and reveals of the characters’ secrets and issues make this an excellent example of good mystery writing. All the features are here: the enclosed setting; the multiple characters, all with potentially harmful secrets all revealed over time and through investigation which could make anyone a suspect; multiple plotlines and dead ends to complicate the investigation; hints to clues which may prove key. Like all good mysteries, these are all rational and complicit allusions to the crime which can’t help making you feel like you can solve the crime yourself, making you want to desperately know who did it (because frankly I genuinely have no idea who the murderer is right now, and that’s a great thing!).

Unlike an episode of something like Miss Marple, this rural mystery also has proved itself to be an entirely realistic depiction of life for young people in the country. The characters are richly drawn and beautifully performed, and the time taken to reveal new layers and secrets makes your suspicions change regularly. There’s James (Billy Howle), the farmer’s son torn as to whether to stay home and continue working on the farm; Tina (Charlotte Spencer), the trainee jockey still dabbling with drugs; Rob (Jordan Stevens, one half of Rizzle Kicks!), a slacker feeling entitled to take no responsibility for anything; plus Ruth (Yasmin Paige), escaping from a troubled background with Romany travellers by joining the police. The murder proves a perfect catalyst for Glue to test their relationships – friendships, love affairs, conflicts – meaning the show never loses sight of its teen drama roots.

Glue is also a fascinating exploration of rural politics. From the plights of struggling farm communities and lack of funds and business, to controversial relations with Romany travellers, and the severe lack of opportunity for young people. It all provides rich background for the setting, as well as ample motivation for much of the story, and shows Glue to be an unusually detailed and well-researched drama. Beneath the beautiful English landscapes (which are beautifully and crisply shot; I really do wish I could watch this in HD), there’s revealed to be a black heart, from the isolation and tribulations of a small rural community in the 21st century.

Glue‘s also refreshingly frank in the way the best teen dramas are. Taboo subject matter is rightly confronted, from extreme forms of drug taking, to a mature attitude to nudity and sex (including a unusually high amount of male nudity), as well as considering daily life in the country in a unblinking manner, such as the slaughter of animals on the farm, to the politics of horse racing.

Much of the show’s success does come down to the performances, which are unifomally excellent from the young cast. Full of faces which make you think “I’ve seen him before! Isn’t he… what’s-his-face from… that show I saw”, these are a bunch of seriously talented young actors and definitely one of the main reasons why you should be watching this show. Plus the careful plotting and detailed characterisation make Glue seriously addictive viewing. The Mentos ads which play before and after the show declare this “fresh telly”, and I’ve got to agree. As Glue progresses, it keeps getting better, and the end of the episode five was gripping enough to make me wish I could binge on the rest of the eight episode series. All the episodes so far are on 4oD, and you should definitely check them out; Glue deserves to be seen by more viewers.