If you have come to Projected Figures expecting accountancy, you are in the right place. Accountancy is what film writers do: counting minutes, counting words, reducing all cinema’s abstract expressions to calibrations, evaluations and calculated formulae on a simplified, and simplifying, worksheet. Critics, you see, operate a kind of reverse-alchemy, transforming vibrant sights and sounds into bland verbiage and, if you’re…
“The wind seems to blow colder here. There’s a dark decay under the surface. And it torments. People are cruel. But I cling to the beauty. Even in death.” So says Fay Corr (Laura Bayston) in voice-over at the beginning of Paul Holbrook’s latest short film When She Sings (which Bayston co-wrote). Her words are…
Reeker first published by EyeforFilm, 29 June 2006 Gretchen (Tina Illman) has offered four other students a lift through the desert to the notorious Area 52 party, but when she learns en route that one of them, Trip (Scott Whyte), has brought with him a vast quantity of Ecstasy tablets, she turns back to the…
Weapons first published by SciFiNow, 6 August 2025 The enigma at the heart of Weapons is laid out plainly in its opening sequence by the voiceover narration of an unidentified Elementary School child. Two years earlier, at precisely 2.17am, all (save one) of the pupils from the class of new teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner)…
Look Both Ways first published by musicOMH, 26 Aug 2006 Look Both Ways is a polygeneric, multi-media ensemble piece whose subject is no less than life itself in all its joys and sorrows, as bizarre chances, unexpected causalities, and the mysterious workings of the human heart are all shown interacting in a skillfully embroidered web…
The Red Mask first published by SciFiNow from its world première at FrightFest 2025, Saturday 23 August Allina Green (Helena Hoard) is a writer, and blocked. She has been offered a dream gig to script a reboot of The Red Mask – an iconic, and iconically basic home invasion slasher from 1982 which spawned a…
The Box Man (Hako otoko) first published by Sight and Sound, September 2025, timed with Third Window’s Blu-ray/digital release Gakuryû Ishii’s The Box Man is set in 1973, the year when Kobo Abe’s source novel of the same name was published. Ishii was due to shoot his adaptation in 1997, but after the financing fell…
Unholy Night world première at Fantasia, 25 July, 2026 As its title suggests, writer/director/editor Michael Gabriele’s debut feature Unholy Night is a sweet Christmas movie in negative, coming with a diabolical twist on the Yuletide formula. Its prologue sets the scene, as the camera sinuously tracks little Lucia (Toni Ellwand) navigating a big family gathering….
Insectasy world première at Fantasia, 24 July, 2026 “Are you a pervert?” asks Honey (Lyndall Huber), who works at a pet store, when she first meets Sadie (Tirion Healy) in Angus Silver’s Insectasy. Alienated English woman Sadie is purchasing live grasshoppers there, supposedly to feed her pet lizard, although she does not actually have one….
Sour Minnows world première at Fantasia, 24 July, 2026 There is a scene, not long into Sour Minnows, where the camera moves from protagonist Ricky (David Brown) working at his laptop in a Los Angeles diner, to the industrial bins in the lane outside – and any fans of David Lynch will feel the dread…
Home Bodies world première at Fantasia, 23 July, 2026 After a title (written in retrofuturist Tron font) divides itself into red for its first word and blue for its second, Home Bodies begins with the camera panning and tracking through first a red-lit and then a blue-lit corridor, past various rooms that light up as…
Ancestral Beasts had its world première at Fantasia As a pickup truck pulls in outside a cabin in the woods – or at least a house surrounded by sparse winter trees – in Manitoba’s rural hinterland, Mathilde (Sarah-Lynne Otsuji) sits clutching in both hands a framed photograph of herself and her two adult daughters, when…