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…
Trim Season had its world première at the Overlook Film Festival 2023 “Murder. All kinds of sketchy illegal messed up shit happens up here. This place used to be a paradise, and now the energy’s all fucked up.” Hippy-dippy dope connoisseur Harriet (Ally Ioannides) is talking about Northern California’s Humboldt County in the Emerald Triangle,…
Clock had its world première at the Overlook Film Festival Clock opens with a distraught woman standing alone on a swing in an otherwise abandoned children’s playground at night, with a pool of blood forming on the sand beneath – and between – her legs. She looks at something in her bloody hand, whimpers, pulls…
Godless: The Eastfield Exorcism had its world première at the Overlook Film Festival 2023 Nick Kozakis’ Godless: The Eastfield Exorcism opens with text stating that it is “inspired by true events”, yet ends with a disclaimer that its characters are entirely fictitious. It is a familiar paradox in films about exorcism, which tend to play…
Kieran Reed’s All You Can Eat opens with the image of a three-eyed alien in a flying saucer, toothy mouth wide open to receive the severed human limb that it holds in one of its tentacles. What we are seeing will quickly turn out to be the neon-lit logo above roadside food outlet Planet Burrito…
Requiem first published by Film4 Summary: Sandra Hüller puts in an award-winning debut in Hans-Christian Schmid’s dramatic dissection of a notorious exorcism case from 1970s Germany. Review: For ten long months between 1975 and 1976, Anneliese Michel, a devout Catholic student with a long history of temporal lobe epilepsy, willingly submitted herself twice a week to violent…
Malum opens with a diptych of horrific sequences from 2022. In the first, police-seized footage shows four abducted young women being terrorised in the barn of a pig farm by the members of a Manson-esque cult whose leader John Michael Malum (an understated Chaney Morrow) evidently causes the video to blur and distort by his…
The Unheard begins with noise, and then silence. The noise is both auditory and visual in nature, as an old family video plays with its staticky images jumping and skipping and the audio track loudly distorting. A mother and child can be seen, both inside and outdoors, and a voice can be heard calling ‘Mommy’…
The Dead 2: India first published by Grolsch FilmWorks Key to what made brother Jonathan and Howard Ford‘s feature debut The Dead (2010) a success was its placement of oldschool zombie archetypes into a minimalist storyline amidst astonishing natural locales shot very wide (as though in reference to that other filmmaking Ford). Although this sequel…
The Dark Tourist (aka The Grief Tourist) first published by Grolsch FilmWorks “She’s more a man than all the other guys on the 4 to 12 put together,” security guard Jim Tahna (Michael Cudlitz) says of his work colleague Sanchez whom he relieves every night for the graveyard shift. “She’s like a friend. We share…
Curse of Chucky first published by Grolsch FilmWorks A mysterious package is delivered to a big old house that contains its own mysteries. Within live an overmedicated, overprotective mother (Chantal Quesnelle) and her wheelchair-bound adult daughter Nica (Fiona Dourif), and you can just tell – whether from the overcharged way in which both women respond…
Cannon Fodder first published by Grolsch Film Works Ever since Romero’s Night of the Living Dead appeared in 1968, shuffling ‘ghouls’ have proven an excellent vehicle for importing social and political commentary through genre’s back door. So when Marc Foster’s World War Z (2013) landed in a walled Jerusalem beleaguered by mindlessly aggressive hordes beyond,…