Demonic first published by Sight & Sound, October 2021 Synopsis: Somewhere in North America, today. Carly is drawn into an experimental attempt to make contact in a virtual space with her mass-murdering mother Angela, now in a coma. Yet there is something else inside, desperate to escape, and a team of Vatican demon hunters is…
Werewolves Within first published by VODzilla.co Werewolves Within opens with a text quote appearing on screen, phrase by phrase, all to the sonic accompaniment of a portentous howling wind and strident musical glissandi. “Listening is where love begins,” it reads. “Listening to ourselves – and then – our neighbors.” Finally, with an ominous crash on…
Demonic had its UK première at FrightFest 2021 “Mum?” shouts Carly (Carly Pope) as she walks through a field, and then into the large abandoned sanatorium beyond – a sanatorium being, significantly, a place of both sickness and recovery. Guided by the pleading voice of her mother Angela (Nathalie Boltt), Carly finally finds her sitting…
Empathy, Inc. first published by Little White Lies, as entry 103 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column “To thine own self be true.” These are the words that open Empathy, Inc. – but the speaker on stage is not Polonius from Shakespeare’s Hamlet addressing these lines to his son Laertes, but rather a man directly addressing…
“Is this like Saw irl?”, someone asks some way into Pavel Khvaleev‘s Sleepless Beauty (Ya ne plyu). At this stage the film’s viewers too will be recognising what they are watching as conforming to the conventions of ‘torture porn’ – that horror subgenre of the mid-Noughties, kick-started by James Wan’s Saw (2004) and Eli Roth’s…
At the centre of Parallel Minds is a classic locked-room mystery. Some time not far into the future, Elise Perrott (Michelle Thrush) and her research assistant Margo Elson (Tommie-Amber Pirie) are racing to complete a pioneering technology called Red Eye – special contact lenses which enable people both to download their memories into a Universal…
Fantastic Planet (La planète sauvage) first published by EyeforFilm (13 Sept 2006) The best thing about Tarsem Singh’s The Cell (2000) was not its manic cut and dash, nor its psychological sadism – rather, it was a quiet, largely incidental scene in which Jennifer Lopez’s protagonist was shown lying back in her bed, smoking a joint and…
Death of a Vlogger first published by SciFiNow “I see it, like all of Graham’s videos, as an art piece. It’s challenging people about what they think is real, and what they think is not real.” This is how artist Erin (Annabel Logan) describes the online footage of her vlogger boyfriend Graham Hughes. Given that…
“What if, like, a fairy godmother came down from the sky, and she said, ‘Jeanette, with one wave of my magic wand, I’m going to give you the perfect life.’ What would you say?” This is Douglas (Tim Seyfert) speaking as he lies on the grass alongside his addressee, Jeanette Harper (Freya Berry) – through…
At the beginning of writer/director Miguel Llansó’s Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway, the title is presented as the colourful title screen for an Eighties computer game, complete with garishly coloured 8-bit graphics displaying the film’s main characters, all to the accompaniment of old-school electronic squelches on the soundtrack. It is an apt…
The Deserted first published by Little White Lies, following a VR screening at the Taiwan Film Festival, 2019 You sit in a swivel chair in a basement room, surrounded by up to 15 other people each with their own swivel chairs. There is no common big screen. Rather, individual computers feed the images direct to…