“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…
Welcome To The Circle first published by SciFiNow “Welcome to the circle” is a recurring utterance in writer/director David Fowler’s debut feature of the same name. These words are addressed to anybody finding their way into an isolated woodland community whose few residents – Rebekah (Cindy Busby), Lotus Cloud (Heather Doerksen), Sky (Andrea Brooks) and…
Level 16 first published by SciFiNow Prepubescent Vivien (Sarah DaSilva) and Sophia (Lori Phun) reside on Level 10 of an authoritarian boarding school for girls, and dream of being chosen for adoption by a good family and seeing the sky for their first time. While helping Sophia pick up the jar of facial cream that she has dropped, Vivien commits…
First published by Movie Gazette Director Vincenzo Natali has followed his claustrophobic debut Cube with Cypher, another tale of labyrinthine entrapment set in the not so distant future. Only this time, the much bigger budget has allowed Natali to broaden his ambitions, and the result is an impressively expansive vision of dystopia. When Digicorp signs…